Chiltern Childhood

I was an arboreal youth, whose summers were the challenges of
chestnuts, oak and beech. Long Saturdays after morning school, stopping
the Dormobile en-route to buy white packets of Smiths crisps with a
twist of salt in blue paper and heavy dark-brown quart bottles of
Woodpecker cider that made you fizz, then languid; stretched out on a
plaid rug under the canopy of an Ashridge beech.

That tree, any tree, was for climbing. The beech was easy, despite the
seeming handicap of a branch-less bole to twenty feet. The long,
deer-pruned branches swept out and down to within easy reach, though
yards from the trunk. "Be careful, darling. Don't fall. That's high
enough, I think. Don't you? Come down now, darling; we're going for a
walk with the dogs."

Even Father hid behind the trees when the dogs ran on ahead, then
turning to check that we were following, panicked, yelping in fear of
being lost and abandoned in the sun-mottled forest. Our laughter always
gave us away and they would scamper up to bark and tell us off for
being so heartless, tails wagging furiously in relief.

Father was the navigator. How he always managed to bring us back to
the van from such an unexpected direction impressed me. That he brought
us back at all impressed me more as I was convinced that we were
totally lost.

Before we left for home, we would gather mementos and trophies of the
day: beech nuts, acorns and their empty dolls' house cups, oak apples
with secret rattles, strips of paper bark from the silver birches,
beech leaves to strip into fish skeletons and sweet chestnuts to roast,
unsuccessfully, in the ashes of the lounge fire. But not conkers;
conkers came from home.

A tree house with a thatched roof made of grasses gathered from Butts
Meadow was the local focus for the children of Ashlyns Road. A tribal
community effort, organised by the "big ones" several years, and half a
life-time, our seniors. It was built in our horse chestnut and
accessible to all via the green pipe work railings that divided the
line of our trees from the high pavement of the road above. A road
strewn with car-squashed conkers.

Conkers were our currency, our science, our sport and our passion.
Pierced with metal butcher's skewers and threaded onto string and
secured with a complex stopper knot, they became the weapons of one to
one combat with a language and ritual of its own.

Like many sports, there was a mixture of skill and the quality of
equipment that combined to make champions. Having decided on the spin
of a penny who would start, the loser would hold his conker, suspended
on 18 inches of string, at arms length. The attacker would hold the end
of the string in one hand and with the other hold the conker as an
archer holds a bowstring and release a vicious downward swipe on the
target that was often deadly accurate and with immense energy. Contact
would either send the target spinning wildly or shatter it completely.
Sometimes it remained intact and the attacker's conker disintegrated.
The players would alternate roles until a conker was separated from its
string. The winner would then add the loser's value to his conker's
score making it a one-er for two virgins or a seven-er or a
twenty-three-er. There was talk of legendary conkers with scores in the
hundreds. Sadly, I never owned such a one.

It was the preparation of the precious conker that exercised the
imagination. How to make your conker the hardest in the world? This was
our alchemy; our holiest of Grails. Boot polish, vinegar, Brasso, oil,
Tizer, burnishing with spoon, baking in ovens; there was no limit to
recipes we tried and each had a new favourite that we hoped would lead
to a champion by the end of the season.

Even now, when I come across a conker - a rare sight in my adopted
Pembrokeshire, I will weigh it in my hand and test its firmness and
wonder if this could be a champion. I must plant a horse chestnut this
year so that my infant grand-daughter can learn the noble art.