#127: Conkers
“…and the silk inside a chestnut shell…”
Conkers, the staple game of the English primary school playground in autumn. It is the time of conker hunting, collecting those which look most promising, and threading string through the middle of them so that you can challenge your friends to a game of conkers, taking turns to see whose will break first.
They are the objects of childhood in autumn, equivalent to the pearls in oysters when searching the ground for horse-chestnut shells still encasing those enticingly shiny round conkers. They also remind me of the children’s song Autumn Days:
Autumn days, when the grass is jewelled
And the silk inside a chestnut shell
Jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled
All these things I love so wellSo I mustn’t forget
No, I mustn’t forget
To say a great big thank you
I mustn’t forget.
The song is about all of the things which make autumn what it is, those cosy smells of apple pie and bacon, or sights of frost at night. But it is also about saying a ‘great big thank you’ for all of these things, because Autumn has become for us a time of thankfulness.
In England we have Harvest Suppers, in America they have Thanksgiving, but both have two main focusses: food and thankfulness. Food is one of those universally required parts of life, it is part of our survival, and also part of our enjoyment. Every day we eat, and in its regularity we often forget to be thankful for this food which nourishes us. So every year, as autumn begins and the time of barren winter approaches, we are reminded to be thankful, and to share this wealth of food with others who may be less fortunate. We are thankful for the food we have grown and collected, and for the food which is stored away for the winter months, a time which is otherwise barren and dangerous.
It is an odd thought nowadays, when we can buy whatever we would like to eat, in or out of season, at the local supermarket. The idea that winter, and the Christmas celebrations it brings, could be a time of hardship is often far from our minds in today’s world, and these autumn celebrations of thankfulness for the harvest are not so widely celebrated in England today as they were in the past. But they are still there, and they add a little warmth as the days grow colder.
This thankfulness is tied up with the idea of harvest. Hunting for conkers is like berry-picking along hedgerows. It includes everything that is fun about harvesting — the excitement of the search and the pride in gathering together these little treasures of nature — without any of the pressure to survive from this hunter-gathering. Like when Eleanor’s apple appeared on her rooftop a few weeks ago, there is still a childlike excitement at finding the perfect set of conkers. They are part of the small wonders of autumn, when you can still find life in the dying leaves which litter the ground. As we share our thanks in these harvest celebrations, with thoughts of warmth and food and the beauty of autumn leaves, we stand with conkers in our pockets, shiny and polished tokens of this cold but cosy season.
