The conker season
Benny Green
There was no apparent reason why the Mole should have sensed in the very first paragraph of the very first chapter that spring was under way, except that presumably some cunningly concealed biological clock was ticking away deep in the recesses of his consciousness. In the identical way, although there is no rational explanation for it, the first half of October never fails to release in my mind that same small click indicating a slight but immensely significant change of gear. After all these years you might have thought that the click would have grown so faint as to be very nearly inaudible, but certainly last week I was still able to hear it quite distinctly and to accept it as a reminder that it was time once more to put away my conkers and turn my attention to the equally pressing business of the marbles season.
During my days in the schoolyard there was not one boy among the several hundreds comprising our juvenile community who ever stopped to wonder at the regularity of the season changes, or to question the strict sequence of diversions which those season changes brought with them. After all, it was not as if we lacked our share of empirical scientists and speculative philosophers, Reed, for instance, who so disputed the findings on the inside lid of the box containing his chemistry set that he embarked on that series of experiments meant to substantiate his theories, but whose only practical outcome was to cause him to while away most of the sum"ler of 1037 without any eyebrows to speak of. There was also that extraordinary boy Dalrymple who, after listening for several days with his ear cocked against the side of the ornate lamp post on the corner of Upper Marylebone Street, arrived at the conclusion that the Germans had planted a bomb inside it and, wrote to that effect to Sir Wavell Wakefield, MP; remaining so unconvinced by the consequent reassurances of the police that the ticking he could hear was not a bomb but merely the time-switch which caused the lamp to light at dusk, that forever after he walked to and from school via the detour of Clipstone Street.
And yet we never stopped to ask why it should be that in mid-October every schoolboy in London suddenly downed his conkers and started trading instead in the beautifully flecked glass marbles known to us as glarneys. We never questioned the switch, and never stopped to think whether there was any logic behind it. Admittedly the conker season which immediately preceded marbles could hardly have been placed at any other time of the year, but the rest of our seasonal games, unlinked as conkers were to the cycle of nature, still followed each other either of their own volition or according to a logic which had been ordained in a past so remote that nobody alive could recall it.
In my time as a member of the schoolyard community there were the usual scandals which gladden the heart of every ink-fingered generation, and no doubt even the form which the cheating took tended to be the same from decade to. decade. For instance, in the year of the Munich crisis, we were all preoccupied by the far More disgraceful affair of the Vidofsky conker. This was the only castanean growth of our experience ever to survive into a second season, and by 1938 its fame was said to have spread far beyond the boundaries of our world. Certainly rumours of its fabulous power had reached south and north across the great divides of Oxford Street and Euston Road, and once there arrived in our school playground a deputation from as far off as Camden Town to examine the phenomenon. Three connoisseurs whose omniscience in these affairs was substantiated by the way their woollen socks were concertinaed about their ankles, just above the scuffed toecaps of their black lace-up boots, examined the Vidofsky conker gravely, passing it from hand to hand like milords Curzon, Minto and Hardinge fingering the Koh-i-noor, pronounced it genuine and returned north with news of their investigation.
Vidofsky, a silent, smiling boy who had watched his conker's status grow and grow until by the time its second season was nearly over it had become a sevenhundred-and-sixer, took his eminence like a true gentleman — until the afternoon when, assaulting a two-hundred-andninety-eighter imported specially for the occasion from another school, he aimed wildly, hit his conker against the brick wall of the school building and was horrified to see the famous weapon smash into several small pieces, which were found on close examination by the spectators to be pieces of ordinary concrete overlaid with dark brown stain.
From this moment schoolboy psychology manifested itself in the most curious way by disbarring Vidofsky from all conker contests but allowing him to participate in cigarette card-flicking matches, top-spin ning contests and marbles tournaments as though nothing untoward had ever happened. Camden Town, by the way, was never informed of the catastrophe.
The case of Dodgy Siddy was in its way even more interesting. Sickly, a sleepy-eyed renegade who had inherited from a long line of slavic forebears a quite freakish blend of cunning and impudence, concealed a comically larcenous temperament behind the absurdly misleading surname of Angel and in the last season before the war revolutionised the glarney art in a most ingenious way. The glarney community always divided itself into entrepreneurs and speculators, that is to say, into those who set up ' firms ' and those who tried to bankrupt those firms. The proprietor of a firm would place a glarney on the ground and invite customers to hit it for an award of three, five or ten glarneys, depending on the distance from which they shot. The usual ploy was for a proprietor to place the target glarney just behind a bump in the asphalt, causing any accurate shot to go flying over the target, but Angel went one better.
Producing a shoe-box lid, he cut into its side three tiny arches with the numbers 3-5-3 pencilled over them, the idea being that the customer tried to propel his glarney through one of these arches, winning three or five more as his prize.
Within a week Angel had become a glarney tycoon, selling off his winnings and taking them back again during the day's play. Nobody ever broke him, and only the war finally ended his career. But on the day we were all evacuated, Angel accidentally left his shoe-box on the train, and I, consigned to a further district, picked it up, meaning to return it when next I saw him. But I never did see Angel again. We were dispersed over too wide an area, and when we drifted home again during the Phoney War, his family had moved. I was sorry, for I would like to have asked him how it was that no glarney was quite small enough to pass through the arch with the figure 5 inscribed over it.
Previous page
