When Kings Ruled September

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

When Kings Ruled September

September 27, 2007

By Cormac MacConnell

REMEMBER days. Bright as always. Beautiful. We were bred for days like these when there is a little snappy frost in the evenings, wraiths of mistiness in the mornings, postcard orange evenings.

Under the giant chestnut trees near the Glor Arts Center in Ennis the chestnuts are dropping, the brownly gleaming nuts breaking their way out through the spiked green husks. They lie like treasures on the grass below.

“The young lads nowadays are too busy playing their bloody computer games indoors to gather up the nuts and have a good game of conkers,” said a man I had not noticed until he spoke. This is a park area; there are quite a few people about.

This man was in his fifties, a dapper townie, his shoes well shined and a copy of The Irish Times under his arm. There’s excellent coffee in Glor, which is why I was heading that way. I discover later he was too.

“True for you.” His remark brought it all back to me.

Playing chestnuts or conkers was so much a part of September, like eating blackberries from the hedges.

“True for you indeed. We’d be up to the top of that tree stripping off the big ones so you had a good chance of getting a king or twenty or thirty.”

That’s what I said. I bent down and picked up one of the nuts. The glossy skin was so smooth you’d hardly believe it.

“I had a king of 470,” he said with real pride. “And he was never killed. I retired him to stud at the right time!”

“He deserved that, fair play to him.”

With the chestnut in my hand I recalled all the games of conkers from the past. You got a big chestnut, bored a hole through it, strung it on a leather shoelace called a “whang” with a knot on the end to prevent the chestnut falling off.

And then you went to war. It was your aim to strike your opponent’s chestnut — which he held out at arm’s length to accept the blow — and then your presented your own champion to accept his blow.

One nut would eventually shatter. If it had survived three battles then your chestnut became a king of four. And so on.

At the end of the day you might have a battered king of twenty and cute lads with new virgin chestnuts would challenge you, almost certainly beat you, and then their chestnut was king of twenty one.

It was elemental and highly enjoyable. Some boys had great eyes in their heads.

They could strike your conker a fierce wristy kind of blow that would shatter your poor king into green (core) and brown smithereens. And the conker season would run through the most of September.

My friend turned out to be a retired policeman from Roscommon originally but raised in Ennis.

Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern was at the tribunal in Dublin answering questions about his personal finances, and President George W. Bush was about to go on TV to announce some kind of troops clawback from Iraq, and there was another foot and mouth outbreak in England, and the McCann family there had been declared official suspects In the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine. But we forgot about all that and talked about playing chestnuts, and especially about his venerable king of four hundred and seventy.

“I owed it to my father,” he said. “He would always tell us to collect a bag of chestnuts and put them away in his workshop until the following September so they’d get seasoned and dark and hard as nails.

“And of course we never did that. But when I was 11 one year and the chestnut season started he went out to the shed and took a huge tough old chestnut from the pocket of an old pair of overalls — one he’d kept specially for me — and he said, ‘See how you get on with that fellow,’ and I went out and slaughtered all round me.

“And do you know I was only a light little shy lad at that time, kicked around the yard by the bigger lads, but I got mighty respect for my king and life was an awful lot easier afterwards. Isn’t that strange too?”

A life altered for the better by a game of conkers. What is the whole of life anyway but a kinda game of conkers, taking the blows and giving them back.

We shared a coffee in Glor later, two silvered men (his name was Phil), and we did not mention either Bertie or Bush or the troubles of the wide world.

We talked about Kings.

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