Conkers

At first I had a little bit of a bad attitude about going to Parque del Retiro. It’s a big old park in Madrid which is kind of nice, but, I think overrated. However, it’s a good location for PW (see La Piscina), so when Ann said she wanted to go, I was only slightly discouraging. We did, in fact, have a lovely time at Retiro enjoying drinks near the pseudo-lake (see The Boating Situation in Madrid), watching a great street performer, and checking out a number of living statues.
But the real gem in Retiro is the debris from the chestnut trees. Charlie and Ann are Brits, and they had something to teach us about conkers. We collected dozens of fallen chestnuts from the ground in preparation for playing conkers. Charlie and Ann tell us that back where they come from, every kid plays conkers, so we better learn how.

Basic conker preparation involves threading a string through a hole in a chestnut. More advanced preparations can involve oven-drying your conker, or even soaking your conker in vinegar and then oven-drying it. There are probably lots of other tightly-held secret methods of conker prep. The point here is to make your conker as hard and indestructible as possible. Because you want your conker to destroy as many opponent conkers as possible.


Charlie found some sort of tool in the ancient tool box in our apartment to make holes in our chestnuts. Then we trekked out to the ferretaria to buy some string. We made up a whole slew of conkers for a conker tournament, and we set out on the terraza to learn how to play conkers.


From the look on Ann’s face when she plays conkers, I’d say she must have been the playground champion at her school. She looks vicious as she winds up to take a crack at your conker. It seems like a boy’s game, but there is no doubt that Ann has lots of experience.

To play conkers, one player dangles his conker at the end of its string, holding it for a shot from the other player’s conker. The other player gets to whack away until he misses or until the opponent’s conker breaks off the string. The players change rolls, back and forth until one conker destroys the other.


The victor, on its first win, is labeled a oner. If it is able to destroy another, it earns the title of twoer. And so on. Charlie says that it is not uncommon for a young lad who has done a great deal of prep work on his conker to wrack up enough victories to be a twentier or thirtier, though I’m dubious. I don’t see how they could possibly hold up that long.

Charlie and Ann are so good at aiming and smacking your conker, that you simply can’t believe they haven’t been at it daily for the last 60-something years. But they swear they haven’t been serious since childhood. Though Ann admits to playing at her last job occasionally.

Jack and the kids are pretty good off the bat, hitting the opponent often enough to be decent contestants. At first not only can I not hit another conker, but I keep hitting myself and getting hurt. Not good form. And a little embarrassing. We play on the terraza until it is too dark to see then come in for dinner. But I think we are all hooked. It’s pretty fun. We have a couple twoers, but most of our Retiro-born conkers are weak and cannot withstand more than one or two battles. We have started a round robin tournament that must wait until later to complete.


The tournament continues the next day after school. We head over to the park in the plaza across from the Palacio Real (The Royal Palace) where there are lots of street performers. So we pack a picnic lunch along with our bag of conkers and head out.

We put our picnic blanket down and pull out our bocadillos to stoke up on before the competition. Next to us, a living angel statue who we have seen before is unpacking her dirty white gown, disheveled white wig, and torn, bent angel wings. As we finish our lunch and begin tournament play, the angel’s devilish boyfriend bawls her out in some Slavic language.


Meanwhile, I am finally getting the hang of this conking with conkers. And I have started to win. Repeatedly. I have myself a oner, twoer, on and on until I have beaten someone else’s threer and have a sixer, a sevener. There is an occasional conker from the bag that survives to enjoy being a twoer or threer for a few rounds, until eventually my conker beats them all and I have the victorious tener of the tournament before the rain starts, and we decide to call it a day on the conker field.


I was rooting for the poor angel, wishing she would come and grab a conker from our bag and whack her bad boyfriend in the head. But she didn’t. When we left, Ann dropped some coins in her box, and we wished that she could be as lucky as we were to enjoy a day out in the park, playing conkers with dear friends, rather than working hard, standing as still as can be for spare change and a boyfriend who should have stayed in Romania.