Conkers find brings the memories flooding back

By Brian McDaid

I look in shock at our old tree, some of its limbs are broken down.

The ones that are still intact have no leaves left on them which would suggest that life has gone out of our tree.

Well, it’s not really our tree.

It’s located along the lane way at the Colmcille Heritage Centre in Gartan out in Churchill.

Recently I came out to the spot where our boys as children always looked forward to visiting at this time of year.

They’re all grown up now, heading into their 30’s.

As I retraced my tracks I realised that I was looking at the wrong tree!

This tree was always like this for years and it still managed to bear a few leaves here and there.

Our tree stands proudly beside it, leaves golden as they fall to the ground.

As I looked around the ground kicking the fallen leaves to the side, it looked as if someone was here before me because I found a crop of chestnuts.

The fact that I didn’t have a car load of wains with me to enjoy this discovery didn’t really make me too sad.

It was only the memory that I was looking for and I was happy to think that families might still do this.

It’s nice to think that people still head out looking for chestnuts – or conkers as they are better known to us.

As children, we used to thread through a shoestring and get ready for action in the school yard.

As I looked some more at the base of the tree, I found a few chestnuts still in their pods.

There’s a lovely feeling opening one of these and finding a beautiful shiny brown chestnut inside.

I took a half a dozen of these with me and threw them into a cup holder in the dash of my Berlingo van.

A week or so on and they are still sitting there.

Every so often I’d gather them into my hand and look at them as they start to harden up, nearly perfect to go into battle.

The funny thing is they sparked memories of an old story that my aunt told me a good few years ago. It was a story that she told me one evening after I had been out collecting conkers with my three sons.

“Do you know your mother Mary Ellen did the exact same thing for you when you were children!” she revealed.

Road trip to Hartan in the earlies 70’s Pop Coyle and his red Opel Kadette pictured with his grandchildren Nelius Brian , Cathal, and Peadar also pictured is their coucin Josaphine Mc Daid. Photo is taken by their Aunt BIda Deeney.

I’m the oldest in my family but for the life of me I could not remember my mammy ever doing that.

That day, as my aunt talked, I said nothing, just nodding in approval.

As if my aunt could read my mind she continued with her story.

“You boys weren’t with her,” she said, pointing out that mammy collected the chestnuts in the grounds of a hospital in Dublin where she was a patient in the autumn of 1969.

That was the year Mammy got the news that she didn’t want to hear.

We were never told as children what was wrong with her.

We weren’t even told where she was, or what hospital she was in.

All we knew was that she was ‘up in hospital’.

That could have been in Letterkenny or in Dublin.

That autumn, mammy was able to go out for a walk around the grounds of one of these hospitals in Dublin.

She came across a chestnut tree and decided to gather chestnuts to send home to her boys to make conkers with.

While she was waiting in her hospital bed she had a rethink.

She began to think that we would end up asking more questions about why she wasn’t there to help get them ready for conker fights.

She also worried that one of us would start practicing in the kitchen and put one of these conkers through our newly rented telly.

So the bag of chestnuts that she gathered sat by her bedside in Dublin until her sister Bida brought them home with her when my mother was sent back to Donegal.

It was only a few short months that she spent between Dublin and Letterkenny’s hospitals but it seemed like years as we waited as children with the hope that our mammy would return home.

On January 2, 1970 my mother sadly passed away.

It was her brother Fr Mark who told us children that mammy had died. My father was too distraught to break the news to us.

Many years after and generations on I was telling my aunt Bida that I had my boys out looking for conkers.

That was the day she started to tell me the story of my mother gathering conkers for her children while in hospital in Dublin.

Bida had them in the same bag in which they were gathered in and kept them until they faded away.

That day, as we sat as two adults feeling like two children, she told me of a few planned attempts she made to take us out to gather conkers, something my mother would have loved to have done.

But at the last minute every time it became too much for her.

The photo of us as children was taken out in the Churchill area.

We were out with my granda Pop Coyle and I think it must have been for a picnic that Bida had arranged as our cousin Josephine is with us too.

On the same day we would have bought a boot load of spuds for the shop.

The car would have been loaded down coming back in the road, seven of us piled into a wee red two door Opel Kadette.

A boot load of spuds, but sadly no conkers.

Heavy memories for my aunt Bida, my mother’s younger sister who she missed so much, and who always put on a brave face just so we could have a better journey in our young lives.

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