The Dangerous Book for Boys. Conn Iggulden

      You need a big knot to stop it slipping back into the conker. The classic is the simple overhand knot, but you’ll need three or four of them to be sure of avoiding catastrophic match slippage. (Loop it over itself and then put the end back through the hole. Everyone knows this one and it’s too basic to put in the chapter on knots.)

      Now you should have a conker that looks a little like this:

      Yours will be round and shiny where this one is like a bit of wood, but that’s because this is a year old and has been hardened using the techniques at the end of this chapter.

      If you can find a lot of old laces, you might think of taking ten or twenty conkers to school and selling them for 10 or 20p each. The aim is not to make money, but to create an instant conker club one lunchtime. You are going to need people to beat, after all.

      NOTE: Sell them ALL before you start playing. People won’t enjoy losing to you and then having to buy another conker from the same person.

      The Rules

      1. Choose who goes first by tossing a coin. Wrap the conker securely around your hand. If it goes flying away on the string when someone hits it, the rule of ‘Stompies’ comes into play. Anyone, including teachers, can stamp it flat and laugh in a menacing fashion.

      2. When it is your turn on strike, keep the string tight with two fingers under the conker. Wallop your opponent’s conker as hard as you can.

      3. When you’re being hit, let it dangle a little less than the length of your forearm. Any shorter will be too easy to send into a windmill. (See Rule 4.)

      4. Windmills. If your conker is sent in a complete circle, your opponent gets another go. Whether this rule is applied or not is agreed before starting play.

      5. Strings. If the strings become entangled by a bad shot, the person on strike loses their go.

      6. Take shots in turns until one conker is destroyed.

      Scoring

      There is an element of trust here, but if you win one contest, you now have a ‘one-er’. If you win another, you have a ‘two-er’ and so on.

      If a ‘three-er’ beats a ‘two-er’, you add the numbers together to make a ‘five-er’. That conker is now responsible for the deaths of five conkers in battle. Do not lie about this. Honour is at stake.

      How to Prepare Your Conker

      The best conkers are the ones you left in an airing cupboard the year before. If you do this, remember to make the holes first as it’s practically impossible when they’re rock hard. By all means, play the first year – but at the same time, prepare for the next by securing a supply. Apart from the passage of time, the classic methods of conker hardening are:

      1. Soak in vinegar for an hour, then bake in an oven at 250 °C for five to ten minutes. All you’re trying to do is speed up the effect of drying out for a year, so don’t leave them to roast and go black. It’s best to let your parents do the oven bit, as well. They will probably pat you on the head and talk about their own conker triumphs many years ago. Try not to go glassy-eyed in case they have a secret technique we’ve never heard of. If they have, send it to the publishers. We want to know and we like to win.

      2. This one probably steps over the line of clever competition preparation into outright cheating, but a single coat of matt varnish is difficult to detect and helps to hold the conker together. Do not try more than one coat as a conker that looks like a cricket ball will be noticeable.

      Avoid trying to fill the conker with something hard, like glue or fibreglass resin. At some point, the conker will break open and reveal what you have been up to. Bear in mind that suspicious opponents may want to check your conker. It’s best to play ‘clean’ and be sporting.

      Now go out and find a big stick.

       Catapults

      CATAPULTS HAVE INTRIGUED boys for as long as they have had access to strips of rubber. Before then, slingshots of leather were used right back to Biblical times, as when David slew Goliath by hitting him in the forehead with a stone. They do have a serious use in hunting, of course, or for launching bait into a river whilst fishing. However, the classic images are more to do with Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson. They can be astonishingly powerful and accurate, though this is not something to demonstrate by telling a younger brother ‘Run,’ and laughing in an unpleasant fashion. Never aim or fire a catapult at someone else.

      You will need

       A forked stick.

       A piece of rubber – 2 ft (60 cm) long.

       Twine to tie the ends.

       A piece of leather, such as the tongue from an old shoe.

      1. Find and cut a forked stick. We found our example in a large holly bush, but the ‘Y’ shape can come from almost anywhere.

      A Swiss army knife has a saw attachment that makes short work of small branches. You don’t want the diameter of the wood to be any thicker than your thumb. If you are not confident in your ‘eye’, cut a little more than you think you will need. A good top to bottom height is six or seven inches (15–17 cm).

      2. Cut rings from the bark at the top of the ‘Y’ to anchor the rubber – a Swiss army knife is perfect for this, too.

      3. Finding the rubber is the hardest part. After a fruitless search in hardware and toy shops, we found that a strip cut from a bicycle inner tube works very well. Cut a two-foot length of tube and then make two cuts lengthways to remove a long strip. Some experimentation will be necessary to get the right pull tension and power.

      Note that we have used two pieces of rubber. It was tempting to use one long piece, with the central pouch threaded through. In practice, we found that the pouch piece moved after one or two shots and suddenly we had a catapult that could fire almost anywhere without warning. It is far better to tie two pieces securely.

      4. The central pouch piece is easy enough if you have an old shoe. Either the tongue of the shoe or some part of the body can be cut to produce a rectangle of material around 4 × 2 inches (10 × 5 cm). Leather is best for this as it can be holed without splitting. Make two holes with a sharp point and attach the ends of the rubber. You now have a catapult.

       Fossils

      HALF A BILLION YEARS ago there was no life on land and only worms, snails, sponges and primitive crabs in the seas. When these creatures died, their bodies sank into silt and mud and were slowly covered. Over millions of years, the sea bottom hardened into rock and the minerals of the bones were replaced, molecule by molecule, with rock-forming minerals