Conkers - A Beauty and the Beast Top 10

Conkers

I have a fairytale.

Less of a fairytale in the castles-and-evil-witches sense, but there's a tale and there's a fairy in it... Fairy being the term my uncle reserved to describe his somewhat gracile nephew back in the late-90's, and still thinks it's amusing because I shape my eyebrows. But it's close enough.

I even lived in a kingdom, if you count Flat 119 of the Gloria Estate somewhere in the arse-end of Slough a kingdom. I certainly did, but when a council-estate is all you've ever known, you'll start to think so too.

The Gloria Estate had its king, its queen and their many not-so-humble servants chugging a bottle of White Ace by the bus stop most evenings. In this fairytale our most honourable royal family went by the names of Nicky Worter and his latest hookup Chantelle.

You could even say this story has a curse, and every curse has to land on someone eventually. Well, you certainly won't be disappointed, because the curse began on November 26th 1987. If that particular day doesn't ring any bells with you, don't worry, I don't remember it either.

Because it was the day I was born.

I was a perceptive little girl (put down that VCR remote before you press rewind – you heard that right), but one thing I didn't know, and nor did anybody else, was that I was cursed. And this isn't any breed of curse my aunt would read to me from some old book she'd held onto from her girlhood days, where a dashing prince would come and save me from this terrible fate. No. This was the kind of spell that couldn't be undone overnight, and it took many years to even realise I was cursed in the first place.

I was eleven or twelve when first I came into King Nicky's radar. For reasons I didn't understand at the time, riding around the old conker tree on a boy's bike was cause for him to approach me. It was a boy's bike for no other reason than the uncle who had raised me wanted to buy me a kids' BMX the same model as his, complete with aluminium stunt pegs I absolutely never used.

"Conkers. Nasty little buggers, ain't they?" Nicky had said that day, kicking the spiky green fruits across the slabs. He crushed another under his neon orange Nike soles, reducing its prickly defences to mush and exposing the chestnut inside it. "Looks ugly. Might hurt if somebody lobbed them at you too."

Needless to say I lost my BMX after that. Nicky was right; conkers are notoriously unpleasant on the receiving end, especially if somebody bigger than you makes a game of hurling them at your face and neck. But I didn't go home empty-handed. Oh, no. Far from it. I came away with hundred tiny red welts, some explaining to do, and a year-long grudge against me that was apparently personal.

It was because I was "different", and yet there were millions of kids across the globe going through exactly the same thing every day, making me, in fact, not particularly unusual at all.

It wasn't my fault, even. Society expected me to grow up into a confident and successful young woman, and it was King Nicky the Conkerer who first noticed that it was not the path I'd chosen. I wore baggy t-shirts to hide the humiliation of developing breasts, quite unlike other girls my age who had probably already invested in their first plunge bras. I kept my hair short under the pretence I was 'avoiding nits', and it was something of a shock when my peers discovered I couldn't even produce a French plait. And oh boy did I flush up a mighty tantrum on any occasion somebody forced me into that awful tartan dress my aunt adored so much.

But it was more than that. It's more than how I looked or how I dressed, or the fact I owned an unhealthy number of Hot Wheels. As I reached 13 and King Nicky incessantly punished me for being a tomboy, I realised it wasn't something I was willing to stop, even if I knew how to.

I could've done without him stealing my prized bike, or sticking gum in my hair, or even the time he tried to ram a matchstick down my ear, but I learned something valuable about my curse beneath that conker tree, of all places.

"Nasty little buggers," I parroted a year later, pinned against its trunk. I was hiding from him of course, after he'd pushed me into an abandoned sofa full of earwigs. "Nobody would treat you like you're nasty if they could see what's inside you."

And I was right. Buried beneath the fleshy green spines of the horse-chestnut fruit hides the autumnal prize we all collected as kids. The smooth, shiny brown nut with its fresh, grassy tang and a waxy coat beneath the fingers. I remember the simple joys they brought to us; well worth the care of excavating them in the first place.

And there was an abundance of them, all unaware of each other, isolated in its own space. All cursed to remain beneath their exteriors indefinitely, unable to reveal what they truly were at their core. Whole. Beautiful. Desirable. For many kids like me it would be many years before something would crack open that prickly skin and break the spell.

Perhaps not with a neon orange Nike sole, but something.

It's true in fairytales that the curse eventually lifts, though mine was a little less in the spectacular fashion of the old stories we're all familiar with. It came in the form of a single word on the front of a card from the aunt and uncle who'd raised me like their own, on a dreary November 26th.

"Happy Birthday Son," it read.

And like that my shell fell away, revealing the beauty buried inside it.