On the Shoreline of Knowledge

Chestnuts

I

I've never met anyone immune to the appeal of chestnuts. If I did, I think they'd stir up in me a silent wave of disbelief that would soon gather into suspicion and — left unchallenged — break over into puzzled interrogation, even dislike. How could anyone not be drawn to them? Picture a rich crop of chestnuts stippling the ground beneath the trees with a dense scattering of their woody marbles. Some are naked, glistening with newness, just emerged from the cushioning white cuticle that holds them safe inside their armoured cases, as spiked on the outside as miniature medieval maces. Others have yet to hatch. Many of the cases sport hairline ruptures, or are cracked open just wide enough to reveal the enticing gleam of their smoothly voluptuous tawny cargo. Who could walk past such luscious bounty untouched by the desire to gather it?

Of course I've met plenty of people who disdain to pick them up. But this is to pretend an immunity I don't believe they possess: they feel the chestnut compulsion well enough, but have schooled themselves in resistance. Since horse chestnuts aren't edible and boast no other utility to legitimate it with a reason, many adults fear gathering them might brand them as immature, surrendering to the same susceptibility as children. In some circumstances, I feel similarly constrained myself, so one of the delights of the last several autumns has been walking with my daughter under a row of chestnuts that border a field near where we live. Her company provides all the alibi I need to obey the chestnut compulsion to the full without impugning my adult status. It's completely absorbing to spend half an hour searching the grass for the fallen cases and their already ejected payload, sometimes reaching up for those still on the tree that have ripened within reach on the lower branches.

There's at once an innocence and a kind of carnal allure about chestnuts. They draw the hand and eye with a mix of childish delight in their smooth tactile solidity, the appealing mahogany sheen of their globular rotundness, and a less easily described — or admitted to — force. It's not quite erotic, yet not quite not erotic, a sense of reaching out for little almost fleshy protuberances, swollen to nubile perfection, offering themselves up to be opened, gathered, taken, held. They're anything but wooden, despite their similarity to polished wood. They call out to be touched. In the same way that other plants have evolved complicated forms and mechanisms to render insects, birds and bats their willing slaves, pressed into the unnoticed labour of pollination or seed dispersal with the reward of fruit or nectar, I sometimes wonder if chestnuts have somehow plumbed our psychological depths and sculpted their seeds to beckon to us at a deep subliminal level that makes it difficult to ignore them. Though they often destroy them by playing conkers, generations of grubby little hands must also, surely, year on year, have transported scores of chestnuts further afield than they'd otherwise have reached.

II

It's hard to explain the exact reasons behind the appeal chestnuts exert — but such explanation isn't really necessary. Even if it's interesting to speculate about why, their appeal works on a level that makes understanding automatic, if in the end opaque. This is something instinctual, of the blood. It issues in an immediate sense of empathy, so we can feel in ourselves the gravity of their attraction even if we can't spell out the fine detail of its operation. I don't wonder in the least at my daughter — or anyone — wanting to collect them. I only have to look at my own reaction to know why this is. But I'm at a loss to explain — and in the absence of any instinctual empathy feel the need for reasons — why this same daughter took such a shine to a tweed coat of my mother's. She was drawn to it, wanted it, in the way we're drawn to chestnuts.

The easiest explanation doesn't work. She never saw my mother wearing the coat, so it wasn't just a case of associating it with someone loved, the garment representing the person who'd worn it. Her first sight of it was anything but personal. It was amongst all sorts of other garments put in clear plastic sacks and stacked in the garage beside my mother's house. This was shortly after her death when my brother and I were clearing the house and had assembled a mass of clothes to be taken to charity shops. Though it was a good coat, showing little sign of wear, it was in a style unlikely to appeal to people now. We had no use for it. Nor was the tweed in any way striking — it had no obvious feature that might arrest the eye. Had it been woven in bright colours, or been small enough to fit her, I could have better understood why it beckoned so imperiously to my daughter. A quiet, adult-size coat of unassuming quality, in a gentle mix of unobtrusive browns, discarded in a sack and stacked on a bare concrete floor alongside lots of other bagged garments — I've no idea why a six-year-old should have been so adamant she wanted it.

It's fascinating, if — as in this case — baffling, why some things speak to us with the force of commandment whilst others, often seemingly more appealing, leave us cold. In that garage full of the remnants of my mother's life, there were, to my eyes, several items that seemed more likely candidates to strike a child's fancy and call out to be retrieved. But out of all of them, Laura chose this unremarkable tweed coat. None of the other garments possessed the appeal it instantly exerted on her. Her reaction to it was precisely that of someone in thrall to the kind of magnetism that governs the human-chestnut dynamic with its iron rule of attraction.

Although at the time neither I nor my brother welcomed having items salvaged from our charity shop pile — both of us still feeling at sea with loss, overwhelmed by things and eager to get on with the practical business of jettisoning what we could — I gave in to my daughter's entreaties and kept the coat. Her victory won, she soon lost interest in it and, if truth be told, the coat, still in its plastic sack, is stowed away in our attic with a jumble of other things we don't really want or need, as forgotten as last season's chestnuts. Although it was irritating to have our selection challenged — for it risked breaching with other retrievals the dam wall of our decisions on what to dispose of and what to keep, a wall built on shaky emotional foundations — I'm glad I listened to Laura. This wasn't because of the coat itself, but because of what we found in one of its pockets...