For Frances

Conker: noun British

• the hard, shiny dark brown nut of a horse chestnut tree.
• (conkers) [treated as singular] a children’s game in which each has a conker on the end of a string and takes turns in trying to break another’s with it.

Origin:

mid 19th century (a dialect word denoting a snail shell, with which the game, or a form of it, was originally played): perhaps from conch, but associated with (and frequently spelled) conquer in the 19th and early 20th cents: an alternative name was conquerors