A [favourite] child character for Youth Day (ZA)

“Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.”

– narrator, after A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad

A group of children plays. It's sunny and lovely in the Forest of Dean, a day to remember for as long as one lives. The war, the second one, is one of the adults' plays and far away from the children's much simpler life. It seeps through, though. You may run around, imagining being a fighter bomber, putt-putt-putting while you do so. And your uncle, your uncle!, is a parachutist! And maybe your dad is missing and your mum is doing something that involves bed sheets, and the other kids are mean about that. That too. That too is the cruelty of blue remembered hills.

A [favourite]* fictional athlete for Dennis Haysbert's birthday (1954).

 

Close friends Hsiao-Tung and Yung-shen spend their time together, wandering about, eating dumplings, and training for athletics. Until one of them pushes too hard, leaving the other alone in his grief.

 

* this month's Bales' Challenge is marred with “favourites”, something I don't believe in. Instead, I stick to great cinema and will squeeze in a few LGBT-themed films for Pride Month.

A wasteful act: Crispus Attucks, (arguably) the first American victim in the American Revolution, dies on March 5^th, 1770.

“She's always happy. She desires nothing, envies no one, is curious about nothing. You can't surprise her. She doesn't notice the humiliations, though they happen to her every day. It all rolls off her back like some waterproof material. Zero ambition. No moral code. Not even a whore's love of money.”

– The Writer

An ambitious but aimless girl – she wants to be loved, and to be a model, a proto-Edie – mills about her day.

 

Sublimely shot, we see Adriana through glass panes, in reflections, in an off-focal plane, in other people's words.

“Yes, it's story time on WJAD in the heart of Times Square, New York, New York. The city so nice, they named it twice.”

– Johnny LaGuardia, on the air

Drums for Junkanoo.

A voyage of discovery on the start of Francis Drake's circumnavigation. Children, ignored by their ever-busy parents, set sail to the Seventh Continent.

“I'll be eating frankfurters and onions. Plenty of tomato ketchup. Chips with lots of vinegar. Few cockles and muscles. Jellied eels, Coca-Cola, beer, the old jukebox, lollipops, all the lot.”

– Pete

“Trouble is, she likes everything. She's always happy. She desires nothing, envies no one, is curious about nothing. You can't surprise her. She doesn't notice the humiliations, though they happen to her every day. It all rolls off her back like some waterproof material. Zero ambition. No moral code. Not even a whore's love of money.”

– the writer