“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.”Blue Remembered Hills (Brian Gibson, 1979)
Jun
16
Youth Day
The children playing in the Forest of Dean. From left to right: Raymond (John Bird), Angela (Helen Mirren), Willie (Colin Welland), and Audrey (Janine Duvitski). DP: Nat Crosby.
A [favourite] child character for Youth Day (ZA)
– 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.