Blue Remembered Hills

11/17/2024

Anyone else grow up reading Enid Blyton books? Those "Secret Seven" or "Famous Five" stories where young folks had some jolly japes, sometime tempered with a baddie and some ingenious traps and wheezes? I thought for a while that this is what we were going to get here as a collection of youths are playing merrily in a forest in the middle of WWII. There's no sign of the atrocities of the war per se, here, but as the children play their dialogue and attitudes make it clear that their's isn't the innocence we might have initially expected. There are five boys and two girls and for just over an hour we watch their games become, well something just a bit more than that. The playful starts to become the serious, the fun more serious, the constraints of their age that ought to hem in their imagi