Leslie Daiken’s One Potato, Two Potato, from 1957, creates an impressionistic montage of monochrome footage, beginning as a camera travels across the chalked opening credits, and a voice chants the familiar rhyme of the title to the accompaniment of a lone drum beat. The film acts as a compendium of children's street games, filmed within the bomb-damaged setting of post-war London. Following the progress of chalked line against brick, disembodied legs and feet run along wall tops, jump down steps and leapfrog bollards. The camera captures the casual, all-encompassing physical engagement of handstands, wheelbarrow races and chain swinging around an improvised lamppost maypole. ‘Girls games’ of hopscotch and skipping follow rhymes chanted to the bouncing of rubber balls: 1,2,3 O’Leary, under a leg, against the wall and behind the back. Set actions and circular formations accompany the more formalised lyrics of the Ally Ally O , and a complex narrative progression involving witches and princes, chopping down trees (raised arms joined at a central point as protective covering) to reach a sleeping princess, woken by a kiss to the hand. Boys fold paper into boats, floated in gutters, and race past the camera in metallic rollerskates; throw marbles against a wall, and sticks at trees, battle for supremacy with oven-hardened conkers on strings. A penny is requested for the straw-hatted guy, and sparklers trail against a night-burning bonfire. Partially covered faces and finger firearms signal cops and robbers, followed by the nonsense-wording of repeated counting rituals to determine ‘it’ for a game of chain tag. A series of boys maintain a defensive position on elevated rubble-strewn terrain, warding off haphazard, inelegant physical assault, arms raised in victory as King of the Castle, and a kite tail streams out against clouds. As the work ends, the camera follows the gently curving wave of chalk line against brick wall off into the distance.