The Class Photograph

Kelly thought she’d join Friends Reunited - as you do when you get to that point in your life when nostalgia kicks in and memories start to fade along with those colour photos you took with your Kodak Instamatic. You begin to wonder how your old school pals are doing. Are any of them famous yet? Have they made their fortune or are they still ordinary people like you?

’

Kelly found her old school on the site, class of ’68. Yes, that’s the old brick wall in the playground for a backdrop and there are all my old classmates seated in front of it she enthused, testing her memory by putting the names to the faces as she scrolled along the length of the photo.

There’s my form teacher too but there’s a missing face and it’s me - where am I? I’ve never even seen this photo before!

An eerie chill coursed through her: it was as if she'd stumbled upon some parallel universe in which she'd never existed. My best friends are all there in the front row, she protested - Stacey Saunders, Nicola Ambler and Carrie Peters but no me!

Perplexed, Kelly reached for the phone and decided she'd ask someone knowledgeable.

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, dear?’

‘There’s a photo from my school when I was ten that I’ve just seen on the internet - it’s of my class but I’m not on it! I’ve never even seen that photo before.’

Kelly’s elderly mother spoke with a logic that would be sure to shatter the possibility of another dimension in which her daughter did not exist.

‘Well dear, of course, you won’t have seen that photo before, will you? I never needed to buy one because you weren’t on it!’

The penny began to drop as Kelly’s mother continued with her rational explanation: ‘You must have been absent from school on the day the photo was taken. Summer of ‘68, you say? If I remember rightly that was when you had measles!