A non-existent school past

At the end of the movie The Shining the camera closes in on a 1921 photo which shows current hotel guest Jack Tottance who had throughout the movie been going crazy and communicating with ghosts. Although it seems to be up for discussion, one of the implications of the photo is that the Jack that we’ve been following in the movie in the present is either a ghost of the past or a reincarnation. In effect, Jack does not fully exist in the present.

I think I’m ‘victim’ to a kind of opposite event.

not quite a school reunion
Ghost of the past.
Image credit: http://illusion.scene360.com/movies/72675/stanley-kubrick-film-inspirations

I found that there was an alumni group from my secondary school on Facebook and I thought it might be interesting to check it out. It’s a closed group so I asked the owner if I could join. We were in the same class in primary school and then moved up together to senior school and although we never kept in touch afterwards I figured she might remember me.

She didn’t, and it took a couple of emails to remind her convince her of who I was am. Finally my membership ‘application’ was approved and I was free to browse through the photo album.

Over 400 photos had been submitted. Some were random shots of the school building – ‘proper’ photos which had been taken with a 35 mm camera taken to a chemist for processing and developing and picked up, likely with 23 or 35 others, some two weeks later. In time this photo had aged like us school pupils, and faded a little before it was scanned with a technology 30 years more advanced and uploaded to a server so far away it’s in a different time zone. Unheard of back in 1983.

Today, sepia is an effect applied digitally to photos to make them look aged. There’s no need for that with these photos from 30 years ago! The school had a presence. The reddish brown gives a sense of foreboding just as it had in real life when I was there. Looking at those photos you’d know it housed nightmare teachers. I wondered what had become of those teachers – the ones who told me I had no hope, but more importantly the ones who believed that I did and supported me. (Mr Holiday, I salute you, sir).

I could see from the photos that the sizes of some things were smaller than they used to be. The railings used to reach my chest, for example, but today’s memory translates that to a height higher than it really is. I can see now that it’s waist height. The trees at the back of the playing field were smaller than I remembered too. Not because they have been growing (or shrinking) since but because I’ve grown since. There’s a funny one – I grow and my memory shrinks.

Changes in apparent size or sepia-induced sense of foreboding didn’t apply to the photos of my classmates. Fixed focus cameras held by excited hands of 11 year olds in moments of fast excitement meant a lot of fuzzy faces through lack of focus.

Lack of focus“. Yeah I think that appeared on my report card. I never did find history interesting.

Over 400 photos bringing back lots of memories and lots of feelings. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t in one of them. Not even in the class photo taken at the end of the year. It’s as if I wasn’t there. Ever.

Out of interest I sent someone on the group a friend request, and rather quickly the reply came – “Sorry, who are you again?”. Was I even at school? Are all my days of education a figment of my (or someone else’s) imagination? Perhaps; I remember my teachers who favoured closed-book exams used to say it was good to have things in your head…

OK, I can’t remember the future, but what about remembering a past for which there seems to be no evidence? Time: they say it heals everything. Some things that did happen in my school are probably best forgotten. Some of the twatty kids too – it’s just that I never thought I’d be one of them.

And here’s another odd thing: I started drafting this post several months ago. And now that’s it’s ready I returned to the Facebook group to pull out a photo.

And the group doesn’t exist any more.

Paul

PS: Yes I know – a blog post about a Facebook group which doesn’t exist and if it does then I didn’t…

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2 Comments

  1. How strange! It sounds like you’d have a great novel there. I hope you get some answers to this mystery.

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