Bailey Bailey

Blunsden Bray

Buckley Bunce

Clay Cook

Coopey Dale

The register call and seating plan of Form 1A, Henry Mellish GS and the first column of three comprising a class of 30, all of us aged 11.  Well, we’ll all be 69 now, one or two even 70.

It’s a mantra I’ve never forgotten, like your times tables or service number.  I remember their faces too and their voices, but as kids.  I doubt if we passed in the street we’d recognise one another now.

I wonder too how many wear hearing aids or are riddled with arthritis or are cripples of some description; or, indeed, how many are dead.

Time is, indeed, The Cruellest Thief.

“How terribly strange to be 70”.