I love FriendsReunited. I don’t make many contacts there, but every few months something comes up in a serendipitous way. Sometimes it’s a happy serendipity, sometimes not. For example, I came across the name of someone that I was at school with back in 1962-3 at St. Benedict’s School in Ealing. I sent off an email, received no reply, and thought nothing of it. And then a few months later I had a message from his account, written by his wife – or rather his widow. He had died suddenly, and she’d been cleaning up his electronic personæ and come across my query. That felt strange.
The most recent connection was just today. FriendsReunited have expanded from their original school and college contacts to include workplaces and now street addresses. Back in 1954-1963 we lived in a suburban semidetached house in north-west London: 75, Oxgate Gardens, London NW2. (Google Maps only shows the street; number 75 was on the north side, about three houses from the corner of Coles Green Road.) Just across the street and a few houses down there was a slightly larger three-storey house that had been converted into a small private school: Blenheim House. Both my brother and I went there between 1958 and 1962. (It’s mentioned towards the end of this history of schools in the Willesden area; apparently it closed a year or two after I left.) I noticed that another FriendsReunited subscriber had lived at an address that must have been next door to the school, so I sent her an email. We exchanged messages, and it unlocked a torrent of memories from about 50 years ago. Delightful. Thanks, Sally.