The Friendship Book

This cover for the book is from 2005. I couldn’t find any from the 1960s. – Trish
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We initially ran across Keith Fraser’s story while trolling the strange coincidence archive – – a real treasure trove of synchronicities. We liked his story and wrote him, asking if we could use it.

In many ways, it’s reminiscent of that final scene in What Dreams May Come, when the husband and wife whose lives went terribly wrong have reincarnated and meet up on a pier as a young boy and girl, playing with toy boats. There’s a moment in that final scene when their toy boats collide and they look at each other and we know that on some level, they recognize each other.
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As a small boy in the early 1960s, I used to visit my Grandma’s house with my mum and read copies of DC Thompson’s, Friendship Book, to pass the time. The book (as it does today) contained a number of submitted photographs. One of these caught my attention – of a young girl painting a picture, and I asked my mum who she might be.

Years later, I was visiting my girlfriend’s home for the first time and noticed a copy of the Friendship Book on a book case. I mentioned that I used to read copies of this when I visited my grandparents, and started to flick through the book. It was then that I saw a photograph I recognized. It was that of a small girl painting a picture. I pointed this out to my future in laws and imagine my surprise when I was told that the photo was that of my future wife, which they had submitted to DC Thompson in the early 1960s. Bizarre, indeed!”
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Fraser doesn’t say what it was about the picture that seized him. But we can easily imagine him at his grandmother’s house, paging idly through the Friendship Book and suddenly stopping, staring, feeling something inexplicable. This story is reminiscent of one that Ray Getzinger set us, about a red headed girl.