York parents got a shock when they dropped their daughter off for her first day at primary school only to find that she had been put in the class where they met 24 years ago.
Helgi Clayton McClure and Kiera Hulse-Storr took their daughter Jemima Hulse-Storr to her first day at Scarcroft Primary School on September 8 and were met by a familiar face - their former teacher Maria Mason.
Aged four, Helgi and Kiera started in Mrs Masons class where they met.
A photograph of the Scarcroft Primary School class of 1999 shows Helgi looking in Kiera’s direction, rather than at the camera.
“You can almost imagine that he’s looking down towards her in fact,” said Helgi's mum Lara McClure.
After primary, they went to Milthorpe School and started to go out together aged 13.
The pair stayed close throughout school, with Lara adding: “In a way they protected each other from the hard parts of being a teenager.”
When the time came to go off to university the couple went their separate ways. But years later they found themselves in York and got back in touch.
Now, both aged 29, the pair live in Acomb and have two children, four-year-old Jemima and two-year-old Wilbur, with another on the way due around Christmas.
Helgi now lectures in psychology at York St John University and Keira works as a midwife at York Hospital.
The shock reunion came as a particular surprise to Lara, who remembers dropping Helgi off at Mrs Mason's class in 1999.
“It doesn’t seem too long ago to me that I dropped my son at school,” she said.
She remembers it as an emotional day when Helgi started his journey to adulthood.
“It’s the idea that there was a certain part of his life that was changing and that changes for the whole family,” she said.
Now, she enjoys picking up her granddaughter from school and is in contact with Keira’s mum, Ali Storr, who she met all those years ago when dropping off Helgi.
“It’s a really nice bit of continuity,” she said.
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On how the interaction between Helgi and Lara and Mrs Mason went, she explained: “I think it was quite nostalgic.
“The two of them were there - the teacher remembered them.”
Speaking about the shock coincidence of Jemima starting in the same class, with the same teacher as her parents, Lara said simply: “It’s the kind of thing that happens in York.”
After some first day nerves she said Jemima has adjusted to school life and is looking forward to her time at Scarcroft.
Lara said her granddaughter told her: “I love school.”
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