Dennis and Elaine Part two

Now I never expected to hear from Elaine.

After all the events I wrote about happened back in 1970 and that is a long time ago .Back then you couldn’t pass a wall without seeing the names “Dennis and Elaine.”*

They were there at bus stops, beside advertising hoardings and of course street walls.

They began in 1970 and ceased as abruptly two years later.

So it was a real surprise when just a week or so ago Elaine took the trouble to make contact and in turn shared the memories of her friends who also remembered the “Dennis and Elaine” signature across Withington.

And not for the first time it made me reflect that history is more than just the story of the top people and great events.  These are important but so are all the tiny bits which help us make sense of the past.

My parents were not  famous, did not invent a life saving drug, or climb a tall mountain but they helped win a world war and set about making a good peace after the conflict.  They were two “of the little people caught up in a big century” and they left their mark.

They left it in the stories they passed down to us, the way they brought my sisters and I up and in the odd simple objects that were part of how they lived.

Here for example is the tiny wooden thing mother used to darn our socks.

I could instead have chosen the heavy metal last which father repaired our shoes with but this “wooden mushroom” has played another role over the years.

For my mother it was a simple but effective way of stretching the woollen sock so that she could sort out the hole.

It was inexpensive but did the job and so would have been one of the essential  household tools.

And for me it became  a perfect teaching aid in introducing history to young students.    Faced with having to decide what the object was we explored door handles, mortar and pestles to wooden stamps, and rarely arrived at its true function, but in the process they got to think about how you make sense of the past through the things that were left behind.

In its way that is exactly my fascination with “Dennis and Elaine.”  It is as much a part of popular history as the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii which ranged from the bitter “you love Iris but she does not love you” and the sweet “If anyone does not believe in Venus they should gaze at my girlfriend” to the touching “I don’t want to sell my husband, not for all the gold in the world,” and the sombre “Atimetus got me pregnant”**

Now I could get all pompous about how they all reflect one of the basic and universal human drives to record  your feelings, instead I shall just reflect that in the words of one of Elaine’s friends “How wonderful - 40 odd years later, a complete stranger remembers... absolutely amazing!”

Just goes to show history is an amazing subject.

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/ghost%20signs

**Graffiti from Pompeii, http://pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm

Picture; Salford in the 1970s, from the collection of JBS and mushroom darner http://mylifeinonehundredobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/darning-mushroom.html