It takes two

Davina and Nicky bring us another Long Lost Family special tonight: this time dedicated to stories of twins who were raised apart from each other. One particularly jaw-dropping account in this episode is that of Mary Holmes and Elaine Allin, who were adopted separately and raised in the same neighbourhood in Chesterfield, but were still forbidden from having anything to do with each other. Inside TV spoke to Mary to find out more about her incredible story.

“We were 30 when we met and we’re now nearly 74 – I seem to have been telling that story for a long time!” she chuckles. “Elaine was told from when she was very small that she couldn’t have any contact with me. It was actually my mother who laid down all the conditions.”

Mary wasn’t initially told by her parents that she had a twin sister, but as she got older, the two of them started getting mistaken for each other…

“Children would call me Elaine here and there,” she recalls. “It didn’t mean anything to me at the time. Once, at the doctor’s, a little girl came up to play and she was calling me Elaine all the time, so when we got home, they decided they’d have to tell me, because too many people thought

I was Elaine. Chesterfield is not a huge town!”

Even after she was told about Elaine, Mary wasn’t allowed any contact with her sister, and Elaine’s family moved to London a few years later. It was a strange stroke of fate that eventually brought the two of them together, when Mary was at home one night watching telly and spotted a familiar name in the credits…

“I knew her brother’s name was Vince Logan, and that he was a dancer,” she explains. “I was watching a programme with The Young Generation dancers, and I saw Vince’s name. Eventually, I decided I would write – and it was very bizarre, because I wrote to his name, c/o the BBC, c/o The Young Generation! – and said if he was Elaine’s brother, then I would appreciate it if he could pass the letter on, and if not, I was sorry to have troubled him. It was probably less than a week later that I got the reply from Elaine, and it was brilliant!”

You can hear what happened after Mary and

Elaine were brought together in tonight’s episode, as well as a revisit of the show’s first-ever reunited twins…