WHISTLING

Many, many years ago, when I was a boy, everybody whistled. We would whistle on our way to school, whistle – even more cheerfully - on our way home; whistle while concentrating on a tricky job like building a crane with a Meccano set; whistle in the bath to savour the special echo effect. Whistle – well, we would whistle almost everywhere.
It meant we were relaxed, no pressures, everything was nearly all right with our world.

The most dedicated whistlers were errand-boys, now, sadly, a vanished profession. On an upright bicycle, with his employer’s name on a plate below the cross-bar, and a large basket attached to the front of the handlebars, your average errand boy would cycle, in a somewhat dangerous and erratic manner, around the town distributing his master’s pork chops, beef steaks, or bags of groceries, depending on the type of purveyor he worked for. And he always whistled - it was expected of him.
‘Whistle while you work” was one of the most popular songs of the period.

When war came along, and we moved from adolescence to manhood in about 3 weeks, we still whistled. I have marched many miles whistling songs such as “Roll out the Barrel” “Colonel Bogey’ and “Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag”.
In the early days we whistled an optimistic song called “We’re going to hang out our washing on the Seigfried Line” but soon learned not to put too much trust in song lyrics.

Nowadays, it is rare to hear anyone whistling – well, whistling a tune.

The only human whistle I seem to hear now is on the Television. During almost every show with an audience, the introduction of an act or the mention of a very minor ‘celebrity’ is greeted by hysterical screams. Above the screamers you can hear the ear-piercing screech of the whistlers, sometimes blotting out the words of the presenters.

I always imagined that the screamers were the daughters or grand-daughters of previous generations who had screamed at the Beatles or the Bay City Rollers. In turn, I imagined that the whistlers were descendants of the old bargees or dockers who would attract the attention of their mates with a fingers-in- the-mouth screeching whistle.
I even started watching audiences, whenever they appeared on screen, to see if people were actually whistling – I know from personal experience that producers are not above adding some “ambience” to brighten things up.

But last week I had a shock. In the audience at the Show I was half watching, there was a fair-haired, pretty, feminine girl in a green dress, looking every inch the sort of grand-daughter a man would boast about. Suddenly she put two fingers in her mouth, dragged down her lips, and let out a screeching whistle that a building worker in sagging jeans would have been proud of.
She immediately turned into the sort of girl a grandfather might try and avoid.

I would like to have a word with that “Whistler’s Mother”