Radio 4
Home Truths
Listen Again
About John Peel
| | |
FROM YOU - Family Whistles Jilly Bradshaw's family whistle has inspired a chorus... Just click to listen
Gavin writes:
'Unlike the Hayman's, my wife's experiences of family whistling are not so happy. My father-in-law is a farmer with an extended whistling vocabulary, used for communicating detailed instructions to his sheepdogs. The kids, out in the fields with Dad, soon became conversant in this strange tongue. Dad therefore thought that the best way to communicate simple instructions to them (especially in public) was in sheep-dog whistle.
Acutely embarrassed by this behaviour, my now-wife protested vehemently to her father - which merely provoked him to further excesses of canine communication with his entirely homo-sapiens offspring.
They finally managed to put a stop to his embarrassing behaviour by calling his bluff. An angry summons "come here now!" would be totally ignored if whistled, but "come hither good daughter" expressed in English, would be obeyed. It didn't take long for the whistling to stop.'
And from Tina Hemmings:
'As a child my parents had a caravan at Dornoch, where they would spend (it seemed to me) interminable hours playing golf. I was left to my own devices and used to roam the beaches and dunes playing with the dog. The dog recognised the family whistle but was also trained to a dog whistle (one of those very high pitched whistles, people aren't supposed to hear). But I could! If we were miles away, they would use the dog whistle to summon us both, and it always worked. Quite often I would hear the thing when the dog didn't, if there was a long distance involved! I never thought it strange, and it was only when I reached my teenage that I realised how unusual it was to be the only child in Scotland trained to answer to a dog whistle.
Eventually the dog went deaf, and shouting didn't help as this made the shouter sound angry, which upset the dog. My father routed a microphone through the hi-fi, so you could speak softly, but turn it up to several decibels, and the dog could rejoin family life. Unfortunately so could all the neighbours!'
Many thanks to you all!Do you have a family call signal?
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites. | |
| |
| |
