Comment: Whistling is out the window

Joe Bennett remembers the days of the milkman's early morning whistle. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Who whistles any more? Whistling seems so quaint, so old-fashioned, so pre-digital. I’ve barely heard a whistler in years.

I don’t mean wolf-whistling. Wolf-whistling was what builders did when a pretty girl walked past. It expressed objectifying lust. Objectifying lust hasn’t gone away but it is no longer considered acceptable to parade it. And quite right too. The wolf-whistle, like the comedy of Benny Hill, is no loss.

Nor do I mean the fierce attention-grabbing whistle. That’s still about. As a child, I longed to learn the art. Some people did it with the first two fingers folding back the tip of the tongue. Others used forefinger and thumb pushed into the corners of the mouth. I begged both types for tips and secrets, spent hours in solitary practice. I produced nothing but a hiss. I still feel the lack.

It is such an authoritative thing to do, to be the instant grabber of attention, using a noise that is entirely unreliant on equipment. How much more satisfactory than the artificial piping of a referee, or the ponderous blowing of an old-fashioned policeman, or and most especially, the efforts of an aircraft passenger who has somehow managed to find the life jacket under the seat and tightened the straps successfully and is now bobbing about in the middle of the Pacific alternately puffing into a tube to keep the buoyancy up and blowing hopefully into a little red plastic whistle to attract the attention of potential rescuers when there is nothing but sea in any direction for a couple of thousand miles. Meanwhile, a shoal of sharks, attracted by an unusual high-pitched noise …

Nor do I mean the whistling languages, of which there once were many, devised by people in remote and mountainous terrain to exploit the acoustic effect of whistling that is so well known that I have no need to explain its scientific basis.

Whistling languages were local and like most whistling, they have declined. The village of Antia on the Greek island of Euboea, for example, whistled a language called sfyria. Forty years ago everyone in the village could whistle it. Today only a few know how.

But the whistling I have in mind is the simple whistling of tunes, achieved by pursing the lips and hollowing the cheeks and blowing. After great perseverance as a child I learned to do this after a fashion, but the fashion was tone-deaf and never good enough for public exposure.

A good whistler was a pleasure to have around and some even made a living from it. Roger Whittaker had a guitar and a beard and a polo-neck sweater and he recorded several popular hits, but sometimes he would just stop singing and whistle like a bird and it was lovely.

Roger Whittaker was not a woman. I say that only because I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman whistle. I don’t know why. Is it modesty or genetic inability or something else?

All I know is that the great whistlers of my youth were tradesmen. The milkman whistled in the street at six in the morning. And a one-legged bricklayer I laboured for as a youth whistled the livelong day apart from when he was abusing me or drinking Guinness, which was actually most of the time.

I have just discovered that the song Whistle While You Work was written for the score of the Disney film Snow White. It would be nice to think that the decline of workplace whistling was at least in part a reaction to the saccharine sentimentality of American popular entertainment but I suspect the cause lies elsewhere. I suspect it lies in electronics.

Whistling was a way of brightening the day and of lulling the mind while engaged in monotonous labour. And that job was long ago handed over to the transistor radio. Stations proliferated playing popular tunes interrupted only by an endlessly cheerful disc jockey. It was mind-numbing, commercial and successful. The whistler never stood a chance.

And now even in the street, the whistler is a thing of the past. No one needs to amuse himself. Tiny electronic devices and earphones mean that people need never be without the amniotic comfort of their favoured music and reality need never intrude. It’s aural teat-sucking. Give me a whistler any day. But ah well.