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Can we go back to complaining about our old houses please?
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My Grandad was a farm manager for a posho called Lt.-Col. P. V. W. Gell, so my Dad grew up on a farm on a big estate in Derbyshire in the 1940s/50s (Hopton Hall, now broken up as a lot of the land was used to build Carsington Reservoir).
Among his many stories was that when picking strawberries they had to whistle continuously to prove they weren't eating them. When I was a kid I didn't think that sounded too bad, now if I think about being forced to whistle for hours on end it doesn't sound like much fun.
It's nothing like slavery of course, but the power inbalance and meanness gets my goat a bit now. My Granny worked as a cook in the kitchens and their lives at that point were pretty much serfdom. Not being able to spare a few strawberries for some kids growing up in the (rationed) 50s seems incredibly tight and petty now.
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spenceey
Fox
@deleted
I went on a plantation tour in South Carolina. It was one of the plantations that grew rice, and at the time South Carolina was the global financial centre of the world.
They showed us around the plantation and to the kitchen out the back which was separate from the house, due to fire. There was a long winding path from the kitchen to the house.
They told us that the slave boys would have to walk the food from the kitchen to the house and to ensure they didn’t eat any of the slavers food they would whistle the entire way. Hence the term, whistle while you work.
It was all fuckin awful. I’m not against the shutters though.