Dad at the Marina close to Minnesota

Dear Readers, I was sitting on the top deck of a bus en route to the Museum of Barnet on Saturday when I heard a sound that I thought had been consigned to the past. The man sitting at the front of the top deck was looking pensively out of the window at the driving rain (well, it is June after all) and occasionally whistling what sounded like an excerpt from ‘You Are My Sunshine’. Ah, how the memories flooded back, as you’ll see from my piece below, written in 2021. 

I am trying to forget about Father’s Day, but of course I don’t want to forget my father. Father’s Day could often be a bit fraught, as Dad was impossible to buy for because he didn’t want anything. His only vice, latterly, was creme caramel (a bit difficult to send in the post) . Plus, on one occasion when I phoned to wish him Happy Father’s Day, he announced that he was too young to have any children and put the phone down. When questioned by the nurse it transpired that rather than being in his eighties, he was a young lad of 21. 

As the years go on, the sharpness of grief largely eases, but the ache remains, ready to be nudged into consciousness by a complete stranger and his tuneless whistling. If I close my eyes, I can nearly hear Dad’s all time most terrible rendition – a version of ‘She’ by Charles Aznavour, not an easy tune to start with but made all the more surprising by Dad attempting to whistle in a French accent . If you are finding that difficult to imagine, then count yourself lucky. But how I miss him! And for more on the subject of whistling, read on…

Dear Readers, whatever happened to whistling? When I was growing up, everyone seemed to do it. Paperboys whistled on their rounds. Van drivers wolf whistled out of their windows at any female between 11 and 65 (these days they yell obscenities which is hardly an improvement). To attract a friend’s attention, you put two fingers in your mouth and emitted a startlingly loud blast (which I could never do, but was impressed by those who could). Nowadays the paper boys (those who are left now that we all read the news online) listen to music on their phones rather than making it, and I suspect most people never learn to whistle in the first place. The only living things whistling on my street are the starlings.

Dad was a long-established whistler. He would put a Nana Mouskouri or Demis Roussos record on the player, and would tap along for the first thirty seconds. My brother and I would wait for the inevitable. Dad would pucker up and join in, invariably half a bar late and with a tune that only roughly approximated what was actually happening. Sometimes he would stop and give it another bash, and on other occasions he would rush to try to catch up. We were often in silent stitches by the end of the performance, but Dad would always look quietly content, as if the race had been difficult but he’d got there in the end.

I don’t remember the last time I heard Dad whistle. It might have been around the time that he was diagnosed with COPD, but for years he’d barely had the breath to sit in his reclining chair comfortably. As his health, and Mum’s, declined, there was precious little to whistle about. But when I had lunch with him in the home in March last year, they were playing Spanish music and serving Spanish food, and I saw him tapping along with Julio Iglesias. He puckered up at one point, as if about to start, but then the Spanish chicken turned up and he set to with enthusiasm. It was the last time that I ever ate with Dad, or had a proper conversation with him, because he died on 31st March. The tuneless whistler was finally silenced, and there will never be a performance like it again.

How amused Dad would have been to hear that there is such a thing as a professional whistler! I thought of him when I read this piece in The Guardian yesterday. Here’s an excerpt:

‘Sitting by the deathbed of the Hollywood veteran Harry Dean Stanton, professional whistler Molly Lewis delivered her most poignant performance to date. The Australian-born musician whistled otherworldly versions of Danny Boy and Just a Closer Walk from Thee, the gospel ballad Stanton croons in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke. “He kissed my hand – it was such a beautiful moment”, remembers Lewis of her intimate 2017 performance”.

So, naturally I had to have a listen myself. For your delectation, here is the video for Lewis’s 2021 single ‘Oceanic Feeling’. I think the sound is utterly beautiful, but it might be better listened to rather than watched – it’s difficult not to be distracted by the comic appearance of someone whistling.  See what you think!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ6vuWFxvGM