TOMORROW sees a return of that two-hour horror show Downtown Abbey, where the mind-numbing ignorance and sheer brutishness of the British upper-class is hidden from view.

 

Nor do we see drudges rising in freezing shared attics at 5 am, slopping out chamber pots, heaving coal, black-leading grates with hands made raw by chilblains and caustic soda.

Desperate to escape life on a tiny French farm my grandmother went into service and I doubt many readers are more than a couple of generations away from of their peasant roots.

I am especially nauseated by the myth of effortless upwardly mobility in view of my father's super-human effort to rise in that era from the coal-face to university via Skerry's college.

Dr John Cameron,

10 Howard Place,

St Andrews.