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.
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