"When I was a child, at home we had a savings box for Banardos the children's charity. It was about 8 inches tall, 5 inches wide and 2 inches thick, and it had pictures of what my brothers and I regarded as startling clean and well dressed children on the outside. To us they looked significantly better fed and dressed than ourselves, and we wondered if there had been a mistake and if the flow of resources should be reversed. It was only later that we realised that these were English children. We knew about English children because we had started out as English children due to an accident of birth. Although the biggest accident of birth was my younger brother who was meant to be the girl that balanced a surfeit of boys.
Being English we were sent to school with shoes and socks firmly attached to our feet, but all the other children went with bare feet. My elder brother became tired of defending this difference, and my mother was often lucky enough to find his shoes deposited in the mail box on the way to school. And all our school clothes appeared to be grey. Although given the black and white photography of the times, a lot of other things were grey too. So perhaps it wasn't surprising that the Banardos boys looked pretty sharp in their white shirts and their long English haircuts.
That was another thing that we felt a bit aggrieved about. I remember the first time we went to the barber for a haircut. Barbershops were the ultimate domain of men and reeked of testosterone. Or possibly bay rum dressing, for this was the era of hair plastered to the scalp. The barber could hold up his end of a half-hour conversation on sport or politics with practised ease. Since I was only 3, this had limited appeal, and since he seemed to know very little about kid's toys, we got off on the wrong foot. Well by this time I was no longer on foot, but perched on box like contraption that fitted over the arms of the chair and projected my hair within range of the electric clippers.
 Perched in this manner I was already having second thoughts of the wisdom of my Mother's decision to initiate us into the world of the Men's barber. But seeing him advancing on me with the electric clippers pointed at me and buzzing their peculiarly deep tone, I felt the need to escape. But my feet were dangling. So I did what any man would do in the circumstances and burst into tears. These were tough times and business was business, so I still emerged with a hair cut.
And what a hair cut. In fact there was only one men's hair cut style to be had in the small town I grew up in. Now when you go for a haircut, the barber asks:
"And how are you today, sir. Would you like a trim - just above the ears?"
And it's perfectly possibly to say no.
"No I'm getting tired of the way that looks. I think I'll go for a number 1."
|
