Open Writing

“A haircut in the 1940s was not an experience I relished. To save money, and because I was merely a little boy, my father did the job himself. I think a pudding basin was involved in the earlier years,’’ writes Brian Barratt.

Dad used a pair of barber's scissors, quite different from Ma's kitchen scissors and the scissors I used for cutting paper and cardboard. He also had several sets of hand clippers, and that was the bit I didn't like. They occasionally got jammed in my hair.

Snip snip snip snip wrench. "Ow!", I yelled. He growled, blamed me, told me to sit still, and continued.

My infant school girlfriend's father had a tobacconist shop in the town, with a barber's salon at the back. Except that "salon" is far too grand a word. It was just a back room with half a dozen chairs, a large mirror on the wall, a barber's chair, and a kitchen sink. At some stage, I started going there for my haircuts. At least he didn't jam his clippers in my hair. In fact, he used electric clippers. A luxury to enjoy after those years of intermittent torture.

By the time I won an 11-Plus scholarship and started at grammar school, I had started growing my hair the way I wanted to grow it, not in the very short back and sides fashion. Reasonably short back and sides were, I suppose, compulsory but I grew the rest of it as long as I dare. I had to be able to pull the hair down from my forehead and put it in my mouth. There was no dietary reason for this, by the way, given that I also used to chew my tie. Not all the time, you understand. Only when I felt like it.

In those days, men used hair-oil. So I started to use hair-oil. Brylcreem, to be precise. It made you feel like a man of the moment because you knew that Dennis Compton, the great cricketer, also used it. Well, he advertised it, so you assumed he used it and he had lovely glossy black hair. Longish for the time, too.

There came a time when, like most other schoolboys, I grew my hair longer, all over my head, but the long hair at the front plus Brylcreem could make a real mess of my glasses. Let me explain.

In the 1950s, I was a biker. Not a bikie. A biker. My second motorcycle was a BSA 250cc 4-stroke with a tall plastic windshield attached to the handlebars. When I was driving at speed, the wind blew over the top of the windshield and straight onto my head. The long and very greasy hair thereupon disported itself in tangled fury and wiped itself all over my specs and I couldn't see where I was going.

My solution was to go to the barber and have something akin to a crew cut. Not quiet as short as a crew cut but perhaps more akin to the style of ancient Roman emperors. For several years.

But I also went to the chemist (supermarkets were few and far between in the olden days) to look for something non-greasy. Thereafter, I used Silvikrin hair dressing without oil or with only a small amount of oil. It wasn't until the 1970s that a helpful chemist pointed out to me that it would be much cheaper and just as effective to use plain old bay rum. Lovely stuff, with its pleasant astringent sweet-and-sour aroma. By the time it became difficult to find in the shops, I realised I didn't need any hair dressing at all.

Now, what was once a dark brown forest has become a sparsely flowering area of brownish grey with pink clearings in its midst. There is no longer enough of it in the widow's peak to grow long at the front, so I have to be content to let the back grow longer than is respectable for a gentleman of my age. I don't waste money on sundry oils and potions any more. But I still wince at the memory of Dad's clippers.

© Copyright Brian Barratt 2011

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