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Don’t they say ‘the past is a foreign country’? Whoever it was that coined the phrase – it sounds like Henry James but I don’t think it is – should maybe have said the ‘past is a second language’. I think that image conjures up better the difficulty of achieving true authenticity in the remembrance of things past. The difficulty of truly knowing the past, of understanding at a remove of many years how a person might really have felt, the prevailing mood and culture, the issues that motivated men and women at a certain time in the past. It’s not so difficult for an individual looking back on his or her own life, or is it? Doesn’t time also distort our personal memories? We all have them. Memories of experiences that seem as pure and unadulterated years later as they did when fresh, when first tasted. Certainly in my own case I feel that to be true. The personal impact of some ‘big’ events meld them completely with the social, historic and economic context of that time, freezes them like an insect preserved in amber. Let me tell you about a life-changing experience for me that took place in 1983, in a small south-coast seaside resort of the United Kingdom. 

I was then in the magazine publishing trade and used to buy print from a business on the industrial north edge of the resort. It was mid-July and very hot. The noise and heat from offset litho printing machines are not the most pleasant companions in the heat of a Dog Day so, after a grisly canteen lunch with my contact, I made my excuses early and walked down a long hill into town. I was a young lad in my twenties back then, and a little casual to tell the truth. What the hell, it was the company’s time, and there was a long drive back ahead of me. I needed to be fresh. Looking back with forty years’ hindsight, I can see now that even though I was on business that day, in common with so many other day trippers before me I found myself looking unconsciously for souvenirs, for commemorative experience. I found it: not in the plastic buckets and spades and beach balls idly turning in the occasional cat’s paw of hot wind outside the promenade shops. Neither in the tasteless novelty ceramics, the striped multicoloured sticks of rock and other jaw-breaking lumps of confectionery on sale. I found it in the trance-like state of the town and in that singular heat. A town where time seemed to stand still. And in something that happened.

That particular afternoon, by two o’clock the heat was wobbling with pent-up fury. A walk along the front nearly suffocated me with the overpowering tang of fish and tar. There were big fishing boats hauled up on to the beach, wavering in the heat haze above the molten shingle, and lots of rope, scrap metal and painted cork. Behind the front was a narrow strand with a network of tiny streets and alleys. I branched off seeking shade. Not all of the shops were stocked with seaside gift trash. There were a few grocers, a baker’s shop, a small Mace supermarket. Many of the shops had that look of not having changed since the nineteen fifties even though this was a generation on from that era of post-war austerity and rationing. Their front windows looked poorly stocked, as if the proprietors thought displays of plenty were morally objectionable. Dingy coloured packaging and shelves decorated with patterned paper were faded with strong sunlight. I particularly remember the baker’s shop where a large cake stood in the window in splendid isolation, the pink icing bleached almost to white on its outfacing side, the rosy pinkness still intact on the shady side facing into the dark interior. A few hard dead black fly corpses were scattered around it randomly, like points on a graph where there was no correlation, no straight line to be approximated. As I strolled around the curious dreamy hazy atmosphere seemed to be getting stronger. Perhaps it was the intense heat? Everyone and everything in that town seemed to be moving a fraction slower than normal. I bought a can of lukewarm lemonade, and it being the right sort of shop for tooth-rotting rubbish, a sugar woman. I didn’t know who this was for or why I bought her. She just appealed to me. She was lovely, though. A hard surface like the finest Parian porcelain, the faintest perfume of Parma violets. Neat black shoes and a red dress. Her hair a tightly sculpted orange rhomboid (was it an up do, was it a short sixties pixie crop?), and eyes pinpoints of bright blue. She was cool and immaculate in my hand. I studied her and wondered at how the coloured areas of sugar had been formed and demarcated so perfectly. They didn’t seem to have been painted on to a white piece of moulded sugar, they seemed coherent, blended into the surface. The subtle gradation from white neck to orange hair particularly intrigued me. I pocketed her and continued my stroll, jacket over my shoulder, in my shirtsleeves, sipping my drink, the sun torching the top of my head.

At the top of an alley I saw an old neon sign, unlit, advertising a ‘Gentleman’s Salon’ – there was a striped pole outside too, like a stick of red and white striped seaside rock. I decided I would get my hair cut. It seemed a good idea in that heat and I was getting close to my scheduled six-weekly scalping. The idea of having a haircut in a traditional gent’s barbers seemed attractive, a playful gesture of solidarity. At that time in the early-nineteen eighties, barber’s shops were an endangered species, the fashion being for ‘unisex’. I think I still had the old-fashioned idea then that women secretly wanted their hair done in peace, uninvaded by men. They probably did. And men the same. The macho world of styptic pencils and ‘something for the weekend, Sir?’ seemed just as much under threat as the mysterious sanctum of the Ladies Salon, long hidden from prurient male gaze. You got jokes about the unisex age on TV programmes like Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads. Unisex salons were supposed to be slightly dangerous places where the manhood of red-blooded young males, so it was implied, were at risk from limp-wristed male hairdressers.

I mounted a few worn stone steps and went in. An old mechanical bell jangled as I pushed the door open. It was even hotter inside and sunlight slanted in from above, casting a rhomboidal shape of glowing intensity on the back wall. Motes of dust drifted slowly in the strong shaft of light. There was a strong smell of floral soap. The barber had a customer in the chair, a middle aged man. The barber had short black brilliantined hair and was wearing a bum-freezer white jacket with scissors and comb in the front pocket. Come in Sir, won’t be too long, he said, looking up briefly, One customer to do! He looked back down to his work and carried on snipping. I closed the door and sat on a cracked leather-covered bench. A woman who I took to be the customer’s wife was sitting at the other end reading a magazine, waiting for him. Pretty and plumpish, in her early-thirties perhaps, with beautiful wavy red hair to her shoulders. She looked at me and smiled faintly in polite acknowledgement. I smiled back, then gazed around in a rather bored dream. This was a really old-fashioned place. There were photos of various mens’ haircuts from the 60s and 70s on the wall, the models looking primped and self-satisfied and, strangely, all wearing polo-necked jumpers. There was a crew cut, a short back and sides, a very groomed look with long sideboards, and a more recent one of a young man with a full wavy mullet and a big moustache, looking for all the world like Frans Hals’s ‘Laughing Cavalier’. There was a ton of hair on the cracked and worn out lino floor, in black, sandy, dark brown and grey drifts and clumps. And sure enough there were the expected display cards of ‘styptic pencils’ and Durex ‘protection’ in packets of three on the counter in front of the customer. A couple of pairs of big heavy black bakelite electric clippers hung on hooks under the counter. Cut-throat razors laid in trays of sterilising solution. There was a big mirror facing the solid leather chair, which was upholstered in dark red leather and had a foot pedal for raising and lowering the seat. I picked up a paper and started to read.

The barber was finishing off now - loosening the customer’s neck strip and flicking the clippings brusquely from his neck with talc puffed from a rubber bulb and a small stiff brush. The customer stood up, pleasantries were exchanged and he went over to the counter to pay. I looked up from my paper and glanced at the woman, who was watching the departing customer with some interest, but clearly nothing to do with him, as she stayed where she was, smiling benignly. The barber looked at me and smiled. ‘Next,’ he called, snapping out a clean striped cape. I made to rise but the woman was up before me and in the seat before my dropped jaw had time to snap shut. His smile had not been a signal that I was next. But what was it a smile of? It had the air of complicity.

I was very surprised and, to be frank, a bit disturbed at this turn of events.  The red-haired woman was indeed the barber’s next customer. Surely there was some mistake? I had never seen a woman get a haircut before, if indeed that was what was going to now happen. The thought of it was instantly exciting, in a forbidden way. At the time I thought my reaction was just the vague notion of being privy to something secret, something that normally happened to women in private. It felt a little like I was going to see her doing something intimate like bathing, an undignified thing for her to endure in front of a male stranger.  Women didn’t get their hair ‘cut’ in those far-gone days, they got it ‘done’. Perhaps the word ‘cut’ was too masculine - brutish, short and onomatopoeic - to be applied comfortably in a feminine context? The euphemism ‘done’ now seems awkward: what was there to hide? Since time immemorial women have had their hair cut, like men, as well as having it permed, set, waved, curled, rollered, back-combed, whatever an unimaginative hairdresser can throw at it. Everyone knew that but no one mentioned it much in the England of the early eighties. Anything seemed possible on this hot, dreamlike afternoon, though, even a young pretty woman getting her hair cut in a barber’s shop. My mind wandered in the heat. Might a woman really come to a barber’s shop to get a haircut? Maybe she would, but only for a basic trim. Even that seemed doubtful. Certainly the cost would be a lot less than a trim in a ladies salon. I felt it would be a rather eccentric woman who would go for that experience, maybe one of those no-nonsense plain ‘boyish’ types who tend to be into animals (and possibly other women). Or one of those women who are probably biologically female but otherwise look and sound like men. This didn’t square at all with the conventionally dressed, pretty, rather shy-looking young woman now sitting in front of me. Surely she was too feminine and demure to be seated here? She might be old enough to be not that keen on a unisex salon, but there were plenty of old-fashioned ladies salons around, still catering for the more conservative market. She still had more choice, not less. The fact that there was no conversation or instruction seeming to pass between the barber and the woman heightened the intrigue. I wondered what was happening. Whatever it was I had a legitimate ringside ticket for the show. The next few minutes, I admit, I couldn’t stop staring and almost abandoned any pretence at covering my interest and surprise. I was sitting right behind and to one side of her chair, so close I could almost taste her body heat and the intense waves of pleasant floral perfume she was radiating. All was enacted in total silence. I could see her occasionally glance at me. She noticed that I was intrigued and her reflection smiled rather weakly at me from the mirror once or twice. She looked pinker around her neck and cheeks since she had sat in the chair, but whether this was from embarrassment at having a curious audience for her haircut or from the stifling heat it was impossible to tell.

The barber encircled her sloping shoulders with the striped cape and fastened it securely. The gap round the neck was stuffed with tissue to stop the cut hair from getting inside. All very much like the preliminaries to a man’s haircut, many of which I’d viewed over the years with nothing more than casual interest, whilst waiting my turn. I’d seen enough through salon windows, rubbernecking while passing, to know that normally women’s hair is shampooed and sectioned before cutting, but if the barber possessed any hairclips these were not produced, neither was her hair even dampened. He produced a large black comb and combed through the hair from the ends working up. The combing was a bit heavy handed and while it straightened her hair slightly, a strong wave was very much in evidence. He left the front tumbling in a thick, sumptuous curtain over her face. The hair looked longer having been combed, and flowed on to her shoulders in glossy waves, in a bell shape. After this unceremonious preparation she was now ready, or so it seemed, as the barber stepped to the side and unhooked one of those chunky-looking pairs of clippers, to which he fitted a toothed extension.

‘Now, Mary…’ he said, gently but firmly. I watched her wide-eyed apprehension in the mirror when the clippers snapped on with a precise clunk and the low hum of the blades started. But she did nothing but bow her head slightly, her lowered face hidden behind her curtain of hair. I imagined her biting her lip, a tear emerging slowly from the corner of one of those blue eyes, but couldn’t see if that was what happened. If the preparation was unceremonious it did nothing to prepare me for the rapid and unsentimental despatch of her fleece by a succession of upward sweeps of the clippers that followed then lifted away from the contours of her head. The first stroke was at the left side of the back of her neck, the clippers being pulled away at mid-ear height. There seemed to be skill in what the barber was doing as the end result was a severe looking bob that ran in a neat line from mid-cheek to mid-ear to the slight bulge of her occiput, and a big pile of red hair on her shoulders, lap and floor. The lower part of the head and neck looked scruffy and unfinished. But this was next for a tidy up. My heart thumped as he removed the comb attachment from the clippers and fitted a smaller one, pushed his left palm up into the top longer layers of hair to expose the back clearly and proceeded to plunge in the clippers with gusto. He used a rocking motion, pulling away as he reached a point at about the top of her ears. More clumps of hair fell and the natural shape that the hair grew on the back of her neck was revealed at each pass as the hair was clipped close. Her hair was abundant and thick, at least before he started it had been, and the result of his studious clippering was a lovely inverted triangle of very short red hair, with a dense nap like suede. The bottom edge in perspective was a wavy letter m-shape, with a central vee-shaped tongue in the groove between the strong pillars of her neck tendons. He finished by crosscutting the back by yawing the clippers at forty-five degrees and making short lifting strokes in a horizontal line, and then with a cutthroat razor, scraping away the stray hairs and stubble to give a clean, tapered neckline. The hair on the back of her head now was cut as short as a working man’s, about an eighth of an inch. But her ordeal wasn’t over yet. Time seemed to have moved very slowly for me in this period of rapt attention. The barber pulled her head upright firmly. He took a bottle from the counter and sprayed her hair at the front and back then combed the droplets of moisture in. He repeated this twice. The hair darkened and looked lank and straight and reached beyond her lips at the front. He took up a pair of scissors and snipped off her fringe at eye height, right across the width of her forehead. Long sinuous snakes of her fringe locks fell with a soft plop on the cape and dark shreds peppered themselves around her pretty nose. I could see her face again now, clear, pink and calm. Next he lifted sections of hair at the side of her head with the comb and with rapid movements of scissor and comb cropped away the hair so it fell rhythmically on to the cape like soft rain. He layered the hair, blending it into the extremely short area below and leaving more length towards the crown. I could see exactly how he did it, using the widths of his fingers to judge the length – two slim fingers just above the ear and four on top. He then used a pair of thinning shears to finish the job at the sides, all the while combing and lifting in perfect fluid motion as if the woman and her hair were at the mercy of a heartless automaton. Time continued to pass very slowly as I watched with rapt attention, until suddenly the cut was finished. She sat erect in the chair looking like a pre-campaign soldier after a particularly brisk short back and sides while the barber brushed and flicked at her creamy neck with a stiff brush to remove the trimmings. He unfastened the cape and a mass of red hair clippings slid on to the floor as she stood and turned, looking over at me and, in the time-honoured tradition of the barbershop, took the offered tissue to wipe away the last traces of stubble from her face and neck. Her femininity, the curve of her full breasts, long swan-like neck and strikingly pretty eyes and face seemed to be enhanced rather than marred by the masculine severity of her haircut. I had fallen for her, and for her hair, utterly.

Then she paid and was gone with a fading ring of the shop bell as she opened and then closed the door behind her. I was literally caught in two minds. The barber was motioning me to sit for my haircut but my instinct was to follow my red-haired woman. Idiotically, I thrust a pound note into the barber’s hand and ran out down the steps into the alley. It must only have been half a minute’s delay, but she’d disappeared. I wandered around the town in despair looking for her and eventually gave up and drove back home.

I couldn’t forget her. The week after I went back and looked for her again. Starting in the obvious place I went to the barber’s shop and asked. The barber assumed his mystical smile. All he said was, I think she may be an actress, Sir. Ah, that was it. I’d been racking my brains for some explanation of why my red-haired woman had been cropped.  I could think of no occupational imperative other than the military, and though industrial safety or hygiene might have come into it, those days any issue for a long-haired woman with the operation of machinery or preparation of foodstuffs would surely have been dealt with by way of suitable headgear, not a short haircut. But an actress – of course! Why hadn’t that occurred to me? So I went straight down to the town’s Playhouse and before even entering the foyer I’d seen her on a large poster - my red-haired woman revealed in all her glory carrying a standard and, perhaps surprisingly after what I’d seen the week before, with her long red mane flowing in the wind. That day I sat and watched both the matinee and evening performances of St Joan by George Bernard Shaw. I might have known my mystery woman was a Shavian, if you’ll forgive me the pun. In the play Joan wears her red hair long and flowing in the first Act, for which she donned a wig, but in Act II when the captured and brutalised Joan is led on stage by a soldier and her shorn hair is revealed for the first time there was a genuinely shocked gasp from the audience. Most actresses, including Milla Jovovich in the recent film of the play, sported a more historically accurate above-ear bowl cut, but the merciless crop looked infinitely more masculine and shocking on a pretty woman, and had the same astounding effect as Jean Seberg’s very short gamine crop in the much older film. Like her haircut the week before, I sat and watched her performance with close attention, enthralled.

This was all nearly forty years ago, and you will be impatient to hear how the story ends. To cut a long story short, I stayed over in the town for a few days attending every performance, hanging about the theatre bar in the evenings, having phoned in to work ‘sick’. ‘Lovesick’ would be more accurate. Eventually, terribly nervous at the reception I would receive, I spoke to her and we set a date in a coffee shop the next morning, where I revealed all about my unintentional haircut voyeurism. I felt I had nothing to lose and had to match the honesty, courage and integrity of a woman so compelled by a role that she is prepared to have nearly all of her hair sheared off for it. She proved to be open-minded and found it all rather amusing, claiming to remember me and be reciprocally puzzled by my open-mouthed interest as she’d watched me from the mirror. The barbershop meeting became very much ‘our first date’ and we married a year later. Though she never played Joan again, and in fact gave up professional acting not long afterwards, every summer she played the part of the Maid of Orleans for a local religious theatre group in the town as part of an annual festival, and still does to this day, even though she is now seventy-one and her still-thick hair has to be dyed from its natural silver-grey to a reddish blonde. And so, naturally, every summer, she has to be cropped in preparation for her role.

Today is in fact the day, the thirtieth of May 2009. Each summer she always knows when it’s the special time. I take out my carefully preserved sugar woman one evening in Whit week and lay her, along with a fresh towel, laundered cape, scissors and clippers, on the counterpane in readiness, as a signal. She has a preparatory hot bath and as I seat and cape her, in our bedroom, I use the barber’s time-honoured words from 1983, delivered in a gentle but firm manner just after I kiss the top of her head and just before I run the clippers up her neck: ‘Now, Mary…’

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