It was at the barber’s last month when I realised that what had passed for this summer was well and truly over. It was busy, mainly with some teenage boys and one strong mother who, with a mixture of charm – directed at the barber – and firmness, before which there was no deviance – directed at her sons – had her way. She was not for turning.
One of those sons, tall, thin and with so much hair it seemed his slender frame must struggle to support it, was led to the barber’s chair with a docile resignation as of a lamb to the slaughter. He had accepted his fate, there being no alternative. His hair was green and so thick it seemed the barber might need shears.
His mother instructed that the boy was to have a “number three” haircut. I had to look it up later – it would leave her son with three-eighths of an inch of hair on his head. His hair “grows fast”, she told the barber. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy,” Wordsworth whispered in my ear. Her intention, it seemed, was that the cut would see her son at least half-way through this term.
Soon the barbershop floor around his chair was a soft deep pile of green hair as a smooth-faced youth emerged from its shade exposed in his innocence as the boy he still was, no longer the cool, green dude he aspired to be but reduced by mother and school back to a childishness he seemed desperate to escape. Back to Shakespeare’s “whining schoolboy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school”.
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Maybe by now, about six weeks later on this 30th of September, he has regained his dignity and a full head of hair as well as that insatiable aspiration of younger teens to be seen as older and mature, cool as their coolest peers with hair of colours to match, away from the tyranny of adults who, seemingly, want to keep them children.
It’s not easy being teen, or green. And while hair of that colour can be easily shorn, it is a struggle to be rid of the trappings of childhood, and of parents or institutions who won’t or can’t allow the child to become a young adult.
Barber, from Latin barba for “beard”.
