A DAD'S LIFE:A careless haircut can turn your kid into Audrey Hepburn
I’M SITTING in the car waiting for the elder to finish her horseriding lesson. Kids go by with ponies but I don’t recognise any of them until one knocks at the window. It’s only when this nearly grown woman-child mouths at me to open the door that I realise it’s my daughter.
Two days previously I had been sent out with instructions to take this child for a haircut after school. I made the initial pick-up and we drove to the, gulp, salon. Salons are not for men. We like barber shops. We like the slightly stooped cutter of hair, complete with comb and scissors, to be male. We like the smell of extra large tubs of bargain basement gel, the selection of tabloids and the model photos resembling George Michael in his Club Tropicanaheyday.
We do not like salons. Even when they say they are “uni-sex”, with or without the hyphen. “Unisex” offers us no comfort. These places are overrun with women in black, back issues of Vogue and the threat of mousse. They usher you into their plump cutting chairs – no red vinyl seats here – ply you with tea and coffee and expect you to have ideas on what the end result should be.
That’s not my job. The man with the scissors makes hair the same as it was, only shorter, talks about the weather and unemployment, and doesn’t bother me with the intricacies of layers and moisturising of the scalp. He works through the flakes and makes no comment.
The elder halts my suggestion in its tracks. “You’re bringing me for a haircut? We’re not going to the barber. Mum brings me to A Cut Above.” The implication being that her mother is a cut above my squat little red-and-white barber’s den.
I wonder aloud whether her salon has any “fringe benefits”, but my oh-so-clever piece of hairdresser names banter falls on deaf ears as she glowers me out of any more barber shop jokery.
We enter. She takes her seat and starts to flick through a magazine, legs crossed, taking in the details of Wills and Kate’s forthcoming nuptials. I wonder if women have this process hardwired into their circuits at birth. The ladies in black move around in a haze until one signals the elder to move into the cutting zone.
I have a memory of primary school shearing days. My mother would hover behind the barber, making little cutting movements with her fingers, always urging him to go shorter. “He likes a fringe,” she would say. No, I didn’t, I just never realised there was an alternative. Cue years spent emerging beneath the pole, a freshly-minted Lego man bowl for a barnet.
As a result I slip over behind the elder and her “stylist” and immediately start with the finger chopping. “She likes a fringe,” I say. “No, I don’t,” says the daughter, “Dad, sit down and read the paper.”
I sit. The hairdresser asks the elder what she would like. She signals to just above her shoulder and says she is going for a bob, with the weight taken off and a side parting from the left. The hairdresser smiles at her confidence but queries whether she is sure she wants to take so much length off. Yes, the daughter is sure. She has thought this through. No hesitation.
I marvel at the self-belief. I come out in a cold sweat debating a two or a three-blade to the sides and back, hoping the barber won’t be offended if I ask him to curtail the meandering growth of the sprouts where my eyebrows used be. As for the nose
and ears, you have to pray he will notice and quietly remove excess foliage with a little decorum.
There are few instructions, more an unspoken belief that he can read my ever more varied hair patterns and respond accordingly. Yet, here she is, at nine, calmly shaking off the cutter’s reservations and continuing with her plan.
A few moments later the hairdryer is going, blowing shape into the new look. She peeks out beneath her locks, a miniature Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday,and gives me a grin. The grin is still gappy, the freckles dappled on her face. She still launches into a skip or a jig out of the blue when she walks. But this is a big girl's style, and it's her call.
So, when she appears at the car window, for a moment I don’t know her. But she gets in and talks about ponies all the way home and I feign interest – and things haven’t changed a bit.