‘Hair’ is the title of a sixties tribal love-rock musical on the theme of the hippie counter-society and the subject of much discussion in an era when caftans took over from sports jackets and menthol cigarettes were superceded by three-rizla paper joints.
Hair wasn’t just a question of styles, of dyeing it, of plaiting it or anything remotely like that. For girls it wasn’t even a question of length, so wrapped up were they with back-combed and beehive helmets and those ghastly perms which made them look like premature grannies. But for boys hair was a real issue. So used to short-back-and-sides with, at most, a ‘boston back’, to let one’s hair grow even just a half inch more than the accustomed allowance would arouse astonishment. ‘Sheepdog’ was the word my Latin master threw at me. At zebra crossing it would be ‘queer’ shouted by lorry drivers. At home it was a constant ‘get your hair cut’ dirge from my mum – my dad had given up the subject some time previously.
What was it about even the most modest length of one’s hair that created such disfavour, even antagonism, among the older generations of the nineteen sixties? After all, looking at photos of the Victorian age the hirsuteness of males was striking. Beards and moustaches of the wildest of styles accompanied hair which even among the most respectable classes could be grown quite long.
Clearly time in the army and national service, which didn’t stop until 1963, influenced what was deemed suitable for males.
Today – happily – it is a different hair world for both sexes. From skin heads to the longest of locks hair length no longer arouses anxiety or distress except to the most mildew-laden conservatives. Hair is just part of a person’s style like the clothes they wear or the subjects that interest them or the music they listen to.
And yet! To think that I and so many of my contemporaries were daily subject to constant attack from member of society and, most rigorously of all, from our own parents. In an office situation long hair had to be hidden. For a visit to relatives we were immediately told to go to the barbers. And so forth. The basic equation was long hair = bad character. I even had long-haired friends shooed from our family house. Long hair was inevitably associated among the older generations with delinquency, moral depravity, even sexual vice.
Of course, this hairy problem no longer affects me today…and not just because I’ve lost most of my hair. It just doesn’t have the importance it used to have in those benighted post-war years when brillcream dispensers were to be found in in every public bath.
I still like to cast an eye upon those few photos of my teenage years when I was physically able to disport a Byronic head of hair. Oh! How I had to fight in those days to keep my natural right to have my hair the way I wanted it!
