Country Experience
by Belv2000
This is a story – a
completely true story – of fifty years ago, but which at the time was
reminiscent of the 19th century.
I was working on a
vacation job in the early 1950’s on a farm in the West of England – for
those of you unfamiliar this was then one of the wilder and more remote parts of
England still living at least fifty years behind trendy London. Being addicted
from an early age to keeping my hair what I called tidy, but by average opinion
rather on the short side for the day with a short taper running from 000 up to
¾” below the crown, with the top at about 1½” at the back and increasing a
little more towards the front and the fringe, with a side part and brushed to
the sides – you get the picture? Rather unusually for the period, I did not
use brylkreem.
I was feeling scruffy and
asking the Boss if there was a barber in the locality, I was sent to the other
end of the village with the warning to watch him, as he would carry on snipping
and clippering until you were bald, unless stopped at the correct time!
After work one evening, I wandered along to spot a flyblown sign hanging in the
front window of a little cottage advertising ‘HAIRCUTS’.
Talk about
‘old-fashioned barber shops’! Even I, who in those days sought out scruffy
barber shops as an act of bravado daring them to leave me respectable, went in
with the sort of feeling a slave must have felt facing the gladiators at the
Coliseum in ancient Rome. Please, dear reader, try to picture it. I walked into
the front room of the cottage – perhaps 12 feet square; in front of me three
wooden chairs and on my right a barber’s chair of the kind one reads of in
stories of underground SM parlours – wood, no upholstery, raised up on tall
legs so that the victim’s shoulder was at neck level with the barber. In front
of the chair was an ordinary table with a couple of pairs of scissors and
several hand-operated clippers. (The younger ones of my readers will find these
in the ‘museum’ cabinets in some older barbershops) The barber himself was
leftover from the 19th Century, about 5’ nothing in his socks, probably on the
funeral side of 60, with a face like a well-bred walnut.
Sitting in the chair when
I arrived was a youngster, with a blond mop which had not seen scissors for
several months, having been at the last shearing I would think something like a
short Ivyleague, judging by the fringe. The hand clippers the equivalent of a #2
in modern terms, were laboriously munching their way up the nape of his neck
towards the crown in slow, inch-wide, swathes throwing at least 2 inches of
clippings on to the boy’s shoulders. As he reached about an inch from the
crown the barber tilted the clippers back so that they lifted away from the
scalp thus tapering the hair. This was repeated slowly moving round to the right
temple then back to the back and move round to the left temple. Visualize if you
can, the effect of this. Back and side stripped almost bare with some three
inches of straw sticking up at the top, the whole head looking like a yellow
pineapple.
Standing at the side, the
barber picked up a pair of scissors more like those of a tailor than a
hairdresser, and with comb in one hand, the scissors in the other, he
methodically lifted a chunk with the comb, held it between his fingers and –
SCRUNCH. He started at the back working towards the middle and moving forward to
the front, but leaving the fringe. This was repeated from the other side. We now
had a sort of Ivyleague, looking as though the lad himself had chopped off the
top with scissors and no mirror, and a fringe down to his eyes. Changing to
smaller scissors, he now repeated the whole procedure using a comb but not
fingers and smoothed off the top quite reasonably. With a spray bottle he damped
and then combed down the fringe and deftly slashed 2½” off.
Finished? Oh! No. Back to
the hand clippers but this time a finer cut about a 000, and slow and meticulous
reducing the straw stubble half way up to the level of the top of the ears and
rocking them to smooth in the taper – quite clever this.
By this time, I really
began wondering if I was in the best place for my haircut. What I have not
described was the continuous guttural throat clearing and snorting, and a
delightful habit of frequently spitting on his palm to lubricate the clippers.
You would have thought
that this was the end, but Oh! No. Once again he took the smaller scissors, and
standing in front for the lad, he worked his way back from fringe to crown
lifting with the comb and snipping – I suppose he was now down to about ½”.
This prompted more clipping and the ‘shaving’ with the 000 went up another
inch. Then the smoothing between the new clipping and the #2 we started with had
to seen through by rocking the clippers. This apparently made the top look
rather too long, so it was scissored back to 1/3” whereupon the lad jumped out
of the chair – having has enough! He paid up and left.
The only other victim in
the shop was an old man wearing a flat cap. When this came off, he had only a
fringe round the back and sides, and a good 000 strip took moments only.
Now it was my turn.
I walked to the chair like
murderer to the scaffold. I was wrapped in a haircloth, which I think started
like as a curtain and had not been washed since. The barber looked at me and
dived for the #3 clippers. Before he could start (he had not asked me how I
wanted it cut) I managed to say quickly, “just a little trim please”. He
proceeded to ‘rake’ my hair, rather than comb it, first straightforward then
with the normal part. [About this time I received the first snort & spit].
Up went the #3 very high but very slowly, approaching the crown. Fetish-wise I
found this satisfying, but tonsorial rather worrying! When he reached the sides,
I realized that he was quite reasonable in that he left rather more than a
vestige of my part. We then went through the grades to a satisfying 000 at the
nape and sideburns. I think that they were well tapered the one into the other,
I my hopes rose.
Next came the dreaded
scissors.
He stood in front of me
with his crotch only inched from my face, and proceeded to cut the top back to
1” or so, leaving the fringe at 1½”. I reckoned I could just part my hair
still. But now round two started. The 000 again, taking the taper well shorter,
which meant more nibbling round the junction of sides and top – leaving the
top too long, so another 1/8” was taken off the top and fringe, leaving the
sides rather too long necessitating another attack with the clippers which
finally did away with the part and unbalanced the crown which was scissored to
about ½” which meant that ……..
Remember this was in the
days when country lads frequently got fleas and the common practice was a No.1
all over to cure them. I was beginning to feel that I was infected or at least
my friends would think I was. Like the lad before me, I called time, leapt from
the chair, handed over the one shilling & sixpence (in the 1950’s about
20cents), which included a tip and left hurriedly. It was a week or two before I
could comb my hair into its usual style, but at least I looked tidy!
The End