I got my period when I was eleven years old. My hair was straight and long. Soon after, I began to change and feel angry at the endless rules I was required to obey. I found a photo of a girl in a hair magazine. The girl was softly punk. She had loosely spiked short, black hair and wore a fashionably baggy jumper. She had dark smoky eyes and a sultry neutral-toned glossy pout. I wanted to be her. I took the photo to Keith and Pat’s house next door and asked their lovely hairdressing daughter, Karen, if she’d cut my hair short. ‘Yes,’ she said ‘but did you ask your Mum?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I lied, she’s fine with it.’
After Karen had finished and sent me off with a lesson in how to spike my new do with hair gel, I went home. I walked into the kitchen. Mum stood at the sink in a cloud of washing liquid bubbles and steaming hot tap water, wearing her yellow rubber gloves up to her elbows. ‘Oh what have you done to your lovely hair?!’ I don’t recall how much trouble I was in but it didn’t matter. I was changing and I wanted to rebel against authority and changing my hair without permission was my first step on the path to independence.
The following Monday at school, after assembly, the Headmaster, Mr Boddins, who had never before appeared to see me from beneath his impressive eyebrows, concluded his assembly by asking me to stay behind, in front of the whole school. My stomach wobbled. He looked me in the eye for the first time in two years. He was a large man, tall and big, towering over my tiny self, with the physical and institutional weight of authority. He wore a green-hued suit and had thick hairs in his ears. There was talk of my slovenly clothes and attitude and something about bucking up ideas and pulling up socks but I cannot remember his exact message to me.
Looking back I think the old Headmaster was affronted by my appearance, but he was confused. I hadn’t actually done anything of note at school, ever. The only thing that had changed in me since our last assembly on Friday morning, was my hair. Thus, my hair was the single spark that caused him to speak to me individually for the first time in two years. Yet it was the only thing he did not comment upon. Perhaps he could not say, ‘A girl is not allowed to have hair like that.’ So, instead, he resorted to vague, well-used phrases which bore little relevance to me, an ordinary girl with a distinctly average educational record, who had her hair cut at the weekend.
As I turned to leave the assembly hall, a sea of kids faces greeted me with questions about my rare interaction with Mr Boddins. ‘What did Bodders say?’ and ‘Did he give you detention?’ My fame lasted three minutes, tops, but my fellow pupils made me feel less alone, in that brief interlude from the mundanity of school life.
Given my short, softly spiked hair was intended as a visible act of rebellion against authority, in the decade of punk after all, the Headmasters reaction was confirmation that my haircut had been effective. It had conveyed my inner objection to a felt subjugation. For me it said, I am an individual and I am free to choose. I come to this place five days a week from nine till three and I have sought for six years to conform, to hide behind mediocrity. But now, a new dawn has come and I do not agree that you can make me wear my clothes this way or that and dictate to me that my hair be long and flat.
Today my hair is long and flat. But I quietly continue my hair rebellion. I refuse to hide my silver strands beneath hair dye. I am proud of my years and my hard-won greys. I do not accept those who would have women conceal their age. I smile inwardly when I find new, gleaming white strands. The greying of my reflection and my siblings and my friends, reminds me of our layered and colourful histories, of the vulnerabilities of humanity and the fleetingness of time. The beauty of Age.
Yasmin Ward 