PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH

 

People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather

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Barbers: the chattering classes

For a man of delicate upbringing, such as myself, there is no-one in life so daunting as a barber. I came across one who was, without doubt, the conversationalist who would stop an army in its tracks.

I had circled the shop several times, as is my custom, and each time I peered through the window there were elderly people in waiting, earnestly reading magazines which, in normal circumstances, would not even be considered for lighting their fires. I was seeking the moment when I could walk in, be cropped, and walk out with the minimum of delay, and an absolute minimum of speech. Such is my ideal, seldom achieved.

This is, or was, a one-man barber’s. We had, in the past, reached a tacit understanding. I did not listen. He did not talk. He had learned that there was no point. I liked to enter when no-one else was present. But he had become canny with time and his window was no longer easy to see through. He used wording and plants to baffle people into thinking that the premises were empty of customers. When I finally entered, I was shocked to find three barbers, which included him, all scissoring away, and two customers waiting.

In gaols, mental institutions and barbers’ shops, time is meaningless. It dribbles into the sands of the future and is lost. You might as well give up, pick up the nearest reading matter, and apply yourself to the account of the man in Brisbane who ate his own head.

My normal barber was plainly taking as much time as possible to complete his task, and he kept looking sideways to see how the others were progressing. When he finally rid himself of his customer at the exact time they finished with theirs, he sidled away and vanished to the rear.

The lady barber disposed of a youth, whom she had lovingly tended for much of his formative years, and was ready for a further scything job. I was it. This placed her, and me, next to the third barber, a male person in blue jeans, aged somewhere around 28. She was around 25. I reckon.

So there we were - she had acquired me. Her companion had acquired an old gentleman of some dignity. I heard him say, "Yes, well, short but not too short, you know," and then he was stricken dumb as the barber began:

"Where you from, then?" (to the girl). She told him. "Yer wot?" he said. "Oo, they’re right ones there aren’t they?"

"Garn," she said. "You reckon?"

"I know," he said. "Right ones. Where were you born?" She told him. "Oo," he said, "they’re right ones there, too."

"Yer reckon?" she said. "I bet you’re a right one yourself."

"Not like you," he said. "I bet you’re a real right one."

There is nothing in life so depressing as the sight of your own face in a mirror when you know that it has frozen over like a Siberian winter and is unlikely to show any expression whatsoever until some sense intrudes into life. Or someone rubs your legs briskly. Or gives you a large gin, free. Unlikely in the circumstances.

He turned to her posterior. "You’ve got a nice bum, anyway," he said. "You reckon?" she said. "Yea," he said. "Nice bum. Nice blouse. I could undo some of them buttons on yer blouse."

"Oo, cheek," she said. "Well," he said, "I don’t know about that - you’re right ones where you come from."

The aged customer’s head was receding into his shoulders. He began to look like a Galapagos turtle. I could imagine him leaving his eggs and clopping away there in the sand, tuned to the rhythms of a million tides, grey, resigned, and probably doomed.

The barber shifted ground. "I haven’t told this gentleman how much I am charging him yet," he said. "It’s £93. But I might give a discount." The actual charge was about four quid.

"Ninety-two pounds. That the discount? A pound?" said the lady barber. "Yea," he said.

It seemed to have occurred to the male clipper that neither customer was showing the slightest visible reaction to anything he said. "I’m only joking," he said. He sounded a bit desperate. Up to that point, he had assumed that his birding was being admired by others perhaps not quite as sophisticated as him. The thought was beginning to dawn that he was edging himself towards outright disapproval. With me, he had long ago reached that point.

I was mightily relieved when I left the chair and left the premises hurriedly. I had to get out and breathe different air. I kept playing tunes over and over in my mind to calm myself.

Mind you, in the past I have had worse experiences. In Palestine, a barber bored by his own conversation, began to make funny shapes out of my hair, using a lot of soap to achieve them. He had a companion who howled with laughter at each creation. I did not quite know what to do about this. There were just the three of us in the shop. I now know with certainty what I should have done. I should have shot them. I had the means at that time. It would have been a merciful release for a man already deep in the juvenile pleasures of his trade.

I have had many and various barbers in my search for one both deaf and dumb. I found a place where five of them snipped all day long. As you went in, they all chorused, "Hiya." When you left they all chorused, "Seeya." Revolted by this, a form of conversation intellectually inferior to that in any establishment breeding parrots, I took to touring side streets in search of, perhaps, an elderly barber too frail to have an animated conversation and with few customers. Someone I could physically crush and leave crouched and injured in his own chair if life became unbearable.

I found a likely place in a miserable side street and entered. To my horror, the barber was a woman. There was no retreat. Women are born interrogators without the need for cold water drips on your forehead and they tend to screw your hair up in one hand, then snip where it emerges through the fingers. Men do at least give you a damn good going over with the shears which prevents your having to go back until a couple of months have elapsed. .

Within the space of two minutes, this one knew where I was born, where I lived, and the approximate worth of my house, how many children I had, where I was going for my holidays, and the nature of my profession. She was more pernicious than a financial adviser. I never went back.

When I travelled around more than I now do, and a haircut was required, I knew that the first question would be, "Whaddertheygointodo on Saturday?" Which meant that I was faced with a number of supplementary questions: Which town am I in? Which time of year is it? Is he referring to football or cricket? Having decided all these things, I would mumble, "Oh, yes, waddayou think, then?"

Instead of wielding comb and scissors, barbers halt the movement of their limbs to pursue such urgent matters. Twenty minutes on they are still smoothing out hair and describing, in minute detail, the last match they saw. They could make double their money if they had half their chat.

Hair is silly stuff in the first place. In ancient times, I suppose we were lolloping around with hair all over ourselves. If there’s so much of it on each human being, barbers can go to hell. There’s no call for them. But as hair began to disappear from the human frame, it left tufts here and there, principally on the head, and the artiste with the scissors was born. Regrettably.

More imaginative barbers find things to do with these tufts. They create styles that should normally be seen only on top of an ice-cream cornet. The more bizarre the imagination, the greater the reward. (As for the customer, if he grows chest hair resembling that of a chimpanzee, he undoes an extra button of the shirt and wears a gold medallion on a chain.)

This is not, thankfully, the age where barbers wreak most havoc in men’s minds. As we all know, barbers pulled teeth. They were surgeons, and blood-letters, medicine men in religious ceremonies.

The red and white stripes of their pole represented bandages - red for those stained with blood during the operation, white for the clean bandage. The bandages would be hung out on the pole to dry after washing and would blow and twist together, forming the spiral pattern on our modern poles.

Razors were around in the bronze age. Free men of Rome were clean shaven, and the slaves had beards, so the rubbish people were instantly identifiable.

It was Henry V111 who joined surgeons and barbers to form the Company of Barber Surgeons.

In America, men became attached to their barbers - sad souls - and began to take their personal shaving mugs to leave on the premises as we ale men take our pewter tankards to pubs. The barbers, elevated beyond measure by this loving response, began to sing in unison, adding a further horror to their repertoire..

So to the present sad, miserable times.

Shortly after leaving the shop, I came across a creature covered in a sort of sacking. He was slumped in a cafe chair, the face barely visible, the black hair cascading like treacle beyond the shoulders, the eyes dead, the claws of his hands terminally attached to a long-cold cup of something awful.

I knew immediately who he was.

Someone like me who, long ago, had been to a barber’s and given up as he faced a tide of inane rubbish that would pursue him wherever he went, wherever he was, for the rest of his life so long as hair grew upon him.

The poor sod has just given up on his coiffures for ever and I felt like joining him.

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Mather © 2004

23 March, 2008