2. Mainly Hair
My own early experiences in the Music Room were not without problems. I forget what happened the first time but the second time I went across the yard with the rest of the class, an emissary arrived from the main house, prompting Betty Rayment to remark, “Poor Christopher, every time he comes here he gets sent away!” The order had come from on high that I was to go into Ashford for a haircut.
I shall have to take a step back and explain that, for reasons lost in time, my mother had cut my hair herself. She was not a hairdresser by profession, nor did the results look as if she were. If she had known she was anticipating the fashions of the next decade, she would probably have marched me off in horror to the nearest stripy pole. Some photos recently found in an old box suggest that she and I were unwitting trendsetters. Trends to which Miss Leila could only react with a loud squawk.
Hair was a late obsession of Miss Leila’s. The 1960s could not have been a worse time for an elderly lady with a preference for short back and sides in a young man. One of the more memorable entries to the annual fancy dress competition a few years after this – though I doubt if it got the prize – was “Samson and Miss Leila”. Samson was a senior girl wearing a senior boy’s uniform and with her long, willowy hair combed down to cover her face completely. Whoever “Miss Leila” really was, she had acquired a convincing stick and dragged some sort of a browny-golden dog behind her. Feebly and ineffectively, she clawed at the offending hair with her stick.
A typewritten sheet sent to all parents and guardians with dates and other information about forthcoming holidays invariably concluded, “It would be helpful if all children could have their hair cut before the end of the holiday”. I once overheard a discussion between Miss E. and Miss Travers. The gist was that the phrase should be underlined: “I wouldn’t put it past some of them to go the whole six weeks without a haircut,” said a horrified Miss E. Indeed, it was remarkable how much of a Beatle-cut a young man could acquire in just six weeks.
The urgency with which the contaminating influence of my homemade haircut had to be removed can be grasped if we remember that rescue would have been at hand within a maximum of fourteen days anyway. Once a week, on Betty Rayment’s day off, the Music Room was transformed into a hairdressing salon; one week for the boys, the next for the girls. A barber/hairdresser from Ashford was brought in and by the end of the morning the floor was covered in more hair than you would have imagined possible, considering how little we were allowed in the first place. As far as the boys are concerned, I use the word “barber” advisedly. There was nothing of the hair-stylist about our Mr. Richards, though far be it from me to insinuate that the “short back and sides” was all he knew how to do – he had a nifty way with a Crewe-cut. Once we reached the age of eleven and began attending school in Ashford, we were sent to Mr. Richards’s barber shop in town. A morose man, he occasionally approached eloquence on the subject of young men’s hair-dos and the way “the wind gets in it”. “Once a term now, is it?” would be his disapproving greeting during my last couple of years.
A trip into Ashford by car was quite a thing back then. Simon Rodway was the driver but a full escort was crammed into his old and smelly Austin A40. He introduced me to Robert Clark, “the oldest boy at Caldecott”. There was a girl in the party too, for I remember a voice cooing behind me “Ooh, I think he looks sweet like that”. I cannot put a name or a face to my early admirer. As we piled in, my youthful imagination got to work. I was a fan at that time of Enid Blyton’s “Famous Five” and “Find-Outers”. These books usually contained an episode where the young would-be-detective was kidnapped and spirited off by a seedy band of robbers. I thrilled to the thought that perhaps just such an adventure was beginning for me! Simon Rodway’s face seemed to fit the bill well enough (sorry Simon, but that is how I remember it!). Nothing doing. All that happened was that I lost a lot of hair and then we all went for an ice-cream. Boarding-school life was beginning to look rather good …
If the drive went without incident, maybe I was lucky in another sense. Just a little later, by which time Simon Rodway was no longer a housemaster at Caldecott but a periodic visitor, it was mentioned at the dinner table that “Roddy” was coming that afternoon. James King, at whose table I was sitting, remarked mildly that “there should be a call out for all drivers to keep their cars off the road” (Mr. King’s comments were always made mildly; it was only when you thought about them later that you realized that what he actually said was often not mild at all). “Simon Rodway”, he explained, “is a menace. He should never be allowed behind the wheel”. Legend has it that, when the roundabout was opened linking the Ashford by-pass with the eastern end of the town and the A20 to Folkestone (now absorbed into the M20), Simon Rodway, chauffeuring Miss Leila, drove straight over the top of it. Miss Leila just put on her best Queen Victoria face and remarked, “I don’t think that was really necessary, Simon”.