When I was a teenager agonising over my hair, my paternal grandmother told me about her brother cutting hers when she was around the same age

At the time of this conversation my own hair was long, straight and mousy-brown. In theory it had been in fashion for a while (although it would have been more fashionable if blonde), but somehow it – along with me – never was. Now, a new fashion was coming in: shoulder length with curled sides. I needed a good hairdresser, possibly a perm and definitely curling tongs. None of these were things my mother thought worth spending money on. She considered me too young for a perm, could trim my hair herself and from bitter experience suspected it would take more than curling tongs to curl my hair.

‘I rather regretted letting him do it,’ said my gran, touching the nape of her neck where there were some adorable grey curls sticking out.

This stopped my whinging in its tracks. While my sister and I are now best of friends (which we weren’t at the time), I still wouldn’t trust her with my tresses and a pair of scissors. And what I knew of friends’ brothers, I definitely wouldn’t have trusted them.

‘Whatever did he do?’ I said.

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she said. ‘He did what I asked him to.’

Halted in my tirade against parental unreasonableness, I asked the obvious question: ‘Whatever did you ask him to do?’

‘Bob my hair,’ she said. ‘My parents wouldn’t allow it. The bit where he shaved at my nape has never quite grown right since. Before my parents found out, I sold a lovely necklace I’d been given so I could go to a barber and have it done properly. They were horrified all the same, even though my mother once did something similar.’

Her parents were horrified? So was I. My gran was the archetypal housewife. She had married young, had never had to work for a living and never had an urge to. She’d fallen happily into running a home efficiently and well. She gardened, styled her home, baked and sewed with high skill and also joy. She was calm, conforming and believed in obedience and the status quo. The last thing I could imagine her doing was anything that horrified anyone. But what did she mean about her own mother ‘doing the same’?

It turned out that it all went back to cultural perceptions of femininity, modesty, and being a good Christian woman which we’ve now largely put aside.

My great-grandmother was in her late teens in the 1890s, one of the youngest of eight (I think) children. Her father would have been well into his sixties. While not remotely poor, they certainly weren’t in the ‘going to balls’ class, so when she obtained a party dress which exposed lower arms and neck, her father was apparently horrified. (Although I have a photograph taken of her in this extremely modest – by today’s standards – dress, so she must have been forgiven.)

Her daughter, my grandmother was the youngest by far of four, a teenager in the 1920s. The brother who cut her hair must have been a good six years older, since the eldest one had been killed in WWI. Their father would have been in his fifties and her mother in her forties. Bare lower arms and neck were one thing. Short hair and short skirts were something else altogether.

But WWI had accelerated what had already started in the 1910s – more sensible, practical clothes and hairstyles for women – and by the 1920s there was no going back. My great-grandparents forgave her. It was a very loving and accepting family, and they must have realised that the world was never going to be what it had been before the Great War and that fighting over the length of someone’s hair was pointless. Plus Gran had a married sister who was eleven years older and probably took her side.

The whole conversation came back to me recently as I started writing a new project: a mystery set in the 1920s where the female main character is twenty-three. She hasn’t had her hair cut into a bob yet but a number of the other female characters have. (At the time, you went to a barber to have it done, holding a page from a newspaper with possible hairstyles in your shaking hand.) Will she get it cut or not? Haven’t decided yet.

I don’t think having her hair bobbed was Gran’s only rebellion. I believe that there was some concern about her marrying my grandfather. It wasn’t because he was unsuitable in any way as a person, or is family was less than acceptable. I think it was because there was a possibility of mental illness in his family since his father had tragically died by his own hand. Somehow my grandparents prevailed, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.

I never did get that fashionable curled sides hairstyle while it was still in fashion and stopped nagging my mother. Perhaps I realised maintaining it required more skill than I had (or would ever have).

At Christmas, some months after the conversation I’m relating, my paternal grandfather unexpectedly died. A little after a year after that my paternal grandmother did too. We’ve always felt that a broken heart was more of a cause than anything medical.

For reasons I still can’t explain, one of the first things I did in my grief was to demand to go to a hairdresser, where I had my long hair cut into a short bob. Ever since then, my hairstyle had been fundamentally one of three styles: long and straight, long and permed, or in a bob.

But for the record, so far I haven’t got my sister to do it, and no one has ever taken a razor to the back to create the adorable curls that stuck up at a funny angle which my grandmother had.

(NB for anyone not in the know, Barnet Fair is Cockney Rhyming Slang for Hair. And I will be writing more about the subject.)

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit Vector Set of Different Flapper Girls Icons in Modern Flat Style Isolated on White Background. Stock Vector – Illustration of hair, face: 87491137