Tag: skinhead girls

‘It was only a haircut.’

And to some, it was – but to many, myself included, choosing your own haircut was a rite of passage. I was around 11 years old when I begged my mum to let me go to the barbers and get a crop. Up until then she had cut my hair herself, most certainly through necessity rather than any penny-pinching. She was a single mum bringing up two kids in a flat above a row of shops. My clothes came from jumble sales. It took a lot of pleading and whining, but she eventually relented and off I went to the barbers expecting to be transformed in to Suggs’s lovechild, but that’s a whole other story.

It is easy to forget that in the late 1970s, early 80s, you could still be sent home from school for daring to turn up with hair shorn too short. A mohican or dyed hair would almost certainly have got you suspended until you agreed to comply with school dress code. Yet in some weird way, it is exactly because these boundaries and rules were in place and enforced that this period of time is so memorable. I have been asked why my novels, Too Much Too Young and Feathers, are set in the period that they are. It’s really simple. It’s a time I am familiar with and one that, rightly or wrongly, I am very fond of. For myself and many, this period was our first dipping of our wicks in to the exciting world of music, fashion, social freedoms and autonomy.