Home from university, I asked my dad to cut my long hair short, and so on a bright and breezy summer’s day, I sat in a white plastic chair in our garden facing into the wind. 

Beyond the lawn, a row of silver birch trees was home to a raucous rookery, beady eyes looking on. Long grasses caught the sunlight and the air in shimmering waves. The noise the wind made through the trees was loud as the sea too, surrounding me, and though I was as still, as a carved figurehead everything around me hummed and moved with intense energy, lapping and beating around the prow of my little plastic boat. 

Mermaid-wet hair spilled in dark winding eddies down my back, past my shoulder blades. 

“Are you sure?” My Dad asked.

“Yes”, I said, 

“Sure you’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure I’m sure”, I said, laughing – and so he cut. 

It was exhilarating, and terrifying to catch glimpses of my hair flying away behind me. Some of it fell close around me but big gusts caught the rest and carried it away. I wondered where it would end up. Would it catch in wire fences, and brambles, branches and hedges, like sheep’s wool and flutter there. Maybe birds would weave it into their nests – bird-nest hair being something of a speciality of mine, curly-topped and never neat for long, my hair as wilful as my temper.   

It was exhilarating to feel the heat of the sun and the cool air on my newly bare neck. As each section of hair was cut, and became lighter in weight, up it sprang into its wild ringlets.  When Dad had finished my hair coiled around the level of my chin, and my head was light as a dandelion clock. I stood up tall and shook the clinging tendrils from my clothes, then I shook my head around, relieved of the weight and equally delighted and alarmed at the new shape my shadow made.

Growing up, summer seaside holidays were the only time my hair was left gloriously curlily itself.  For a few weeks, I was free from the enemy of pulling-brushes and combs and the torments of pretty laughing young hairdressers who raked through and tugged at my head every Saturday afternoon. Debbie and Sally, one dark, one blonde, both with no more than a gentle wave to their hair, both young and smiley and beautiful, would stand one either side of me chatting and laughing, and gently teasing me. Lying back at the wash-basin, I was at their giggling mercy as they conducted the ‘eyebrow test’. This was a scientifically rigorous experiment to see whether my dark brows with more than a hint of a monobrow, could stop the water from the shower-tap rushing down my brow and into my eyes. I would laugh too but each time I was desperately hoping for a a fail. “Close your eyes, close your eyes!”, they would say, and I would shut my eyes tight and wait as the warm water tickled down my forehead. “Oh, no, no – it’s a FAIL!”, they would cry, and quickly dab the water from my eyes with a towel. 

I loved the clean smell and softness of shampoo frothing, and the noise and camaraderie. Sometimes the girls, would blow-dry one side of my hair each, racing against each other, one left one right, taming my ringlets with big spiky round brushes. Stuck in the middle, with funny tufts of fluffy hair sticking out of big claw-clips, I was pulled this way and that, wincing, though no-one meant to hurt me. Finally my hair would be smooth and straight, and I would be released to show my mother. “Beautiful,” she would say, “Much better.” and she would hug me, and thank them. 

The rest of the day I could run my fingers through silky-straight waterfalls of hair, so long as it stayed dry. The irony being that once my hair was straightened, water became my enemy. The slightest bit of damp in the air, let alone rain, would be sucked in by my hair, which would fuzz and fluff and frizz as it tried to twist back to its natural state. 

The other enemy of curly hair, is the hair brush. The more you brush it, the messier and less itself, it becomes. Fairytale princesses brushed their hair 100-times before bed to keep it like silk. Sitting at my padded velvet stool and brushing mine, I would watch keenly disappointed, every time as my hair fluffed out and up, less and less like Rapunzel with every stroke. How, I envied that my straight-haired English school-friends could brush their hair and feel it swish and swing behind them like horses tails. 

In the summer though, on holidays by the sea my curly hair was glorious. It would fan out behind me, seaweed in its element as I swam in clear mediterranean water. My sister and I would swim for hours, tumbling and spiralling in the water, swooping down and between each other’s legs to stir up sand or feel along turquoise tiles at the bottom of the pool and pick up a coin or stone we had thrown. One day, three laughing, older dark-limbed Greek boys joined me in the water, splashing and joking and daring me to swim through their legs too and find the coin.

Delighted by the sea and their banter and attention, I accepted the challenge, and they craftily  rose to it too, though I only realised that later, when I was washing the day’s sand and salt off me in the shower. As I soaped my legs and inner thighs clean and felt my skin tingling, and flicked my hair across my back and then I smiled, and I would have blushed, but I was too olive brown for blushing.

The boys threw the coin, and I plunged down, my strong young body, silky hair streaming around as I passed through their parted thighs. Again and again, we brushed against each other, strong and supple catching our breath and diving down so that we were all dizzy and laughing, until tired and needing a break from the saltwater in my eyes, I ran back towards my sister where she was playing in the sand. My sister with her dark straight fringe framing her dimpled face, looked up smiling and carried on digging, as my father came over.

“Who were those boys you were playing with?”, he asked asked. “Just boys,” I said. “Hm”, he said. We stood together, looking out at the sea. He stood close, as we watched the boys still swimming and larking about, throwing each other into the waves. 

My father’s eyes were sea-green in colour. He only had a few dark curls left, cut short behind his ears and at the nape of his neck, the rest of his head, clean and brown and bald. 

Day was turning to evening, and as we stood, watching, the boys ran out and further along the beach grabbed their towels and walked away, to go home, chatting and laughing all the while. One looked back, smiling. 

My dad and I  stood a little longer, and then he looked on as I  paddled and splashed in the shallows with my sister, and my long hair drifted behind me as I moved, and dried in the sun and the breeze, soft and springy thickened with salt, dark and curly.