I would have liked to have had it bobbed, but daren’t mention such a criminal act to my parents, for they had never got over the shock of Amy’s brazenness when she had arrived home one day minus her lovely long, thick, dark tresses. She pranced into the kitchen thinking she looked truly beautiful. I thought she did, but Mother, shocked to the core, said in a great temper, ‘Get out of my sight, away from me, for you look just like a little monkey.’ Father, always alert to the rights of the individual, even though it never got him anywhere, despatched one of the boys to the barber’s for the return of Amy’s shorn locks. I thought he intended to use them in his plumbing work, mixing them with tallow, even though the coil of waxed hair he used in his work was yellowish and snuff-coloured. The barber, a Jewish man, called, strangely, Jesus, refused to part with Amy’s hair and my father got in a swearing temper. I thought his remarks about Jesus not at all religious.
