Growing up mixed-race in a small, white, rural community in England back in the Fifties and Sixties, my tight kinky curls were always going to be an issue.
I remember walking into town with my white foster mother and having my hair handled by all her friends. They would thrust their fingers into my hair as if they were examining an inferior ball of wool on the market. And I was expected to stand there like one of the rare breed entries at the Crufts dog show.
For my foster mother, it was an issue when it came to managing it, too. She had no experience of such hair. No guidelines to work with. The nearest black community was in Leeds, about 48km from our sleepy little market town. There was only one thing for it. On my hands and knees with my head in her lap I was shorn like a sheep at regular intervals.
No surprise that I grew up hating my thick bush of unmanageable curls, and I had to look away when I saw my schoolmates pulling a comb effortlessly through their silky locks.
As I got older I learned to tame my kink into submission with globs of setting lotion and those big pink plastic rollers that had to be skewered into place. The nights I slept with those things pricking into my scalp like a nun sleeping in a hair shirt!
At 19 I lived in Italy for a few years. One day after three glasses of Chianti, I worked up enough nerve to take my sun-frazzled hair into an Italian hair salon. All I wanted was a moisturising treatment and maybe a trim. As if! Poor Rodolfo almost fell on his own scissors when he saw me. No signorina! No! No! Preferirei non provare! (I’d rather not attempt it!) You would think I had asked him to perform a deviant sexual act in public.
Later, as my American flatmate trimmed my hair in our kitchen that overlooked the ramshackle medieval roofscape of Florence, I couldn’t help thinking of the irony of it all. The country that had forged the Renaissance had been utterly defeated by my kinky hair.
The Eighties found me living in the United States with a daughter of my own. I had to learn the braiding skills that are second nature to most black women but had never been a part of my own experience. Once a week we had the ritual comb-out, wash, deep moisturising and plaiting session, among tears and protestations from my daughter and sometimes from me. Of course, she was growing up among many other black children, but still I saw her looking enviously at her smooth-haired classmates and I knew exactly what was on her mind.
It was in the US that I understood for the first time how the black woman’s insecurity with her natural hair has been exploited to the max by the beauty industry. To walk into a chemist and find two full rows of black hair products told its own story. Unlike in Italy and England, the American hair salons couldn’t wait to get their hands into my thick mass of curls. That stuff would straighten out beautifully with the right super-strength relaxer. Suddenly the pressure was on not just to unkink my hair but to go straight.
I hated my new hair. It fell in my eyes and blew all over the place with the slightest breeze. In fact, it did all the things I had dreamed it would. But it wasn’t me. Without its spring it lay flat on my head and looked as if all the life had been zapped out of it. I looked like someone else. Someone I didn’t warm to. I couldn’t wait for it to grow back natural.
Eventually it did, of course, and I’ve kept it natural ever since, realising now the fantastic potential of the hair that I have. Weave it, braid it, cornrow it, scrunch it or just comb it out, this hair is so versatile it ought to have its own variety show.
At my hairdressers recently I watched a woman going through the tedious process of having her hair relaxed while her small daughter looked on longingly. That little girl believes she’s a princess-in-waiting, I thought. She believes that in the fullness of time the magic of the straightening tongs or the relaxer will transform her into what the world tells her is beautiful.
Then I thought: someone ought to write a fairy tale about a beautiful little black princess whose natural, springy curls turn out to be the very thing that makes her and the story special. A sort of Rapunzel story for all the frizzy, bushy, kinky-haired little girls. Someone really ought to write it. And that’s exactly what I did.
Christina Shingler lives in the north of England and has just published a children’s book Princess Katrina and the Hair Charmer (Tamarind Books)