More Adventures In Barberdom. (ALERT some "R" rated)

My first "real" haircut was when I was about three years old. ( I have read that we rarely preserve memories until we are three.)

Mum took me to a local barber who operated his business from the front parlour of his two up - two down home on Co-operation Rd,  in the Easton/Greenbank area of Bristol.

I take it that the Civic authorities allowed home based businesses given that because of  the WWII bombing there was a shortage of retail space.

Co-operation Rd as modernised in recent years.

The boy in line before me stamped his feet and cried as the clippers began their work.   Not I,  (the good little people-pleasing boy). I was good!

A few years later Mum took me to a grown-up Barber in the basement of the Bristol Co-operative Society Departmental Store  on Castle Street.  (One of only two buildings which had survived the Blitz in Bristol's main pre-war shopping street).

I was a big boy now!.  What I remember most is the new-to-me smell of burning hair.  Who remembers the days when the best Barbers singed hair ends at the end of the cut?

Fast forward ten years (when I was about 16) at which time my peer group and I decided that Italian Barbers were the best.

We would go to an Italian owned Barber shop at the intersection of Colston St. and Upper Maudlin St. in the centre of Bristol.

There we would get a hair-cut; then a shampoo. After the shampoo our hair would be towel dried, then slathered with hair  spray, and then blow dried.

We young blades would step out proudly with never a hair out of place  -- until the next rainstorm which would restore our pates to dis-array.  It rains in England you know!

Seven or so years later when I was 23:  the R rated part:

I was working at the Knowle, Bristol branch of the (former) Westminster Bank.

One of our customers was handsome a young married barber, maybe two or three years older than I.

I went to his barber shop in Whitchurch, a couple of miles south of my workplace.

As he cut my hair he "came on to me".

I was intrigued, fascinated, scared, and sexually aroused.

But he was married, and a bank customer.  So I never again went to his barber shop.

My body said "more, more, more".

My mind said " no, no, no"

My mind won.

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More tomorrow about Barbers in Pittsfield MA, and Cambridge MA,