regular intervals. I didn’t say a word.
On another occasion I was sat in the front passenger seat of the car, with my mum driving, when we stopped at some traffic lights. I was minding my own business when a biker in black leather pulled up next to us and repeatedly shouted ‘Baldy’ in a mocking voice. My mum and I sat in silence. When the lights changed to amber, I watched him zoom off laughing in the distance. I hoped he might crash.
The truth is, there was always some kind of incident whenever I went out – a confrontation, name-calling, sniggering. The dark side of young people, the lack of empathy, might feel like a new phenomenon, thanks to the camera-phone videos you see online of kids humiliating each other. It isn’t new. Kids are inherently cruel. Kindness doesn’t come for a while – not naturally, at least.
While children could be cruel, the younger ones were just confused. It didn’t make sense to them. I understand why a three- or four-year-old would simply point at a bald kid. When I was that age my brother and I used to tease our father and tell him he wore a wig. It seemed such a fantastical notion to me, because of course he didn’t. We were just having fun.
But then, one Sunday morning when I was maybe ten, as I was getting ready to go to Hebrew classes, Dad beckoned me into the bathroom. He shut the door and told me that he had actually lost his hair at thirteen years old and that he wore a toupee.
He then proceeded to slowly and carefully peel it back, until it came all the way off. He had hair round the back and sides, but otherwise, like me, he was bald, I was gobsmacked. He made me promise not to tell a soul and I swore blindly that I definitely wouldn’t and then went straight to Hebrew classes and told EVERYONE.
‘You’ll never guess what! My dad . . . wears . . . a WIG!’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Darren Swabel, rolling his eyes. ‘It’s pretty obvious.’
And then I remembered one evening a few months earlier, when he had come home and Mum had looked at him, unimpressed.
‘I’m not sure about that at all,’ she said.
Dad had been defensive. ‘I think it looks nice.’
I have to admit his hair did look pretty different that day, kind of flatter, darker and shinier. A bit like a Brillo Pad or a small, flat hat.
It was a different time, I guess. In those days, not having hair was seen as socially unacceptable. People actually thought that it was preferable to wear a squirrel on their head than be bald.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been entirely surprised when my parents suggested to me that I might want to wear a wig at secondary school. Certainly I didn’t question it.
At this moment, as I type away, I do question it. I really question it.
What the hell was everyone thinking?
It was 1985, a full five years after my hair had fallen out. Five years. I had already done my best to somehow assimilate my baldness into my personality, if that makes sense. I had figured out jokey responses to the same old questions if I was in a good mood and withering retorts if I wasn’t. I had mastered the art of staring back fearlessly at people when I caught them sneaking a look at me. I had figured out, in my own way, how to live with being bald.
This was survival, turning a disadvantage into something I could own – but in my heart I still wanted to be just like everyone else. Maybe the wig could do that for me.
I was assessed again by a doctor and then told that, yes, I could have a wig on the National Health Service, so off I went with my mum and grandma to a wig store in central London, where the offending item was waiting for me.
I don’t know if they make wigs for children nowadays, but they certainly didn’t in 1985. A large brown human-hair wig – intended for a woman – was placed on my little head and cut down to size. Unsurprisingly, it was still far too big for me, but Mum and Grandma and the lady in the wig shop all said it looked marvellous and so we left the shop with the wig in a bag.
Back at home I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like it, but I also didn’t really feel – having come this far – that I could or should just give up on it. The fact that I didn’t have any eyebrows made the giant hairpiece look even more unconvincing, but I don’t think it occurred to anybody to teach me how to draw them in.
For a few days I wore the wig around the house to get used to it. The lining scratched my head so my lovely Aunty Denny kindly sewed a handkerchief into it.
And then one morning I tottered up the road to the primary school where I had been going every day for six years – but now with a colossal bloody wig on my head and even more self-conscious than I had been without it.
Head down, I walked across the playground. Suddenly, without saying a word, one of the tough boys in the year above me ran past, whipped it off and threw it on the ground. I picked it up in tears and hurried off to seek the comfort of a teacher.
I persisted with the wig for a few more days, but summer was approaching and it was just too hot and uncomfortable. I would slip it on and take it off as if it were a hat. Before long I was passing it round the class, letting everyone have a go.
Matt 1 Wig 0.
Poor Wiggy. It was only trying to help. Instead it found itself unceremoniously tossed into a cupboard, where it stayed until I could find a better use for it.
Years later, well into adulthood, I was speaking to a doctor who asked me how I had lost my hair. I told him the story about being knocked down by the car and how it had been assumed that it was the shock that had made it fall out two years later. It was a story I had recounted so many times that it was gospel to me now. I no longer questioned it.
But he did.
He asked me if I had asthma, eczema, hay fever or allergies. I said yes, funnily enough, the lot – chronically.
He said that my hair loss was most likely the consequence of my having an over-active immune system, one that was constantly fighting, even when it had nothing specific to beat. No one could say exactly what had made it ‘reject’ the hair but it wasn’t necessarily anything as dramatic as being knocked down by a car.
I asked him what the significance of having this over-active immune system was and how it was likely to affect me.
‘Um, well, you’ll probably never get cancer, actually.’
For a brief moment I felt like a superhero. Then he added, ‘But there’s about fifty-five other things that might well get you, I’m afraid.’
I took a deep breath. ‘So it’s a shorter life?’
He shrugged. ‘You could get hit by a bus tomorrow.’
‘Wouldn’t be the end of the world,’ I replied. ‘Maybe the shock would make my hair grow back.’
C – Chumley
The bespectacled, frizzy-haired Chigwell housewife stood in front of us, recounting her life story. She talked about school, her first job, how she met her husband. It was all going swimmingly.
