Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  I no longer cried at night, nor even felt like it. My grief had changed. When I came upon Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s line, ‘I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless’, I knew that was the state I had reached, a state that lay beyond mere noisy sorrowing. And it was at this point that I was afflicted by a mysterious illness – not exactly an illness – more a disease. One day, when Emily was only five months old, I was brushing my hair in my bedroom, looking at myself in the mirror Simon Birch had given us as a wedding present, when I felt the bristles in my hairbrush seem to seize up. I thought I must have a knot even thicker than usual – my hair was extremely thick and rather coarse. I pulled the hairbrush impatiently and to my astonishment it came away bearing a great hunk of hair. I put up my hand to my head and found a patch of smooth scalp just below the crown of my head. I can not say I was frightened or worried: I simply assumed the sheer force of my brushing had pulled these hairs free. I could easily spare them. The patch, the tiny bald patch, did not hurt. There was no rash or sore or lump. So I thought nothing of it, suffered no twinges of anxiety. But after that I could not help noticing that, although my hairbrush did not stick again, every time I brought it away it seemed very full of hairs. I grew tired of removing them from the bristles of my hairbrush. But I was still not particularly worried until about three weeks later when, after washing my hair, I found great clumps of hair in the basin and on my towel. My hair was black, the towel and washbasin white. The hair looked menacing and obscene stretched in broad swathes across the clean porcelain and the fibres of the towel. I was disgusted rather than frightened, even then. I knew women’s hair often did fall out a little after pregnancies. I vaguely remembered that it was something to do with hormones and, heaven knows, my hormones had been in one sort of turmoil or another for nearly a year. I had never been vain, never given to studying myself in a mirror and, after Emily’s birth, my woebegone countenance was a sight I tried consciously to avoid. But now I began surreptitiously both to feel my head and constantly to peer at it from all angles. Was my hair really thinner? Was something seriously wrong with me? My anxious fingers prodded my scalp, relieved when they had to push against thick, firmly attached hairs and trembling when, as I withdrew them, they took with them the long black strands. I would stare at my hands, transfixed by the ugly sight of hair apparently growing from between my fingers. Then came a day when I felt another patch of smooth, oh so smooth skin on the back of my scalp, this time above the nape of my neck. It made me feel sick. The word ‘bald’ sprang into my mind for the first time. For a week I pretended it must be the soap I was using. Shampoo was, like everything else, difficult to get and for some time I had washed my hair and the children’s with ordinary soap. I stopped. From somewhere I obtained some mild baby shampoo and cautiously washed my hair with that, rinsing it very carefully and patting it dry gently. It made no difference. At the end of another week or so I was frantic with worry.

  The doctor I went to, the kindly old gentleman I had been under for Emily’s birth, was immensely reassuring. He said that he could see I had Alopecia Areata, a form of hair loss brought about by nervous disturbances. There was no need to upset myself – the hair would grow again. There was no treatment necessary. I must try to relax and rest and nature would do the rest. I left his surgery, scolding myself for the panic I had got into and embarrassed by my own fear. My heart had lurched at the thought of baldness: it was so utterly ludicrous. Bald, bald, bald, I had repeated to myself until I wanted to scream at the ridiculousness of it. A bald woman. I thought of pictures I had seen of senile old ladies, their heads grotesquely knobbly without hair, their faces underneath made twice as hideous because of the lack of it. I thought of plaster models in shop windows and how even the most beautiful looked absurd until their wig was put on. I would be a freak, mutilated, pointed at in the street, tittered about, completely unable to hide, but, thank God, there was no need any longer to torment myself. I believed my doctor implicitly and went on believing in him until I had only the thinnest covering of hair left, which had to be carefully arranged to protect my bare, stark white scalp. Then I went back to him. I asked to be sent to a specialist. Yet again, I went to University College Hospital. The specialist confirmed my GP’s diagnosis but was slightly less confident. He told me that in ninety-nine per cent of cases the hair grew back normally, given time and the removal of stress. I asked him about the other one per cent? He shrugged, said it did happen but really even then Alopecia Areata was no tragedy. It was painless, did not kill, did not impair any faculties. It was nothing to fret about, even if the worst came to the worst. Wigs were very good these days, getting better all the time. I had to stop him by rushing out.

  It was the humiliation I dreaded most. I insist again I was not vain but I was proud. How could a bald woman hold on to her pride? I tried repeating to myself what the doctor had said, about Alopecia Areata not being fatal. I tried to be thankful I had not got a heart condition or cancer. I tried contempt for my own fears. What did it matter how I looked? All around me were men with legs cut off, eyes gouged out, half of their faces missing, and there was I whimpering over the loss of my hair. But it was no good. I wept and wept and became more and more distraught. Nobody appeared to notice, or, if they did, they said nothing, they were tactful. I don’t know to whom I refer by using this ‘they’. I was intimate with no one. There were only the children, the workmen and Linda who saw me every day. Rosemary, of course, asked why I wore a horrid scarf all the time but Linda never commented. As I sat feeding Emily, weeping over the contrast between her own almost bald pretty head and my own ghastly one, I felt I could not go on much longer and, if I collapsed, what would happen to my family? It was even conceivable that they might end up in an institution, because there was no one to take them in. So I steadied myself by making contingency plans. I asked Linda to ask her mother if she could go to Brighton to stay with my children, if I needed to go into hospital. She agreed. I wrote to Miss Clarke and explained only that I needed a rest and what I proposed to do. She wrote back at once, a stilted letter, but perfectly agreeable. Then I decided to send them all off at once, while I tried lying in the garden, ignoring everything for a week, to see if this would work what I had by then come to think of as a miracle.

  I lay in the garden. It was the beginning of March, a wonderfully warm early spring. The garden was completely wild and overgrown and I had to hack away thick weeds and branches to make a small space for myself. I lay in the sun, between Emily’s feeds, and tried to empty my mind of all thought. I lifted each limb in turn and let it flop back. I relaxed. I had promised myself that I would not touch my hair nor look at it for a week. Each morning I shut my eyes when I made my bed so that I would not see the amount of hair clinging to the pillow. Then, on the last day, I steeled myself to face what I already knew: I had hardly any hair left. I was going to be one of the one per cent. Strangely enough, I took this verdict calmly. I decided that, before the children came back, I must find a wig as much like my own hair as possible and start to wear it immediately. It would give me confidence, it might even achieve a sufficient measure of relaxation to enable hair to grow. Naturally, I had no idea where to begin in my search for a wig. There must be wig-makers, wigs had surely always existed, but where? I looked in the telephone book and found several firms announcing they were makers of wigs – names I had vaguely associated with the theatre. In fact, the first shop I went to was a theatre costumier’s in St Martin’s Lane. I walked in, baby in my arms, eyes red with crying, I expect, and asked in a very haughty manner if I could see some wigs. ‘For what period, Madam?’ the man inquired. I wanted to say for the here and now but could not get out the words. ‘For myself,’ I said. ‘I need a wig temporarily.’ For the first time he really looked at me but I was wearing a hat, pulled well down. He apologized, even blushed, and said he was afraid they did not make wigs in contemporary styles. He gave me an address in St James’s and another in Bond Street. I walked from St Martin’s Lane to Bond Street. />
  The name he had given me was on a brass plate together with seven others. The doorway was narrow, squashed between two shop fronts, and the stairs inside were steep. I trudged all the way to the top, heart thumping with the effort of carrying Emily so far, as well as with nervousness, and at last I came to the name I wanted. I knocked and tried the door which opened into what looked like a cosy little village draper’s shop. There were two ladies sitting in wicker chairs in front of a gas fire, both holding mugs of tea. All round the room were plaster heads, white and grey, some with wigs on, some without. A small desk was pushed into one corner. On it there were some papers and a bottle of milk. One of the ladies, wearing a blue nylon overall, got up, coughed and asked if I had the right address. I said I hoped so, I needed a wig. And I started to laugh, with mortification. The other lady came over and said would I like a cup of tea – it was all so homely, so unlike anything I had expected. The relief was wonderful. Emily was put down on a cushion from one of the old wicker chairs, and I had my tea and blurted out my sad story, well, some of it. The ladies tut-tutted and smiled and frowned and there-there’d. Then the fatter one – they were both small and fat and bespectacled – took a tape measure out of her pocket and measured my poor head. A lot of cupboard opening went on and pulling about of boxes, before a wig was produced. They made wigs to order, they said, and nothing they could give me would really fit. Then they managed to find a wig, which they put on my head. I hated it. It seemed tight and uncomfortable and scratchy. Fearfully I looked in a mirror and, though I looked slightly odd, there was no doubt I also looked better. It was wonderful to see my face framed, as it always had been, by thick, wavy, bushy hair. I hated taking it off and once more exposing myself, even more than I had hated having it put on. I saw a wig might not be the joke I had assumed, that perhaps, as the ladies promised, a properly made well-fitting wig might help me a great deal. But once I wore it, if I was one of the one per cent, I would always have to wear it. It would be my secret. I could not shame my daughters by involving them. Night and day I would be doomed to wear it, for ever and ever, and what would I do about small hands tugging and winds and swimming – the problems were endless.

  Yet I left Bond Street happier than I had been for weeks. My head was measured, the hair chosen, the style agreed. I was ready, as I had always tried to be, to face the worst, if and when it came. Ready, too, to embark on permanent deception. The most important thing in the world was to protect my family from —

  *

  From what? Oh, my God. She expresses herself so badly it makes me want to squirm. I couldn’t break in and interrupt all that stuff about her hair. I suppose even using the word ‘stuff’ makes it sound as if I’m being sarcastic or derogatory. I don’t intend to be. What I find so upsetting is the pathos of it all. There she was, shut into herself, being brave again, and it makes me cringe.

  We’re getting near that point where my real memories begin, properly formed things with beginnings and ends, quite substantial and as trustworthy as memory ever is. But this Alopecia episode is a fraction too early for me. I have strained and strained to remember but I was only nine and I can’t be sure of anything. I remember the scarf and how it annoyed me because it looked silly. I remember, as I said, going to Brighton with Linda. I don’t remember anything about coming back. My next landmark is going to Primrose Hill School and being given some milk that was sour. I came home and cried and Mother said it must have got too warm in the classroom and it wouldn’t be sour tomorrow. So there I was, demanding sympathy for something so trivial, and there she was with her hair falling out worrying about wigs. It’s extraordinary that we never knew about the wig, or rather the significance of it, because of course I do remember the wig. It went into the dressing-up box on the top landing. Friends who came to play used to marvel at it – it was so beautiful, so real, a proper wig and modern, not one of those Woolworth’s efforts made with horsehair. How can she have borne seeing us tripping about shrieking and laughing, wearing something that had caused her so much pain?

  It was bloody ridiculous, it was laying down a whole pattern for our upbringing from which she never deviated. Nothing nasty in the woodshed for us, ever. What did she think we were, fragile bits of glass which would be shattered if the merest puff of wind blew in our direction? It was insulting. And it made us feel that to expose our own agonies to her was too humiliating, that we, too, had to be cheerful all the time, take things on the chin, never say die and other ludicrous rubbish.

  But she was brave, I do see that. It must have been hell. I bet, though, that any minute it’s going to be ‘but we were very happy’ again.

  *

  — but we were very happy in spite of all this trouble. It took time, of course, to establish our new life. I will not say we were happy all the time. It was a whole year after Emily was born until I could find myself smiling at anything at all. I remember her first birthday, watching her stagger across the garden and thinking that the worst must be over, that the thought ‘this time last year’ made me shudder, but that it was almost a relief because it made me appreciate how much had changed for the better. My hair did grow again, but not until it had completely fallen out except for a long, pathetic wisp coming from the crown of my head. I wore my wig, which was uncannily like my own hair had been to look at, but not of course to feel. It fitted very tightly indeed. There was a sort of inner cap, like a swimming hat, which I had to stretch over my head, it gave me a headache long before each day was over. I was not supposed to sleep in it, and in any case it was too hot and uncomfortable to do so, but I had another, much looser, to wear in bed. I was always afraid it would fall off in the night and one of the children would come in and see this hideous, hairless monster in their mother’s bed and scream and scream. I started to wear a ribbon, securely tied on top of it, to keep it anchored – oh, the distress it caused me when Rosemary laughed at my early morning appearance. But gradually I grew more confident. I never forgot I was wearing a wig – nobody could do that – but, because I looked normal wearing it, I began to feel more normal and not so terrified of public derision. And I suppose this achieved some sort of automatic inner relaxation, which did the trick. My hair started to grow. One night, removing my hateful wig, I ran my hand over my aching head and felt tiny pinpricks of stubble. I thought my excitement would produce an adverse reaction and tried desperately to stop myself feeling my head again and again, but I could not sleep for hoping. I made myself promise not to feel my scalp again until the week was up, and I kept the promise. A week later there was the softest down all over my head. I waited another week, and then another, and then at last I confronted a mirror without a wig, something I had not done for six whole months. I still looked bald, as though my scalp had been painted with a light brown brush. It was nothing yet, the new hair, but it was everything. Those lumps and knobs on my head which had loomed as large as Everest, when first I saw them, were now merely the gentlest of undulations. I could face myself. For another month I wore a wig, and then I told my children I was tired of long hair, I was going to have it all cut off, very short, so that it would be easier to look after. I was too busy to have long hair which needed so much attention and which I hated to see untidy. Don’t cut it, said Rosemary, Daddy won’t like it and I won’t like it and you’ll look ugly. V E day was just over. I knew the likelihood of Oliver returning was now absolutely remote and that it was wrong to let the children think they would see him again. They could not grow up sustained on a diet of false hope (as I was). There were some things from which I could not protect them, and that was one. So I did two things I dreaded on the same day. I took off my wig, for good, and I told the children their father was never coming back. The telling was dreadful for me but not for the children. They accepted it quite calmly. Rosemary said, ‘He was a soldier and he was killed in a battle wasn’t he?’ I said yes. She asked if he had got a medal. I said no. Celia, aged five, asked if we would get another daddy. I said no. She said Ellen didn’t have a daddy and
neither did Phillip and James (all children in the same reception class at Primrose Hill Infants School). My shorn head was accepted in the same matter-of-fact way. Rosemary said I looked funny. I could not have looked as funny as I felt – lighthearted suddenly and glad and dizzy and slightly unbalanced. Instead of hoarding my wig secretly or destroying it I put it immediately in the dressing-up box. It made me feel triumphant to watch the children treat it as a plaything.

  And now, at last, I am done. The background is sketched in, even if it has taken longer than I thought. I am ready to begin —

  *

  Thank Christ. But on what? That was all too depressing to make me want to continue. So I shan’t. I’ll leave, and ring her up later and say I had to go before she came in. She’ll be disappointed but I can’t help it.