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uncut, and a sort of bald strip running from me neck to the top of me skull. And the officer says: ‘What the devil do you think that is?’ And I says: ‘Sir, permission to speak, sir. Am I here to be shaved like a convict, sir?’ And the officer says ‘No.’ And I says: ‘Sir, permission to speak, sir, the barber wanted to shave my head, sir.’ And the officer says: ‘Oh,’ and as true as I sit here that barber got fourteen days. Ah. Fourteen steady days. They run him into the moosh, they did, and they took him on Orders, and they give him fourteen solid days C.B. Yeah, it was jankers for that lousy rotten barber, for flying in the face of the King’s Regulations. My headervair.I don’t mind telling you, it just about broke my heart, what they done to my headervair.
    “That’s a fact. I was a good boy till then. But after that, I didn’t care for nothing or nobody, I didn’t! I been made up three times and busted three times, and when I was a Corporal they bust me for something I never done, ah, they did that! But Detention, Spud-Hole, Jankers, Reps, Royal Warrant, and everything else—nothing ’urt me so much as what they done to my lovely headervair.
    “Murderers! Murderers! That’s what them barbers are, murderers! Jerry kills your body. But the barber, he murders your soul! Look at me now. Bald. Me mother cried when she saw me last. She cried, I tell you, she broke down and she cried like a child, and I don’t mind telling you that I broke down and cried with her, too…. I was ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t help it. I sobbed as if my heart was breaking, I did. And my old dad, a lump came into his throat; he couldn’t touch supper. I can show you a photo of myself with a headervair that’ll make you look up a bit … just like a mop. Call me a liar if you like. I say a mop. Everybody used to talk about my headervair. Girls used to say: ‘Tug, I envy you only one thing; your headervair.’ I got a picture of myself took in Ramsgit in 1910, when I was seven. Curls down to me shoulders. The Army ruined all that. I forgave ’em everything, but I’ll never forgive ’em that.”
    And Sergeant Tug, who led a bayonet charge on the road to Boulogne , or thereabout, and carried six men’s equipment twenty-six miles, and looks upon the awful discipline of the peacetime Brigade of Guards as “cushy,” and has seventeen years of service behind him, and is as impregnable as a tank, fingers his scalp, from which the hair just naturally receded, and sighs, and scowls at the memory of the barber.
    Somebody says: “Sarnt Tug—you got shot in France, didn’t you? What’s it feel like?”
    He replies: “What’s that? Feel like? Oh … sort of hot and cold. Golden, it was … spun gold, my mum used to call it, and I’m not telling you a word of a lie. Spun gold. That’s life for you.”
    “Where d’you get hit, Sarnt Tug?”
    “Machine-gun bursts: thigh and backside: two in the face, teeth splintered to hell. Blimey, I was proud of that headervair …”
    *
    Recruits have been pouring in. The Corporal in the barber’s shop is harassed. Recruits are dreary cattle to shear … terrified, dumb, stupid, paralysed with novelty.
    The floor is sprinkled with clippings, red, yellow, black, brown, and, above all, plain English mouse. The grim soldier is playing barbers: there are two cut-glass bottles on the shelf in front of the chair.
    We cram ourselves into the room. The Corporal says: “Well, siddown , siddown, siddown, siddown, siddown … don’t block up the gangway.”
    The wire-haired boy is first to take the chair. There isn’t a mirror: we can’t see his face; but a look of terrified expectancy spreads, somehow , to his neck. No doubt a neck looks like that when Monsieur Paris has his hand on the string of the guillotine. There is a tickety- tickety -tickety-tickety of clippers. It is like husking a coconut. Out of a mass of fibre emerges something pale, oval, top-knotted, and seamed.