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“Next,” says the Corporal. “What?” says the wire-haired boy. “Fancy a nice shampoo?” says the Corporal. The boy who used to have wire hair says: “I don’t mind.”
    “Any particular kind of shampoo?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t mind.”
    “Ashes of Roses?”
    “If you like.”
    “Or would you rather have violets?”
    “Well, I think I’d rather have violets.”
    “Oh. And a friction? Or a nice massage?”
    “Never mind about that. Just a shampoo.”
    “Just a shampoo?”
    “Yes, please.”
    “Well go and put your head under the bloody tap. Next!”
    The boy rises unsteadily, feels his head with an incredulous hand, blinks, looks at his palm as if he expects to find blood upon it. “Where d’you come from?” the Corporal asks him.
    “Widnes.”
    “Then,” says the Corporal, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Next.” He cuts a man’s hair in about forty-five seconds.
    “It ain’t ’umane,” says Barker. “You ought to give us gas wiv ’air-cuts like these.”
    “Next.”
    Hodge’s naked head emerges, still massive. Thurstan, shorn of a dense dark growth, looks blacker and paler and even more dangerous.
    “I’ve seen your face before,” says the Corporal to the glum man. “What’s your monicker?”
    “Alison.”
    “You been here before, ain’t that so?”
    “That’s right.”
    “And now you’re back, eh?”
    “Worse luck.”
    “You pore thing.”
    One by one we pass under the clippers. He shears us like sheep. One man lurks near the door, half in and half out of the shop, as if he contemplates flight. He is very young and slender, dark and sunburnt yet lacking the look of one who lives in the open air. Town is written on his forehead, so to speak; the streets are his destiny. You can’t help feeling that he got his tan in a city park: like inordinate skill at billiards, it seems to indicate a misspent youth. This is John Johnson of Birmingham; of Brummagem, gentlemen, the breeding-ground of the fly boys from time immemorial.
    He has talked too little and too much during his few hours in the Depot. He wants everything tough—in the silly sense of the term. When Bates, that garrulous and amiable brewer’s drayman from Leicester, said: “Well, Oi ’ope they’ll fill moi teeth,” it was John Johnson who snapped, in his aggressive burr: “Oi want ’em to take allmoine out. Oi can’t be bothered with teeth.” He has a lank, saturnine face; eyebrows which collide in a black plume in the middle of his low forehead; little green eyes, and a sloping chin. He keeps his mouth compressed; sports a green coat, green flannel trousers, green suède shoes, green fancy sports-shirt with pompons; a tricky cigarette case which won’t open and a cunning lighter which won’t light—to say nothing of a novel watch on a doggy leather lanyard, which like Johnson, looks smart but doesn’t work. When simple Bates said he earned a good, steady three pound two-and-six a week, Johnson said: “Oi drew twelve.” He carries a box of fat cigarettes, and a paper packet of little black cigarlets, which, he maintains, are too strong for ordinary men…. The tobacconist warns you that you smoke those cigarlets at your own risk: if you pass out cold in a sweat of nicotine poisoning, don’t come and ask for your money back. Nothing is too powerful for John Johnson of Brummagem.
    Barker, to whom fly boys, both of Brummagem and The Smoke, are an open book, smiled at this, and said: “’E chews nails and spits rust. ’E shaves wiv a blow-lamp.” Barker knows fly boys as Professor Huxley knows flies … what they eat and drink, where they breed, if and when they sleep, how many eyes they have, and where they go in the winter time. But Bates permitted himself to be impressed, and said: “Are they noice?”
    Bates, displaying his blond head, with anxiety in his big, bony Anglo-Saxon face; wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, wide-cheeked and friendly, says: “Do Oi look funny? Do Oi?”
    Johnson