Last updated 13:30, Thursday, 07 August 2008

I WAS casting through some ancient family photographs the other day, and was struck by the lack of sartorial elegance of myself and my brother in the 1950s.

There we are, with our substantial woollen shorts secured by industrial strength braces, worn over ragged short-sleeved jumpers, looking like extras from the Dead End Kids.

There were no designer clothes for young dudes in those days; we were more Army and Navy Stores than Next.

There was no such thing as children’s fashions in the 1950s, when we went round looking like mini-versions of our fathers, even down to the voluminous overcoats that men used to wear, and which used to double up as extra blankets on the bed in winter.

Occasionally, our wardrobes were supplemented by the scavengings of an uncle, who was a window cleaner, and occasionally accepted goods in lieu of cash.

This would now and again include cast-off clothes from the children living in a posh part of his round – although even I could never bring myself to wear the large and shiny brown brogues I was once presented with.

“Now, they’re very smart,” said my mother. “Brogues are always smart.”

I pointed out somewhat hotly they were several sizes too big, as well as being riddled with what appeared to be woodworm holes, but she was undeterred.

“They’re supposed to be full of holes, and you could always stuff the toes with newspaper,” she wheedled.

I reluctantly tried them on, and I might as well have been standing in a pair of canoes.

I argued they wouldn’t go with my grey socks, but she forced them on me anyway, and was obliged to take them away.

Fortunately, with the aid of a jar of elderly potted meat – another of my uncle’s acquisitions – I was able to persuade our perpetually famished Staffordshire bull terrier to chew them beyond repair, ignoring her reproachful gaze as she was cuffed about the head with the ruined shoes for her wanton vandalism.

However, what really struck me about the old photographs were the hairstyles – or in fact, the lack of them.

On one photograph we appear to have been attacked by a blind man with a strimmer, with bald patches augmented by fringes as undulating as the Benguela current.

It must have been taken after one of those occasions when my father had returned home from the Royal Oak full of Ind Coope bitter and good intentions in equal measure, and decided it was time to clip his flock.

It was usually after we had returned from our summer holidays on a farm in Cumbria, where my father proved himself the most inept sheep shearer ever to straddle a Border Leicester tip.

His victims left the cart shed staggering, in need of a blood transfusion from the 1001 nicks he had inflicted, and his encarmined pile of fleeces could have been wrung out to make some fine black puddings.

However, he was convinced he had now got his eye in, and was damned if he going to fork out 1s 6d each to take us to the barber’s.

My sisters melted away like snowballs in the Serengeti, but my brother and I were invariably too engrossed in a game of cowboys and indians to notice him rummaging under the sink for the hairdressing accoutrements.

He would then snatch one of us up, and carry us squirming to a chair in the front room, where he would start to clip and chop laboriously.

These were not modern electric clippers; they were hand operated, and had been acquired as a result of a wager of an unspecified nature with Ikey Gold, the local barber, whose own hairstyle was beyond criticism – he was as bald as an egg.

They were so ancient they may have been smuggled out of Tsarist Russia by Ikey’s granddad, and they were blunter than Geoff Boycott.

The implements were tricky to operate even by a stone cold sober expert, so in my bibulous father’s hands they were lethal weapons.

The hair was not so much cut as pulled out by the roots, and should we have the temerity to wriggle, we could expect a severe rap on the head with the blunt end of the shears.

We finished up dripping blood and tears in equal volume, and had to go to school in woolly bob hats in the height of summer until the hair had started to grow in again.