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Growing up, Tina Shingler didn’t touch her hair like other girls touched theirs. She didn’t preen, stroke or comb – though sometimes she hid pens and cigarettes in it. “I had no respect for it, because no one else had any,” she says.
As a “Barnardo’s child”, Shingler’s hair presented a challenge to her white foster parents, Mary, a housewife, and Jack, a semi-skilled mechanic. She had a happy enough childhood, but every few months was required to kneel in the sitting room in Ripon, North Yorkshire, and rest her head in Mary’s lap to be “shorn”. The language was always animalistic, Shingler says. It was “to bow your head”, and know your hair was “something to be got rid of”.
Now 71, Shingler has “grown into” her hair to such an extent she has woven it into material for motivational speeches and even written a “hairmoir”.
It was a trip to India in 2001 that opened her eyes to her challenging relationship with her hair. Wherever she went, children pointed and laughed. She bought coloured scarves to cover her head, but the jeering brought back troubling memories.
As her foster mother put it, Shingler’s hair wouldn’t be “fettled”. A worry, because “you had to straighten up and fly right” – or back to the “Dr Barnardo’s children’s home” you would go. As a Black child born to a white mother, Shingler had been taken to the Dr Barnardo’s orphanage in Worcester at 18 months old. (The charity ceased to operate children’s homes in 1988 and changed its name to Barnardo’s.)
In nativity plays, she was always a wise man, but the crown refused to stay on her head.
As a teenager, she slathered herself in setting gel and slept in rollers – prioritising fitting in over studying, but wherever she went her hair seemed to be the thing that made her stand out. Well into adulthood, she dreamed of pulling a comb cleanly through her hair, of feeling her hair bounce and sway.
After completing a degree in Italian in her mid-20s, Shingler got a job in the Italian embassy in Washington DC. She had “never been in the midst of so many Black people”, and thought she fitted in.
“Say, honey, what are we gonna do about your hair?” a Black American colleague asked one day, and suggested Shingler – who was wearing it naturally – book a relaxer. After five hours in the salon, Shingler looked “sleek and well coiffed”. Now the comb passed easily through her hair. But she felt more fettered than ever.
Maintaining her style was time-consuming and expensive. “And I didn’t like the look of myself,” she says. “I began to appreciate my own hair.”
The big challenge came when she had a daughter, at 30, and found herself “projecting on to her all my childhood fears”. The Sunday night comb-out was painful for them both.
Shingler returned to the UK in the late 80s, and settled in North Yorkshire again, working as a government press officer. Here she found a professional Black hairdresser – who suggested her daughter get a mild relaxer, to have fun with her hair. Shingler agreed, but “I was pretty disgusted with myself,” she says. “I felt guilty.” However, her daughter, then 10, was “completely in charge” of her hair – and “that was a positive”.
Years later, Shingler was looking through old journals. “And I kept seeing these references to hair” over the decades – how it was seen, how she felt about it. By then, she was 63 and working as a sixth-form study assistant, having abandoned an attempt to retire in Italy.
“I thought: ‘Kids are still getting harassed about their hair.’ It got me thinking about my survival in the 60s, and I began charting my personal experience and what it felt like to navigate that.” She prepared a talk, rented a local hall, invited friends to workshop it and delivered it to schools, libraries, festivals and charities. The response was so positive, she turned the talk into a book.
“I’m writing about hair, I’m writing about politics, I’m writing about feminism, I’m writing about racial justice, I’m writing about interracial fostering, I’m writing about economics,” she says. “Yes, it’s hair. But to me, and to many women like me, it means so much.” Her hair, she says, is “a forcefield. It almost protects me. There is an awful lot of energy in this hair.”
Hair Apparent by Tina Shingler is published by Biteback (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, buy your copy from bookshop.theguardian.com. P&P charges may apply
