An anecdote from my Memoirs.

The Perm.

When I was 15, my mother and I decided it was time to improve my looks, by giving me my first perm, a home perm.

Because we were away on holidays in the Blue Mountains, we decided to do the deed in the first week, so it would have time to “die down” before we went back home to Sydney. Little did we know!

Obviously neither of us had any idea about the mysteries of the permanent wave.  We bought the home perm kit at the chemist and read the directions carefully when we got back to the holiday unit. We laid out the towels, the cotton wool, the glass jar, the lotions, curlers, combs, rollers and little tissue papers, and made a start.

As soon as the first fumes of the chemicals wafted into the air, my father and sister took off for a long walk.

My mother being totally inexperienced, was all fingers and thumbs and the process of separating the hair into sections, soaking it with the lotion and then attempting to wind it onto a tiny narrow curlers, took her forever. Trying to keep one wound up section in place while she tried to force another section onto another roller, was like a episode of “I Love Lucy.” When it was finally finished my head looked like a untidy pink hedgehog. We put the timer on. We’d better leave it for the maximum time, after all it had cost a lot of money, and we did want it to work! But of course we hadn’t taken into account the length of time my mother had taken in the winding.

Later on at the required moment my mother poured warm water over my head, with the rollers still in, and applied the next chemical, meant to fix the curl. After 5 minutes I was to take the curlers out and rinse under warm water until the water ran clear. At this point my mother decided to go out and post a letter, leaving the last part to me.

I knelt over the bath, pulled out the rollers and ran the soothing warm water over my head. But horror of horrors, as my fingers ran through my hair, it seemed to come alive. It grew and grew and grew and grew! My hair was turning into an afro that would have been the envy of Tina Turner.

Appalled I turned off the taps, and madly towelled my hair. Worse. It grew inches more! It was a huge halo around my head and I didn’t recognize myself as I looked, startled and aghast, in the bathroom mirror. My face seemed to have shrunk in size, surrounded  now with the world’s biggest hair.

Wide angled combs hadn’t been invented in those days, and there was no way an ordinary comb or brush could attack such an amazing outcrop.

As I stood near to total despair, my family walked in, took one look and began to laugh, rolling around the floor until they cried. They just couldn’t stop.

When they saw my real tears, however, they tried very hard to be sympathetic, but the gurgles escaped each time they sneaked another look.

The package said don’t shampoo for several days, so in the hope that the thing would go away if we disobeyed these instructions, we rinsed and rinsed day after day, but nothing worked .In fact the afro seemed to grow at each washing.

In 2 weeks I had to go back to my friends and my new boyfriend. I’d rather die. My life was ruined. I would never get over it.  Never!