Children have so much faith in their parents. In the order of heirachy, they are at the pinnacle of our lives. In our home, we just wore what we were given to wear (which included pale green knickers with a foam mushroom on the front, flared baby blue trousers and six inch platform sandals that matched my mother's); ate what was offered (mashed potatoes, boiled green beans, frozen carrots and Russian sausages) and did what we were told.
"Doing what you are told" in my family was an inflexible option. One day, when I was sixteen, my dear mother carelessly said, "You have an appointment at the hair dressers for a perm tomorrow at two o'clock". We were living at a rural power-station village in Africa, so the hairdressing 'salon' was a walk away, on the other side of the village. The next day, without any question and not a drop of hesitation, I walked to the salon and and presented myself for a 'perm'. A few hours later, I had been transformed. The skinny, dark-haired kid from the convent had emerged looking like an astounding, two-legged tube with a pot scourer on it's head. For the next six months, I lived a very visible school life performing activities as a fund-raising ball waitress and reading in church for the nuns.
Not realising that my 'perm' had reduced my invisibility, in preparation for church readings, I would sit through the boarder's two hour study session in the school hall with two pink foam curlers in my hair, above my forehead. By the time I stood at the pulpit, I had two perfectly formed sausages above my brows, one on the left and one on the right, to supervise my biblical reading. So, every Wednesday, religiously, the nuns would ask me to do another reading…and every Wednesday, about a hundred people, witnesses to the faith I had in my very own mother, concentrated carefully, as I stood before them, with my power-station 'perm' and delivered the selected psalms to the cathedral.
