Gradually men rise up to confront them.
One of the bravest is
a teenage hairdresser’s apprentice.
Vidal Sassoon, the man who gave us
the Five Point Cut, the Asymmetric Bob
and Mia Farrow’s £2,500 haircut
was a street-fighting man.
“That popinjay Mosley.
Fascists preaching hate on every corner.
The same abuse that I remembered
from the 1930s,
I was too young to do anything about it.
The pictures we were seeing
from Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau
changed the shape of our rage.
I went to work at the salon in Mayfair
with a badly scratched face
and this refined client said
Good God, Vidal, you look terrible.
What happened to you?
Nothing much, I said. I just fell over a hairpin.”
(From an Anti-Fascists Online report following the death of Vidal Sassoon. Submitted by Jo Bell)
Verbatim Poetry 