Robert Edric’s memoir of his Sheffield childhood opens with one of the best set pieces I’ve ever read in this kind of book: an absolute masterclass in how to set a scene. It is 1968 or thereabouts, and in the small rented house the author shares with his family, something even more than usually unnerving is happening. Why, wonders 12-year-old Robert, has his father, a man whose vanity, bullying and tendency to show off conceal all manner of unspoken insecurities, chosen to come home early from work today? What on earth is going on? The situation can’t possibly be good: for obvious reasons, his son cherishes the 90 minutes between his arrival from school and the sound of his dad at the door. But… oh dear. In truth, the merest glance provides an explanation. His father, who is bald, is proudly sporting a toupee.
Edric senses he must tread carefully. When his father overrules his mother, who’s busy pretending that her husband simply has a “new hairstyle”, and proceeds to show his son how his expensive “Crown Topper” is stuck to his head with special double-sided tape, the boy tries hard to appear impressed. “You can hardly see the difference,” he says, feigning a search for the invisible seam between the toupee and his father’s real hair (it’s not even remotely invisible, for while the toupee is gingery, what remains of his father’s hair is grey). Edric already knows in his gut that this wig is an “explosive charge” placed at the centre of his home. What, for instance, will happen when people outside the family notice it? (And frankly, how could they not?) Mockery is bound to follow. Worse, he and his siblings and their mother will henceforth be complicit in an embarrassing charade. The wig will never be mentioned again. It will just sit there, either on his father’s bonce, or draped over the polystyrene head supplied by Crown Topper, until the end of days. It is the weave of doom.
