A new start after 60: I’d spent my life being ashamed of my hair – now I see it as a forcefield
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Tina Shingler was fostered in a white family in North Yorkshire in the 1960s, where her hair was a source of anxiety and stress. Then she wrote a ‘hairmoir’ and now she empowers others to embrace their hair too. 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.).
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