Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair...

Do you know what it is like to remember something from long ago, but to be unsure whether what you recall is truly a memory, or a story that your mind made up to fill in a gap? So that is why I say that I think I remember, one Christmas evening when I was quite small - perhaps seven or eight - my Dad saying that he had forgotten a present, and taking me upstairs. I think I remember him opening his bottom drawer, and handing me a book, telling me that he had been saving it for a while until he thought I was old enough to have it. That book was The Illustrated Treasury of the Brothers Grimm.

Anyone reading this has probably figured out by now that I have something of a 'thing' for books and reading, so I of course devoured the book as soon as it was in my hands. The first story, "The Frog Prince", and the brightly-coloured illustration of it on the cover, left me sniffing slightly at the thought that I could ever have been too young for this book, but it soon became apparent that beneath the fairy-tale cover there waited for me stories that were truly dark, with illustrations that were, to an eight-year-old (and even perhaps to a twenty-one-year-old!) a little chilling. With two older brothers and no sisters, there was no Disney Cinderella for me - only the Brothers Grimm version of the story, in which the ugly sisters cut off their toes in order to try to fit Cinderella's glass slipper.

 Some of the more disconcerting illustrations from The Brother's Grimm.

I am sure my parents must have read some of the stories aloud to me, or perhaps I did to them (I fear from an early age I had a strong sense of drama when it came to reading aloud, and once exasperated my mother so much by correcting her tone and emphasis in reading the dialogue in the Narnia series that she suggested I take over), because I cannot shake the remembrance of spoken rhythm when I think of the story of "Rapunzel", in which the witch, and later the prince, sang to her window - "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair..." But when I look at the book open beside me now, I realise that memory has played its tricks on me; in my edition the word "long" is absent. But, of course, Rapunzel's hair was long - so long that it reached the bottom of the tower in which she was imprisoned.

For mostly as long as I can remember I have had long hair - not as long as Rapunzel's, perhaps, but longer than the norm, I think. I have painful memories of my mother brushing it (Loreal no-more-knots for kids was used in copious amounts in our household), and also a bemusing one of my eldest brother, not long after he'd first got a girlfriend for the first time, showing me how to brush it out painlessly starting at the bottom and working your way up - Mum had always just determinedly brushed from the top down, dragging the knots with her.  And I realised that my long hair is something I feel surprisingly strongly about, when I read this blog post, about a woman donating her long hair to a charity for making real-hair wigs for cancer victims.

In it, she speaks about the buzz that she got from doing something that she felt would make such a meaningful difference for people in need, and I toyed for a moment with the vision of doing such a thing - of giving away my hair, of proudly wearing a buzz cut and knowing that, perhaps, I had made someone suffering something that I cannot imagine feel just a tiny bit better. But I fear that I am not, perhaps, that selfless. 

The problem is - and this will probably seem ridiculous to people who are perfectly happy with short hair, or who have long hair and would lose no sleep over parting with it - that I have looked into the mirror and seen long hair framing my face for some many years that I am not sure I can imagine me without it. When I went on a month's expedition to China (which included trekking in 40 degrees heat and extremely high humidity), I actively decided that I did not want to cut my hair, though I knew it would be a bother to keep clean and brushed (not to mention out of my eyes - goodness, I hate the wind sometimes!). My logic was this: even when I had not showered for a week, even when I was wearing hiking boots, trekking shorts, and a t-shirt dripping in sweat, I could brush my hair, and that would be my luxury. In the last four years I have had it cut to shoulder-height once, because a man who had hurt me badly had praised its length. I wanted to change, and wanted to be a different person from the one he had made a fool of: cutting my hair, for me, was the biggest change I could think of.

Since then, my hair has grown out, and when I look at photos of my short (to me!) haired phase I feel a bit perplexed, because I do not look like myself. I still threaten to Mr S that I will cut it when he makes a habit of catching it in his cuffs or leaning on it, but I would never really do it, and it would not be the fact that I know he likes my long hair that would prevent me. I'm not sure if it's as simple as saying that my long hair makes me feel 'feminine', or that I want to be a princess like Rapunzel, but, perhaps it could be as simple as saying that I like it. I like the feeling of running really fast against the wind and feeling it stream behind me. I like tying it up in a bun, still damp, and letting it down hours later to see a muddle of curls. I like fiddling with it, though I have grown out of the habit of chewing on it, as I did when I was at the age of first reading The Brothers Grimm. My long hair is free, but I value it more jealously than I do anything else that I might be able to donate - more than coins, more than blood. So, much as I would like to be able to do something as amazing as the blogger linked to above, I do not think I could - because it would mean giving away part of myself.

Of course, even Rapunzel, the epitome of the long-haired heroine, lost her hair to the witch's scheming scissors. But, so long as the worst threat to it continues to be my husband's elbows at the table, my messy, not-exactly-blonde-but-not-exactly-brown, but above all long locks, will remain exactly where they are. At the very least they might come in handy if I find myself locked in a very tall tower.