Head Hunters

A scratch of the head can be an indication of a great depth of thinking and intelligence.


It can also be every mother's worst nightmare of a case of head lice amongst her siblings.


I remember the look of horror and dismay on my own mothers face when she opened up a letter that I had brought home from school. It was from the nit nurse, or Nitty Nora as she was widely and fearfully known. There were regular health checks at my junior school as in the late 1960's and early 1970's there were still a few nasty and virulent illnesses and bugs lurking about, well out of the then reach of anti-biotics. If measles was found amongst our classmates then, rather than be placed in some sort of quarantine there would be a party to which we would all be invited in order to pre-empt a case of the spots and get it out of the way. Chicken Pox, Scarlet Fever, and Mumps were positively a means of socialising.


Head lice was invariably revealed through the regular screening and when notified the parental machine to eradicate the little critters swung into action.


There was some reassurance in that infestation was only found in clean hair, or so the urban myth was devised to avoid embarrasment to those families who regarded themselves or were seen by others as being of the middle class.The stigma was rife and many a playground gates tittle tattle developed amongst the attendant parents. Where the lice came from was a matter of little speculation and rather direct suspicion. Us children were not party to the socio-economic and certainly political aspects of the infestation.


 It was common for kids heads to touch when sat around a small work table in the classroom, if nylon vests worn for P.E were enthusiastically removed with a rush of static electricity through the hair and acting as a natural self seeding action for the lice eggs or domestic science aprons regularly swopped. The dreaded letter from Nitty Nora was as ominous as the black spot handed to the ill fated buccaneers in Treasure Island.


What was then required was not altogether very pleasant. Treatments to kill head lice were very pungently chemically based. The purchase of such, at Boots The Chemist or other well known pharmacy outlets in itself advertised the fact of an outbreak in a specific household and the rumour mill and gossip hotline relished such information in our small town community.


One infested child meant that the whole of the family had to be doctored and the cost of the medicated shampoo for our large unit was quite a chunk of the family allowance. Bathtime resembled a production line. Hair was wetted, the instructions for the application of the smelly solution strictly followed for maximum effect, heads wrapped for twenty minutes in a towel before careful and thorough rinsing out.


The rigmarole was bad enough for me and my brothers with our short hair but agonisingly demoralising for my two long haired sisters. With dampened hair it was time for the use of the nit comb. This was dragged through , scalp abrading, in short regular movements and then closely examined for any captured lice, hopefully drugged, drowned and deceased or their small hard shelled eggs, an infestation in waiting. Upon discovery of such detritus the comb was dipped into a beaker of water and the whole pattern repeated multiple times per head and per child. We would dare each other to peer into the suspended menagerie as though at the entomology house at the zoo. Once, and once only a solitary insect found its way onto a slide in my junior microscope set .I screamed and I am ashamed to say it sounded like a girls scream when the thing came into sharp focus. 

We did feel quite cleansed and liberated in a sheep-dip type way and our mother, and therefore the atmosphere in the house and the wider town, was significantly calmer...that was until the next time of the handing over of that dreaded official letter. Even now, well into adult life my scalp begins to itch just a little at the very thought of the tiny creatures. If, upon reading this, you too feel an urge to scratch your head then beware you may have some unwelcome visitors and freeloaders.