For you today is a short piece I did for my MA homework a couple of weeks ago. This was a response to Naipaul’s Miguel Street, and the brief was to write autobiographically about a quirky or interesting character from your past who is part of a wider community, including the viewpoint of you as a child. Here’s my offering:
The Moustache
Uncle Dieter lived in a house crammed with people and stuff and noise. He was a sound engineer, and he said he had been on tour with the Rolling Stones. Whenever he said this, my mum rolled her eyes, but I believed him. He had long black hair held together with an elastic band, and this despite the fact that the top of his head was completely bald. Uncle Dieter’s eyes were the brightest blue; the rest of his face was mostly covered by an unruly moustache and beard. His house was like some crazy museum – he owned a Tesla tube and an infinity mirror, and he never threw anything away.
I went to Uncle Dieter’s after school two days a week until my mum finished work. All the folk musicians of the town hung out there, and on any given day there would be four or five or six straggly-haired drop-outs lying stoned on his threadbare carpet, or grouped by the window singing odd harmonies. My mum called them drop-outs – to me they were glorious, exotic, far removed from my mundane life. There was always a Girlfriend of the Moment, but the girlfriends seem to circulate weekly, and I never knew which of the wan, folksy girls would be draped around his neck from one week to the next. They seemed interchangeable. They didn’t seem to mind.
Uncle Dieter built and repaired speakers for a living, and my mum would tell me about the time he’d accidentally wiped her treasured cassette recordings with the powerful magnets they contained. She used to sing in a band with her brother, but now she said they were too wild for her. She still let me go there every week, though. I guess she didn’t have many options for childcare. Once, when I was coming up to eleven, Uncle Dieter let me try what he called his spliff. The musicians crowded round to watch, except for the Girlfriend of the Moment, who was then called Fay and had decided to bake Dieter a cake. I could tell they expected me to provide some kind of amusement, to choke and splutter and cough. But I sensed that Uncle Dieter would be embarrassed by this, so I pretended I liked it.
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Let’s have another go.’
He never let me smoke again.
One day, Uncle Dieter shaved off his moustache. He bounded down the stairs and stood in the middle of the cramped lounge expectantly, his arms held wide. No one noticed. Except me, of course. At first I couldn’t understand it; his skin had a stretched, newly-grown quality to it, but he looked older. Thinner. There was something about his mouth, too, and I saw that he had a slight hair-lip which had been hidden before. The light shone off his bald head, and his neck rose scrawny out of the tie-dyed shirt, and he looked like a stranger to me.
‘Put it back on, Uncle Dieter,’ I cried.
Then the others noticed, and the Girlfriend of the Moment put her hand up to her mouth, and the musician called Bandolf started to laugh.
It seems crazy now, with hindsight, but it was at that exact moment I realised some things in life cannot be undone. At least, not instantly. Uncle Dieter couldn’t stick his hair back on; that one random act had changed how I saw him forever, and it was too late to take it back.

November 2, 2012 at 12:00 pm
Love this Joanne. Beautifully written, as always. xx
November 2, 2012 at 6:48 pm
Thank you xxx
November 2, 2012 at 4:32 pm
Great piece Jo. As a young woman I had a similar experience with a guy I knew, it took me a long time to get over the way he looked until it grew back. Did you have feedback?xx
November 2, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Ha, yes – it can scar you for life! Thanks Penny, glad you liked it. Yes, I got really good feedback, actually. I really enjoyed this exercise, Miguel Street is one of the best books we’ve read so far, and I find this first person narrative style seems to flow well. The feedback was that the child’s perspective comes through well, although written retrospectively, which was what I was aiming for.
Hope you’re well, Jo xxx
November 5, 2012 at 1:47 pm
Nice story Joanne. I can relate well to your Uncle Dieter though in my case it was not my moustache but my long hair which I have taken care of for 5 years. Even my own mother didn’t recognize when I came home from the hair salon. I was the center of attraction at that moment and I realized that it was too late to change my mind and glue my hair back on my head. Certainly, there are things in life that we cannot bring back once it was lost 😀
November 5, 2012 at 1:59 pm
That’s funny – and reminds me of when I shaved my hair when I was in my twenties! I had shoulder-length hair, and one day came home and took the clippers to it. I do remember feeling sick, and having to wear lots of make-up to soften the effect! And that when it grew back, there was a lot of grey!!
(I’ll hunt out a photo to post up on the blog.)
November 6, 2012 at 12:14 pm
LOL. What you did is funnier. I could not imagine what you look like with a shaved hair. Good thing also that there aren’t any bullies in your neighborhood. 😀
(can’t wait to see your photo):-)