13
Madge Goes Dancing
Madge had been at 56 IGH for two months when she walked into the nurses’ mess and saw a group so engrossed in conversation that she thought a serious problem had developed. She decided to sit down and join in.
‘I can’t believe how much I took for granted being able to wash my hair back home,’ one of the nurses at the table was saying. ‘I wouldn’t have been seen dead going out the way I look now!’
Shampoo was virtually unobtainable in Chittagong so soap was the only option for the nurses when it came to washing their hair; Madge herself had got to the stage where virtually every day was a bad hair day. It was coming to something, she thought, when the height of luxury would be washing your hair with shampoo.
The only option was a trip to Calcutta, which by road was hundreds of miles away, and then you ran the risk of being given a large shopping list from the other nurses. A lovely Scottish nurse, Julie Boyle, was a bottle blonde, who asked any friend visiting Calcutta to bring back some bottles of shampoo and peroxide for her.
It seemed everybody missed out one way or another. Girls with curly or wavy locks found that within half an hour of dressing up for a dinner date or a dance the hair on which they had spent so much time and effort became one great big frizzy mess. Girls with naturally straight hair couldn’t even wear pigtails because of the hospital’s ‘above the collar line’ rule. Some even found their hair falling out in lumps when it was brushed. Girls like Madge, whose hair was not quite wavy but also not quite straight, found that whatever they did it never looked right, although she had a trick of cutting off the elasticated ends of army-issue stockings and making them into a halo which she would use to keep her hair neatly rolled.
Numerous other worries came to light, but nobody at the table had a solution until a raven-haired Indian sister walked past. The whole table turned to gaze in admiration and it spurred Madge into making a courteous little wave.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but we’re talking about the problems we’re having with our hair. Yours is beautiful. Would you be so kind as to tell us your secret?’
The girl was attractive and very charming and said that she had been blessed with beautiful hair, but even she had to take the greatest of care in Chittagong’s suffocating humidity. There was almost total silence in the usually noisy nurses’ mess when she said that there was, however, a secret, and that secret was coconut oil. The barrage of questions from the table full of VADs stopped only when she held her hands up and laughed as she pleaded for silence.
‘While my hair is still damp after being washed I massage coconut oil into it. Many others rinse it off after thirty minutes, but the key is actually leaving it on,’ she explained.
‘Do you mean not rinsing it off at all?’ asked Vera.
‘You would have very greasy pillows if you did that,’ the sister replied. ‘What I mean is leaving it on as long as possible. All evening if possible, or a few hours at least, then rinsing it.’
Madge compared the condition of the shining black locks with her own sadly lacklustre hair and decided there and then that coconut oil was the answer.
As luck would have it, Madge had an afternoon off the following day and she cadged a lift to Chittagong in one of the ubiquitous three-ton army supply trucks that drove in and out of the hospital. She was on a mission to buy coconut oil but wasn’t having any success. She turned down a side street that consisted mainly of one-floor shops that included a grocer’s, a cafe, a laundry and the inevitable stalls. There was nowhere that sold coconut oil, however, and she was so engrossed in her search that she was more than surprised to find instead what looked like a ladies’ hairdressing salon. Madge could hardly believe her luck and all thoughts of coconut oil were forgotten as she peered in through the window. Suddenly the door was opened and an assistant in an intricately embroidered sari confirmed it was a salon and asked whether memsahib would like her hair permed? Madge replied that she most certainly would.
The salon was impeccably clean and comfortably furnished, if a little dark, with the enchanting aroma of jasmine oil. Three double settees were draped in deep red rugs and at the back there was a washroom with stairs leading to an upper floor. There was even a little kitchen and one of the many assistants produced a pot of tea as Madge settled in. When the girls, the same age as their customer, heard that she had been invited to a dance that night they got very excited and promised her a special treat.
There seemed to be a lot of staff, but Madge was told they were needed for later in the day when business picked up. One or two of the girls wanted to practise their English and happily translated every word to their friends who had gathered round. Stools were drawn either side of the carved high chair in which Madge sat, and it turned out the special treat was a manicure on
