We're nuts about ginger
James Medd on his proud redheaded lineage and why he's passionate about passing it on
James Medd
The Guardian, Saturday August 9 2008
I wish I was ginger. My father and his two brothers were, so were both their parents and my mother's grandmother and they've passed it on to both my sons, missing my generation completely. I wish I was ginger because I now think it's the best hair colour in every way, and also because I know that not everyone sees it that way and I want to be able to support my boys.
If you want to know how deep the prejudice against red hair runs, you don't have to look far. When my older son, Louis, was about a year old, I was talking to my sister, Victoria, then pregnant with her first. "Do you know what it's going to be?" I asked her excitedly. "No, but we don't care," she said, "as long as it's not ginger."
I really don't hold this against her, though. I'm firm in my conviction that my boys have the most beautiful hair in the world and, besides, although her first daughter was blonde, Vik's next two have been flaming redheads (or "half a pound of carrots with a Jaffa cake on top" as she puts it) and she's on our side now. Then there's also the small matter of my wife, Emma, reminding me, when I told her this story, that my first words on seeing Louis were, "Is he ginger or is that just blood?" See? Pretty deep.
I simply can't remember not adoring my boys' hair. For a start, I thought I was too obsessed with the possibility of cleft palates to even consider the ginger question, but the fact that I've blanked this episode out suggests a little denial and a fair amount of over-compensation has been going on. Which is odd, since it really wouldn't have taken long to work out the chances - my stubble and sideburns are ginger, father and grandfather redheads and so on. But then my brother had produced three blondes, as had my uncle, and my father seems to have gone grey before the advent of colour photography. Plus, having never seen my wife's real hair colour, I've grown to believe that she is really blonde.
In fact, a little research and a picture of Emma in the ginger-perm years would have told me that we had pretty high chances. Though it was only identified in 1995, five years before Louis was born, it's known that red hair comes from a mutation of a particular gene, the melanocortin 1 receptor. There are six different mutations and if you receive one of these your chances of having red hair are four or five times above average; if you get two, then it's 30 or 40 times. "Most redheads carry two changes," writes Professor Jonathan Rees, of the University of Edinburgh, who led the research, "one on the chromosome from their mother and one on the chromosome from their father. People who carry only one ... tend to burn easily in the sun (even though they don't have red hair) and are more likely to have a large number of freckles."
Still, it seems all of my family were surprised to produce offspring with pale skin and a crown of red fuzz. My older sister, Kate, was first out with Ben, now 13, and remembers thinking that it would be "a great burden having that pale skin. I just remembered having custard blisters on the chest and bright red shoulders in summer."
We (so says Emma - I'm still blank here) went through a phase of hoping Louis' hair would change or calling it "strawberry blonde" but, once reconciled, we certainly made up for it. By the time Alfie was ready to come out two years later, we were desperate not to have a boring old blondie or brownie. "I always wanted them to be the same," says Emma, though this was partly for the sake of brotherly solidarity.
With two on board, our admiration knows no bounds. We cheer for any ginger sportsman, openly admire redheads in the street, our favourite colour is orange. We even have a ginger dog. Emma and I consider ourselves honorary gingers - I'm sometimes surprised when I look in the mirror and it's "greyie-black", as Alfie calls it, as opposed to their "orange". If that sounds like over-compensation circling the wagons then there's good reason for it.
For a start, everyone goes on about it so much, right from the first moment you take your redhead out in public (covered head to toe in case of sunburn, naturally). "The first thing they say is, 'Oh, what lovely hair!'" says Vik, who produced her second redhead just six months ago, "and the second is, 'I always wanted a redhead.'"
I've always tended to believe them, but then I'm now firmly established as an unreliable witness. Vik puts it firmly at "about 98% lies".
As they get older, though, it gets less benign. "It's constantly in the back of my mind that people might mention it," says Kate. "They make jokes unconsciously and don't even notice after they've done it." Some of them aren't so unconscious, of course. "They pick on gingers more than anyone else and it's just because we're different," says Ben. Since the move to secondary school, he says his hair colour is referred to all the time, though whether he minds or not depends on the intention. You can quite see that friends calling him Ginger Giant or Agent Orange is very different from people who "aren't particularly fans of me" calling him Ginger Pubes, for example. He's also experienced random abuse from boys he doesn't know. "They don't like difference," he says, "though I don't think they really know that. If you think about it, it's just the same as racism. When I say that, though, people say it's not racist, it's hairist."
Playing the racism card is generally seen as an overreaction (a matter not helped by the contributions in this area of Mick Hucknall), but it's echoed by Simon Cheetham, founder of the website redandproud.com, "The home of the redhead". He says that if some of the random abuse he has received had been about the colour of his skin, "There'd have been hell to pay. People say it's only a joke, but if you're 13 and you get it every single day ... Put it another way: it's like girls coming home from school and being verbally abused by big hairy blokes in vans. The website's light - it's done on a humorous level - but we do get people contacting us who are seriously struggling, particularly between the ages of 13 and 14. If you're a shy, retiring type and don't want attention, it's pretty hard to just get on with it."
A look at the statistics tells you it's a pretty straightforward case of bullying: redheads make up only 2% of the world population now, reaching a peak of 13% in Scotland.
My theory is that gingerism started with the first invaders to these islands. The People of the British Isles Project, a study of migration patterns started in 2005, found that the first Britons were redheads, and it helps to explain why they are now concentrated right on the edges, in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. But then prejudice against red hair could equally well be blamed on hostility towards the Viking invaders, who introduced their mutant genes by force, up and down the east coast of England, or against redhead William the Conqueror, or anti-Irish feeling dating from the start of the Troubles in the 19th century.
As recently as 2000, the energy company NPower advertised its wares by depicting a family of redheads above the slogan "Some things in life you can't choose." I'm glad they're not running that one now I've got a boy who can read. Worse is the Newcastle family forced to move house after brutal victimisation on the basis of their red hair last year. Still, the ancient Egyptians liked to bury their redheads alive, the Greeks were certain they would turn into vampires and in the Middle Ages, when Satan turned red, they were considered children of the devil. It was around then that Judas Iscariot, the "mark of Cain" and Adam's scandalous first wife, Lilith, became redheads, which must have been good PR.
And, Lilith aside, it's worse for boys. From Botticelli's Venus and the beauties of Titian and the pre-Raphaelites to Lily Cole and Lindsay Lohan, red hair is admired in adult females, so my nieces will be fine (though their mother says, "I hope they'll be wearing a lot of mascara.") But the boys don't have those kinds of role models. It's fine at first: there are endless little redheaded cherubs in children's books, a favourite being One Bear at Bedtime by Mick Inkpen, the creator of the superb Kipper, featuring a chubby, cheerful, pyjama-ed little ginger who is the spitting image of mine at that age. But now that Louis is seven, it's starting to change. The redheads are moving from centre stage to the side or right off it. If they do get a look-in, it's in the role of best friend: Ron Weasley in Harry Potter, or a series of sidekicks called Ginger from Just William and Biggles onwards. (The classics are a minefield: Dickens matched his anti-semitism with anti-gingerism in the redheaded Fagin, Shakespeare called red hair "the dissembling colour", and was it just chance that caused William Golding to give Jack, leader of the savage schoolboys, red hair in Lord of the Flies?)
In films, redheads don't tend to get the girl or lead the assault team or play James Bond. They're often not even in the gang - like American Pie's "Sherminator", they are the token freak. Cite as many redheaded historical figures as you like - Boudicca, King David, Churchill, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, Napoleon, Cromwell, Christopher Columbus, Malcolm X - but it's not much good to my boys. They need more Damian Lewises and Robert Redfords, even a few more Prince Harrys - not loads, but a few.
What do I do till then? "A lot of it is their outlook," suggests redandproud.com's Simon Cheetham. "If they are confident lads they will deal with it in a comical way. If someone says something about your hair, you find something about them - they are not going to be perfect." My uncle Duncan, a 60-year-old who seems to have emerged unscathed from 40-plus years of redheadedness, tells me, "Your grandmother's attitude to us was, 'It's a plus. You're lucky because not many people have got it,' presumably because there's so much going the other way. It was a bit like kids who are adopted and their parents say, 'You're special, we chose you,' but it worked for me."
Well, it seems to be going well so far, then. I asked Alfie what colour his hair was and his answer was "brilliant". And then, just the other day, Louis ran in to proudly show me the freckles that had appeared on his knees, so I showed him mine. Now, that I can do.
