Part 3: The police are called in

THE POLICE ARE CALLED IN
Written by Bert Plomp

In my neighbourhood, in Napoleonplantsoen, I was one of the first boys to wear his hair long. That drove my parents to despair. “What will the neighbours think?” they worried. Boys with long hair were seen as troublemakers: underminers of authority. Long-haired riffraff provoking society. My parents were prepared to do anything to set me back on the straight and narrow, back into the Christian fold. Starting, of course, with cutting off those dreadful long locks. Whatever they tried, however inventive or absurd, their efforts were all in vain. Persuading my brother Charles and me to visit the barber had long since become a lost cause. Quite simply, my parents no longer had the authority to make us comply. In a final, all-or-nothing attempt, they decided to call in the police. In the stairwell of our block of flats lived a chief police inspector with his family. My father considered him a friend, though whether the feeling was mutual, I rather doubt. My father was always keen to curry favour with the man, simply because he represented authority. Be that as it may, my father managed to arrange for the inspector to dispatch two colleagues to escort Charles and me to the nearest barber for a proper haircut. The forced trimming was to take place at the barbershop “Van der Vaart” on Rubenslaan, near the stadium. One Wednesday, early in the afternoon, my younger brother and I returned home from school, completely unsuspecting and looking forward to enjoying our free afternoon. Instead, we were met by two policemen. We were within a whisker of being marched off in handcuffs towards Rubenslaan. The officers, mounted on their service bicycles, herded Charles and me in the direction of the barber. From the balcony, my father and mother watched the proceedings with satisfied smiles. Only once the quartet had disappeared from view over the Prinsebridge across the Kromme Rijn river did they retreat indoors, contentedly awaiting the outcome of their cunning scheme.

When Charles and I were ushered into the barbershop, the officers evidently considered their mission accomplished. They seemed to assume that we were so overawed by their uniformed intervention that Van der Vaart could manage the rest on his own. Things turned out rather differently. Upon entering, I shook the barber’s hand and showed him my little picture of Our Lord, a picture I always kept ready in my back pocket. When I informed Van der Vaart that I was aiming for a Jesus-style haircut, the ever-friendly man replied: “Come back in a year, and we’ll see how things stand then.”

I encountered Van der Vaart’s son-in-law thirty years later at a conference. We had attended the same school for a few years. We agreed to go out for dinner together with our partners. During dinner at Luden in Utrecht, my old school friend’s wife told me that she had once lived on Rubenslaan. Her father, she explained, had run a barbershop there. Knowing that I had lived nearby, in Napoleonplantsoen, she recounted a remarkable incident her father had experienced. It had taken place in the early 1960s, when two boys from Napoleonplantsoen entered her father’s shop under police escort. The officers had asked her father to cut the boys’ long hair short. In the end, she said, the whole absurd operation came to nothing. After briefly stepping inside, the pair walked out again just as cheerfully, without so much as a haircut. There was great hilarity when I told her that those two “apprehended boys” had been my brother and me.