Colm Tóibín

Well, I suppose that my mother was a widow and there was always that sense of how should a widow dress?

And there was a very big moment.

The big thing that came in in those years was the sheepskin coat.

And I think they were much more expensive than ordinary coats.

But eventually my mother did have a sheepskin coat.

But...

The business of hair and how you dyed it.

You see, women just didn't want to go gray anymore.

There were some women who did, who prided themselves on just being utterly gray.

But then if you were very posh, you did blue.

literally blue hair.

You don't see it at all now, I think.

But then you just, the other women just went into his place and just got black.

But black went out because you could see the gray roots.

And what came in was a sort of, a sort of auburn or sort of gold.

And eventually my mother's hair got slightly gold.

But the beginning, the first dye was a kind of blue.

Yeah.

But I mean, women were very coy about it.

One aunt denied it completely, said she never dyed her hair.