Private George Crook

Private George Crook, 1^st Battalion, The East Surrey Regiment, remembers the somewhat extreme hair care in the Egyptian desert during national service.

Other than that it was wonderful and, getting back to the duties of a ration truck driver, at that time I had a lovely mop of hair but being a ration truck driver as soon as you got back to base every fly in Egypt would descend upon your lorry and when you unloaded your lorry you had a lorryload of flies and 1951 to 1953 there used to be a chemical, DDT they called it, and that was the means to end all and the only way to kill these flies was to walk in amongst them with a canister of DDT and a high powered spray gun and use it to spray and kill all these millions of flies, but at the same time my hair was falling out and I was wondering "Why am I going bald at such a young age?" Later on in life I found out it was this DDT and my hair never need grow back so that was a casualty of being a national serviceman but it wasn’t a regimental barber.