LONDON ZOO recently celebrated the birth of Laa Laa, a Francois langur monkey. These long-limbed little apes are highly active and noisy and produce ginger-haired babies. As we have one of these at home we decided that the two of them should be introduced.
We had missed “Ginger Sunday”, when more than 1,000 redheads took advantage of a two-for-one admission offer in honour of Laa Laa. But this meant that we could examine her at our leisure and without feeling we were part of some minority outreach programme. She was a great little thing and I like to think that she recognised two of her own kind when she looked at the boy and me staring through the glass at her.
The babies are ginger so that the parents can spot them easily. One of the keepers explained that she was already losing the orange hue and would soon be dark like her parents. I asked if over millions of years the monkeys had developed this ability to change colour to protect the babies from being called “ginger bollocks” when they went to school. Apparently not.
My question alarmed the milk monitor. She had started worrying during our holiday in Ireland when I suggested we play “count the gingers”. We spotted so many that we stopped counting at 42 and I suggested we move to Dublin so that the boy would feel more at home. She asked me if there were things about being a redhead that I wasn’t telling her.
I told her about my first day at infants’ school when the class bully suggested that I was really a girl. And the constant invitations to “p*** off ginger”. And being called “carrot-top” and “Duracell” and “ginger whinger”. Oh, and the segregated classrooms.
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What? Didn’t you know about the segregation? It still goes on, you know. And the anti-gingerites are everywhere. I once played Trivial Pursuit in a large group, most of whom I didn’t know. A friend of mine, who is also ginger, was there. A member of my team turned to me at one point and said: “Are you on my team or is it the other one?” Anti-discrimination legislation affords us little protection from this sort of thing.
Still, at least I have been able to counsel others. A lot of my friends have produced ginger children (it’s astonishing, actually, how many there are. People do remark on it. I’m saying nothing). One couple, who were somewhat surprised to produce a flame-haired daughter, asked me what it was like and how I coped at school. I was able to reassure them, just as I did the milk monitor.
Now, when people meet my boy they use hilarious euphemisms. “Oh! A strawberry blond.” Or “He’s got lovely golden hair.” “No, he hasn’t,” I say. “It’s orange.” The other day one mate asked if there was any evidence yet of the boy having “inherited the redhead temper”. I explained that the idea that we were all hotheads was just another myth. But first I worked him over with a baseball bat.
We gingers are used to the prejudice. You can find it even within your own family. During our zoo trip we heard a woman with a thick Irish accent screaming at her son: “Connor, get over here!” My father (a non-ginger) was barely able to contain his mirth. “Which one is Connor, do you think?” he said, nodding in the direction of a group of boys that included one with a brilliant apricot thatch.
The milk monitor has been thinking hard about what lies ahead for the boy. “Well, we do know people who have come through unscarred,” she said, and reeled off the names of ginger-haired friends who are “all balanced and very successful people”. Oddly, she didn’t include me on her list.
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damian.whitworth@thetimes.co.uk