“A Most Pecular Aberration.”

From Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs (1968), a memoir of being an English cook in the interwar period (pp. 177-179, additional paragraph spacing added for easier readability):

It was after I had been there some months that I discovered [the master of the house] had a most peculiar aberration. 

If he came down to the house on his own, he’d always ring the bell in his bedroom at about half past eleven at night, after we’d gone to bed.  It rang upstairs on the landing outside the bedrooms, and Hilda or Iris, the housemaid, would slip on a dressing-gown and go down to his room.  Then he’d ask them to bring him a whisky and soda, or a jug of water, or even a book that he’d left in the library. 

I said to Hilda one night, “Why does he always wait until we’ve all got in bed before he rings that bell?” 

So she said, “It’s because he likes to see us in hair curlers.” 

I said, astonished, “What do you mean?”

She said, “He likes to see us in hair curlers.”

People in those days didn’t have hair rollers like nowadays, they were all those dinky steel curlers, and we did our hair up every night in them because it was the fashion to have a mass of frizz, and the bigger you could make it stick out the better it was, you see.

So I said, “You’re joking.”

“No, it’s the truth,” she said.

I said, “Well, what does he do then when you go in wearing these curlers?”

So she said, “Well, he doesn’t really do anything much.  He asks us to take off our hair nets and then he fingers the curlers in our hair, you see.”

I just couldn’t believe it, it seemed pointless, stupid. 

I said, “Is that all?  He feels your hair curlers?”

She said, “Yes, that’s all he does.  And he’s always happy and pleased when he does it,” she said.   

She just sat on the edge of his bed and he just felt her hair curlers, and that’s all.

Well, it struck me then, and it does now, as a most peculiar way of getting pleasure.  It just didn’t make sense, I mean whoever heard of anyone wanting to see anyone in hair curlers, never mind about feeling them?  But Hilda and Iris did quite well from this peculiarity of his, because they used to get cosmetics or boxes of chocolates or stockings each time.

I could have got them as well if I liked...  [T]he reason I wouldn’t go was because it was yet another demonstration of servants’ inferiority...

[But Hilda] said, “I get quite a kick out of it, and when I’m waiting at table,” she said, “and when [the master] is sitting there talking so high-falutin’ to his guests,” she said, “I often feel like slipping a hair curler on his plate!”

But I never heard of such a peculiar aberration in my life as hair curlers.  I wonder what was the cause of it?  Something tied up with his youth, I expect, perhaps his mother had them or something.

. . .