the times | Thursday April 28 2022 5times2
much that one of her teachers asked
Obiajulu for tips on how to remove
distractions from her own kids’ lives.
“Parents ask me, ‘How do I ban my
children from watching television?’
Lots of kids watch TV and get perfect
grades and go to Cambridge. I don’t
think everyone needs to do it. It’s just
what she did to me and it worked.”
When she got into Oxford to read
French and Spanish, there was a
celebratory party in Oghe, her
parents’ village. Is it a burden having
all those distant eyes on you? “There’s
so much pressure,” she says. “You feel
like people are living vicariously
through you.”
She and her siblings have helped to
fund a school founded by their
mother, on a plot of land in Nigeria
where Arinze had once said they
would build a school. “When you are a
Nigerian immigrant living in the West,
it is expected that you will do your
part to help people in your community
lead better lives. I’ve done well
because of my mother, but it’s reallythe whole community who have given
us the love and support. We see life
as a team sport. When I do well I’m
not alone. But when I fail I don’t feel
alone either.”
After Oxford she went to Columbia
University’s school of journalism in
New York and then answered phones
at a television production company.
Success didn’t come straight away and
it was during this low point that she
added the Old Testament name Asher,
meaning “happiness” or “blessing”, to
her name, “like a mantra”. She worked
as a reporter for a small TV station in
the Bronx and eventually secured a
job at CNN, where she now presents
on CNN International and is known
simply as Zain Asher.
She and her husband, Steve Peoples,
a political journalist, have two boys,
aged three and eight months. Will
they be sent back for “training” in the
ancestral village? “My husband’s
American, so obviously he wouldn’t
allow it,” she says, laughing. “We
would do summers in Nigeria, but I
wouldn’t send them back even though
I do understand the inherent benefits.
You want your children to have a
relatively easy, simple childhood, but
at the same time you want them to
experience some difficulty. Just
enough to toughen them up.”
Despite her job, the television is not
on in the background in her house
except when there is important
breaking news. After dinner is family
reading time.
Recently the family gathered in
London for Obiajulu’s 70th birthday.
Her mother cried when she read
the book, but, Asher says, she is
rather nonplussed that her daughter
has made her the star of a memoir.
“She still thinks she has done
nothing special.”Obiajulu stuck newspaper
stories about successful
black people on Asher’s
walls so she had role
models, removed her
bedroom mirror and told
her: “Less focus on how you
look, more focus on what
you can become.”
At primary school,
however, girls screamed,
“She’s coming!” when she
approached the pool during
swimming lessons, and
claimed her skin would
turn the water brown.
Obiajulu, whose childhood
had included eating snakes
while living as a refugee in
the bush, tried to
empathise but didn’t fully
understand, Asher says.
“My mother experienced
the stuff of nightmares
growing up, so I always felt
as though what I was
experiencing paled in
comparison.”
Her mother decided to
send the nine-year-old
Asher back to Oghe, the
Nigerian village where
Asher’s grandmother lived
close to a rubbish dump,
for what she called
“training”. For two years
she was toughened up in a
home where they cooked
on a kerosene stove while
sitting on the floor. She
fetched water in a bucket
on her head from the
river, a mile away, and
learnt how to catch
pigeons in a crude trap.
“It was so normal to be
sent back to Nigeria,” Asher says. “It’s
only as an adult, and now that I have
children of my own, that I realise, oh
my gosh, that is nuts!”
However, she appreciated the
resilience she acquired and the
perspective that living there gave her.
“I was very homesick, but I look back
on those memories and I’m so grateful
for them. Out of all the decisions my
mother made, that was one of the best.
I was born in the UK, but I feel 100
per cent at home in Nigeria. It’s a
place where my soul is at peace.”
When she returned to England she
briefly attended a Catholic boarding
school in Dorset, but was framed for
stealing another girl’s moneybox and
ostracised. Although the culprit
eventually came forward, she was so
disenchanted she left for a girls’ day
school in south London.
Obiajulu taught her children to
divide their day into three equal parts:
eight hours each for sleeping,
schoolwork and working towards
dreams. Her mother’s dream was clear.
Rather than punish Asher when she
misbehaved, she took her to look
around Oxford. “I went so many times
it gave me the confidence to apply.”
Her teachers said she wasn’t a strong
enough candidate, but her mother had
a plan. Asher was banned from
watching TV and when she sneakily
switched it on, her mother took a pair
of scissors to the power cable. The
phone was replaced with a payphone
soon after. Her grades improved soAt nine, she was
toughened up in
Nigeria, fetching
water in a bucket
make us stars
was Princess Diana. Fergie asked him
if he could cut the hair of a “mate” for
the 1991 celebration Pavarotti in the
Park. Clarke was duly invited to
Kensington Palace, where Diana made
him a sandwich and read Hello!
magazine while he got to work.
“She was a lovely, charming
woman,” Clarke, 63, told The Times
last year. “Of course that night it was a
torrential downpour and her hair was
drowned. She still looked fabulous.”
Clarke styled Christian Bale’s hair for
the 2005 film Batman Begins and it
was his salon that Meghan Markle
popped into when she was in London,
long before she became engaged to
Prince Harry. “The staff said she was
very lovely,” Clarke said.
His first marriage, to Lesley, ended
in divorce in 1997, but the couple, who
share two children, remained friends
and business partners. She later said
that the business was like a third child,
which they built together from scratch,
“and you don’t abandon a child if you
split up, do you?”
Clarke went on to date the interior
designer Kelly Hoppen, after they met
at a party thrown by Elton John.
Today, he is married to Kelly Simpkin,
40, whom he met when she joined the
salon as a stylist. The couple share two
young children. While he retains a
salon in Birmingham and a line of
electrical hair appliances, he has said
that the decision to close the London
salon was not an easy one. “We have
spent months exploring alternative
solutions to keep the salon in
business,” he said this week, “but
unfortunately these have not
come to fruition.”
Hilary RoseNicky Clarke’s
London salon
gets the chop
I
t’s no coincidence that in 1991,
when Fergie cut the ribbon on
Nicky Clarke’s Mayfair hair salon,
she was sporting the best haircut
she’d ever had. Clarke, with his
instantly recognisable mane of long,
blond hair, was always an adroit self-
publicist, but he’s also very good at
what he does. Now, a combination of
Covid lockdowns, travel bans and
rising rents have forced him to close
his London salon. In recent years, it
had faced stiff competition from other
famous hairdressers following in the
steps of Vidal Sassoon, including Jo
Hansford, Josh Wood and George
Northwood. Clarke, though, was
among the first, cutting his way
through a celebrity Rolodex of the
1980s and 1990s: Princess Diana,
Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Thatcher,
David Bowie, Gwyneth Paltrow,
Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and
George Michael all sought him out.
He once earned £12,000 for three
days’ work styling Isabella Rossellini
on a L’Oréal shoot. His hands were
insured for £1 million, he was the first
hairdresser to be in Who’s Who and
the first to charge £500 for a cut. (The
rate now for a first-time client is £650.)
“It wasn’t about making a statement
or proving anything,” he once said.
“We had to charge £500 because the
phone was ringing off the hook.”
He grew up in a council flat with an
outside lavatory on the Old Kent
Road in southeast London. His
mother was a seamstress and his
father, who worked at Bankside power
station before it became Tate Modern,
disapproved of his son’s choice of
career. The young Clarke left school
at 16 and joined Leonard of Mayfair
as a junior on £12 a week, sweeping
the floor.
“I didn’t know one end of a comb
from the other,” he said, “but vanity
drove me, because I didn’t want to
look like an idiot, so I learnt very fast.”
He worked his way up rapidly,
booked for his first Vogue shoot aged- He became an assistant to John
Frieda and built a client list of his own.
He opened his first salon with his
then-girlfriend, Lesley, and a £20,000
loan. He happened to be cutting
Fergie’s hair the day of the grand
opening and joked that she could help
by turning up. She duly did.
“It was great for hairdressing,
because it made it into all the national
papers,” he said in 2012. “For the first
time, probably since Vidal,
hairdressing was mainstream news.”
Clarke made sure it remained there.
He was regularly photographed on the
celebrity circuit in his trademark tight
leather trousers, and an early clientHe was the first
hairdresser to
charge £500
for a cut
Nicky Clarke and
his former girlfriend
Kelly Hoppen
in 2008