Its a childhood thing I think that guides me. We were bought up in caravans, travelled in a extended family wagon train around Kent and Sussex following the season, working on farms mainly fruit and hop picking, then we became posh and moved into a Nissan hut before getting a house in 1958, I was born in 1945. I remember 1952 when King George died. My mother told me to run over and tell Aunt Gentelia (Aunt Genty as we called her) and I was amazed when she started to cry! Sorry, just an aside.
Were were a matriarch family and the wives were absolutely spot on with their personal hygiene demands on all of us! You no doubt have heard the tale of kids punching their way through ice to wash, well that was us! Every morning we were up just after dawn and outside the wagon (that's what the caravans were called) was a large oval galvanised metal washing container, freshly filled with water the night before. No matter what the weather we all had a full strip down wash even in January and February, rain, frost or snow. That's where the nit comb came in, about once a week we were always checked over to ensure that none of us had any head lice and so on. I can't remember if we ever did but we were always checked by our mums.
In later years when I was 19 I managed to get a job in my local general hospital A & E department. There were two of us, young, energetic and keen and we were mostly rostered on duty on a Friday and Saturday night, the busy time when the drunks were bought in, who had been in fights or had fallen into the roads or similar. One night I was on duty and an 'old man of the road' was bought in, drunk as a skunk and CRAWLING with lice and what seemed to be everything else moving over him!
A Nurse and myself were told to gown up, head covered with face masks on as well. Our job turned out to be to go into the side room and we had to shave him from head to foot, he was in that bad a condition. Even though we thought that every inch of our bodies, except our eyes, were impregnable, we both ended up scratching within 2 days! The little blighters had found there way through our armour!
The embarrassmet of it, all those earlier years and nothing only to suffer the problem years later. We both were sprayed and powdered, separately of course, and within a day were were free of them. I learned my lesson and remembered that to be safe whilst hiking and camping I always carry my nit comb, JUST IN CASE! Its never happened but I know that it could.
Sorry for such a long winded tale but I felt the need to explain myself.