got used to seeing bodies and blood, and hearing cries of agony" as he carried messages from central London to the docks. Upon the insistence of his mother, they tried to get him into a hairdressing apprenticeship; his mother told him that her ambition was for him to become a professional hairdresser. However, he saw himself becoming a football player, a sport he excelled at. "I could not imagine myself backcombing hair and winding up rollers for a living." When she took him to the hairdressing school of a well-known stylist, Adolph Cohen, they were disappointed immediately when they were told it was a two-year programme and would cost much more than they could afford. "My mother looked so terribly dejected", he said, that as they left the salon, "I thought she might faint." A few minutes later, Cohen called them back to the salon, then told him, "You seem to have very good manners, young man. Start Monday and forget the cost." His mother began to cry out of joy. Wartime activities At the age of 17, although he had been too young to serve in World War II, he became the youngest member of the 43 Group, a Jewish veterans' underground organisation founded by Morris Beckman which broke up fascist meetings in East London. The Daily Telegraph calls him an "anti-fascist warrior-hairdresser" whose aim was to prevent Sir Oswald Mosley's movement from spreading "messages of hatred" in the period following World War II. In 1948, at the age of 20, he joined the Palmach (which shortly afterwards was integrated into the Israel Defense Forces) and fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which began after Israel declared statehood. Sassoon arrived in Mandatory Palestine in April 1948, a month before Israeli independence. He fought in the Negev against the Egyptian Army. During an interview, he described the year he spent training with the Israelis as "the best year of my life", and recalled how he felt: Career Sassoon trained under Raymond Bessone in his salon in Mayfair. Sassoon opened his first salon in 1954 in London; singer-actress Georgia Brown, his friend and neighbour, claimed to be his first customer. Sassoon stated his intentions in designing new, more efficient, hair styles: "If I was going to be in hairdressing, I wanted to change things. I wanted to eliminate the superfluous and get down to the basic angles of cut and shape."