Meet the Stockton barber who can't say no, even 45 years in

Wendy Everingham was born in Maitland. It was where her mother, father, and her sister lived. Maitland was her home, and she liked it there. She had been a nurse for 50 years and was enjoying her retirement.

But her husband - a tall and gently spoken man of 72, with a steady gaze and a sweep of short, neatly combed white hair - had wanted to move to Stockton since he bought the barber shop on Mitchell Street from its last owner, Jack Tapp.

That would have been in 1979. It was February and one of the two chairs, which must now be nearly 100 years old, faced the other wall. He resurfaced the floors and repositioned the layout to have both chairs facing the mirrors and cabinetry he installed when he took ownership.

His first sale receipts are still pinned to the back of a closet door by a bulldog clip. He keeps the float in a battered chocolate tin that his mother-in-law gave him when he opened the business. The paint has almost entirely gone, and the lid no longer fits. Mrs Everingham has tried a few times to replace it, but he refuses to part with it.

The tin, like the receipts, the chairs, the old council health department posters, and Jack Tapp's framed business license that still hangs on the wall, is part of the shop. These small treasures make the space his own, and he belongs with them.

For the better part of the past 45 years, Danny Everingham has woken up early each morning - about 6.30- or 7am.

He would drive from his former home at Maitland to open the shop on Mitchell Street by 8.30am, wearing a traditional white barber's jacket and working mainly with a pair of good steel scissors and a straight razor.

He doesn't take bookings, and the prices are hand-printed on a piece of butcher's paper taped to the mirror. He has a regular clientele who drop by and take a seat, flicking through the papers and magazines as they wait their turn. The shop doesn't close in the evening so much as the clients eventually stop filtering through the door.

"When I was fit and healthy, there was no end to the day," Everingham said at one point, "If there was no one around at 5pm, I would shut, but if a bloke still wanted a haircut..."

About eight years ago, the couple moved to Palm Lake at Fern Bay. Danny had been driving about an hour a day by that point, and always into the sun, and Wendy knew that couldn't continue. Though she was initially reluctant, she now says that she loves her new home and the decision to move was a good one.

But Danny still wakes up early.

"He has always been a morning person," Wendy said as her husband methodically finished his work on his first client of the day. It was about 10.30am on a Thursday. He works only three days a week now but still sees his regulars who come and go on the unspoken schedule of the shop.

Danny had only returned to work about three weeks earlier after undergoing 35 doses of radiation and chemotherapy to treat throat cancer. Two years earlier, he had suffered a stroke that forced him to close the shop for a few months. He will find out on December 21, after a new round of scans, whether the treatment has taken.

All he wanted to do, Wendy said, was return to work.

Danny and Wendy met in 1965 when Danny was 15. He was looking for work, and she was living with her family in the apartments above the shopfronts her parents owned at East Maitland.

"I always wanted to be a barber," Danny said, "There was a barber in Maitland, John Quinton. He had an FJ - one of the first Holdens - a lime green one, and he was always well-dressed by the menswear shop. He had an account there. I thought I wouldn't mind being like him."

He had initially applied for a job at the Jesmond Shopping Centre and was told that there was a position at East Maitland; the owner would hire an apprentice up there, and Danny should put in for it.

It was Wendy's brother-in-law, Raymond Ellison, who ultimately hired her future husband. The couple married in October 1969.

"I went up there, and it was Wendy's sister's husband who gave me the job," Danny said, "That's how we got together."

It was a four-year apprenticeship. Danny swept the floors, sharpened the razors, and learnt the trade from the ground up. When the '70s rolled in, and long hair became the new trend, Danny found there wasn't much work in barbering and gave it away to become a fitter at BHP. When he bought his Mitchell Street shop nine years later, some of his first clients were those he met at the Steelworks.

There is a careful art to Danny's work. His clients don't just come for the service, which is done with a tender, steady care, but for something implicit in the air, soaked into the leather of the chairs. They come for Danny.

"You won't believe who my first customer was today, Russ," he says at one point, as longtime client Russell Tait takes his seat, "It was Peter."

"I was in trouble with my wife because I refused to have a haircut until Danny was back," Peter Kelly, the client Danny mentioned, had said a few minutes before.

Danny's customers understand that what the barber offers isn't a quantifiable transaction. It doesn't fit on a price list. It happens in the moments before, after, and during the haircut, when Danny asks them about the football or the cricket, chats about the weather, or the goings on about town.

"There might be three or four blokes here, and Danny is doing someone's hair, and he will stop and just start talking," Ron Hancock, another long-time customer, said, "You see the blokes waiting, but it doesn't matter. There's no hurry."

Before his turn in the chair, Mr Tait waited by his mobility scooter outside the shop. Danny has cut three generations of Tait hair. Russ has been coming here for years.

"We come because he's a good bloke," he said, "He's Danny. He's a part of Stockton. We wouldn't know anything if we didn't come here - we'd be devoid of information."

As he glances through the window, he speaks quietly to Wendy: "He looks good."

"He looks well when he's down here," she replied, kindly.

"How has he been handling it?" Mr Tait asked of his friend's health.

"He doesn't complain," Wendy said.

"He never does."

Mr Hancock, who has been a client of Danny for as long as he has been in Stockton, comes to the barbershop to hear the news. He was the president of the local cricket club for three decades and remembers when Danny played for Maitland. They chat about sport and the local gossip when he is in the chair. Danny knows what is happening in town even before Facebook, he says with a smile.

"He's just a genuinely lovely guy," Mr Hancock said, "He never complains and never says a bad word about anyone either - even though he's telling you the gossip, he never bags anyone."

Wendy has been coming in to help her husband run the shop as he recovers. If Danny refuses to retire, she has resolved at least to help him manage. She sweeps the floor, handles the bookings, and chats with the clients while Danny works, all the while keeping a loving eye on her husband.

The treatment has knocked out his saliva glands. He has lost his sense of taste and Wendy suspects he has also lost some of his hearing. Though Danny would never go without the barber's shirt, it is buttoned loosely around his shoulders to keep the pressure away from his throat where the lump of the tumour has almost disappeared. He asks her to help him button it up to its regulation height for the photos.

"I'm just a man who can't say no," Wendy sings, ribbing her him playfully as he goes about his trade. Wendy is Danny's other half; the pair are inseparable. It is impossible to conceive of one without the other. And though she jokes about his obsession with work, there is the sense that she knows how much he loves it and how much his community loves him in turn. After 54 years of marriage, she knows him better, perhaps, than he knows himself.

Danny is the local barber; the friend, the confidant, and the community institution. He's the kind man with the jar of jellybeans in the cabinet, next to the Brylcreem, that he keeps for the kids. He's the businessman who couldn't bring himself to part with a battered old chocolate tin float given to him by his mother-in-law almost half a century ago. Danny is Danny.

Asked if he would ever consider retiring, he smiled and said, "Well, I've signed another lease. I'm happy to work for another two years yet."

"He just loves it," Wendy said, "He said, 'honestly, Wendy, if I drop dead on this floor, I will die happy'. So, what do you do? ... He loves all the people, and they love him."