Canongate (2025) [a]
If I close my eyes I can see it now, that dear old house on Memory Lane ... [b]
I.
Longtime readers will recall that whilst I might not particularly care for all of his books, or share all of his passions, I have in the past expressed admiration for the English writer Geoff Dyer and recognised that there is even a degree of kinship between us: see, for example, the post dated 19 July 2014: click here.
Dyer has written several books that I would have been proud to have written - not least of all his study of D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997) - though that's not to suggest for one moment that I could've written any of them with the same casual brilliance as the author not only of numerous award-winning works of non-fiction, but four novels to boot.
And now, with publication of a memoir entitled Homework (2025), there's another one to add to this list of books by Dyer that I wish I'd written ...
II.
Five years older than me, Dyer and I were basically born into the same world and were shaped by many of the same experiences, games, toys, and comic books [c]. And so it's hard to read and reflect upon this memoir without projecting oneself into it.
That's not something I would normally want to do or encourage, but, on this occasion, I think I'll just surrender to the urge to see this book not only as a window into the soul of the author, but as a looking glass in which I can see my own self reflected (albeit slightly distorted, as in one of those crazy funhouse mirrors).
Apologies in advance if this soon proves wearisome.
III.
Dyer was born in 1958, in the historic spa town of Cheltenham - not far from the Cotswolds - which might suggest that he had a posh and privileged upbringing in a Regency townhouse, but, actually, he was the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker living in a two-up, two-down terraced house; so I think that qualifies him as working class (in England, as the book makes clear, class matters a very good deal indeed).
Dyer's early years were characterised by wargames, waterfights, and worn out tennis balls: like Dyer, I remember these things well.
But I don't recall taking the first of these things as seriously as Dyer and his chums seem to have taken their re-enactments of World War II - even if I did have a childish fascination with Nazi Germany, not only dressing my favourite Action Man [d] as a Stormtrooper, but giving pride of place on my bedside dresser to a cast metal model of a Luftwaffe plane - I think it was a Fokke-Wulf - that dropped a single cap-loaded bomb.
Nor do I recall ever wanting to trap and kill birds, or shoot them with an air rifle, as Dyer claims he attempted to do. As a child, I had no qualms about violence inflicted on other children, but hated even the thought of cruelty to animals (with the exception of certain insects; like Dyer, I remember killing ants with boiling water).
IV.
Dyer's parents, like mine, pinned their hopes on winning the pools or perhaps ERNIE doing them a favour; much the same as people today dream of winning the National Lottery. Of course, those eight score draws never came up and neither did they ever win big on the Premium Bonds.
I don't know about Dyer, but I rather resent how working people have to rely on luck (and prayer); there's something humiliating in checking numbers every week when the odds of winning a significant sum are infinitesimally small. [e]
V.
Playing cards for pennies with your parents ... Eating John West salmon sandwiches ... Buying sherbert flying saucers ... Carrying around handkerchiefs that were "routinely stiff with yellow snot" [21] ... etc., etc.
Dyer has an almost devilish knack of inserting the right detail, the right turn of phrase, into his text at the right time; which is why he's so admired as a writer and why his publisher can persuade so many famous literary names to provide advance praise for the dustjacket: although my dislike of this smoke-blowing practice remains second only to George Orwell's [f].
VI.
I really like these lines about the excitement generated by the "swirling tune of an ice-cream van wending its way through the streets" [23] on a sunny afternoon:
"As soon as we heard that innocent ice-cream music there would be a scramble for money, for change, and we - the neighbourhood kids, rarely accompanied by adults - would flock to his open window." [23]
"Even now, sixty years later, Keats's line, 'Fled is that music', makes me think not of a nightingale but a gaggle of kids standing, waiting, listening." [23]
When I was a child, in the 1970s, there were at least three different ice-cream vans regularly cruising round Harold Hill: Tonibell, Mr Whippy, and - my favourite - Rossi's. Now, there's only one van which visits once a day, in the summer months only, and which rarely attracts any children.
And of course, taking along a handful of pennies isn't going to buy you a 99 or even a small wafer today - as that outraged little girl and her twin sister in Burnley discovered to the amusement of the world back in 2024: click here.
VII.
I'm so happy Geoff loved conkers: I can't love anyone who doesn't love conkers and appreciate their gleaming quality when they emerge out of their spiky green shells like "the newest things in creation" [26].
But I have never in all my life heard the words: "Obbly, obbly onk, my first conk / Obbly, obbly ack, my first crack" [27] - is that a Gloucestershire thing?
I'm also very pleased to know how much Dyer loved collecting Brook Bond tea cards: me too. Not that I remember learning much from them (not sure I even read the backs); it was possessing images that I loved.
Like Dyer, I do wonder if children still collect things with the same innocence and enthusiasm he and I shared: I'd like to think so, but I doubt it.
VIII.
So far, I have only mentioned the things Dyer and I had in common as youngsters. But when it came to our favourite television programmes, an important difference opens up; he was under the spell of the BBC whilst I was very much an ITV watching child.
This might seem a relatively minor or insignificant thing, but it isn't. In fact, it helps explain Dyer's smooth class transition via grammar school and Oxford University. Blue Peter and Jackanory pave the way into the bourgeois world [g].
And while we're mentioning differences ... Dyer loved "everything about the undersea world" [53], whereas I hated the thought of putting my head under water even at the local swimming baths - of not being able to breathe - which is the main reason I never learned to swim (that, and my failure to see the point of swimming from one side of a pool to another when one could walk around with less effort and without having to take one's clothes off and get wet. This kind of implacable logic would often put me at odds with parents and teachers; if I couldn't see the sense of doing something, I wouldn't do it).
IX.
Not only did I not want to deep sea dive, I didn't want to parachute from a plane either. Perhaps this made me a boring child - one who lacked the spirit of adventure - but, there you go!
This even extended to a dislike of funfairs and here, I'm pleased to say, Geoff and I are on the same page once more: "The din and lurch of lights and noise had the quality of nightmare rather than treat ..." [57]
X.
Dyer is right to acknowledge the huge debt his generation (and my generation) owe to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson; without them, the "fantasy and reality of space travel" [59] wouldn't have so permeated childhood in the 1960s and '70s.
Thanks to shows such as Thunderbirds and Space 1999, the future arrived on our TV screens and, whilst it wasn't all that different from today, it was certainly sexier and more silvery. I may not have wanted to voyage to the bottom of the sea, but I wouldn't have minded a trip to Moonbase Alpha to meet Catherine Schell (Maya).
XI.
Another important difference between young Dyer and my childhood self: I would never ever have considered joining any organisation such as the Scouts or Boys' Brigade that required one to wear a uniform and acknowledge the authority of either the Church or Crown or both (much to my mother's disappointment, as she had been a proud Brownie).
I may not have had the vocabulary as a six-year-old to articulate my position, but I was a natural born anarchist and atheist and so I find Dyer's willingness to join the Junior Training Corps - a subset of the Church Lads' Brigade - if only so he could march in the streets and go camping in Wales, a bit depressing to be honest.
However, thankfully, he redeems himself by confessing that he soon found it to be "a bit of a bore"; just like many other things "eagerly embraced as a child", including Sunday School, which "after about four weeks" [79], put him off religion for life.
The fact that his dad had no time for the Royals, probably laid the foundation for Dyer's own "subsequent loathing" [79], which has intensified in adulthood.
XII.
Eighty pages or so into the book and Dyer takes us out on to his father's allotment. It's one of my favourite parts, particularly these lines in which Dyer reflects on walking with his wife to the allotment many years later, in September 2022:
"It was all the same as it had been when I was a kid, just a little more hemmed in by houses. [...]
I couldn't remember exactly which plot had been ours. It's possible that the plots had been slightly redrawn, but that didn't matter. The trees, I suppose, were the same trees that had been there when I was a boy. The sky overhead was as it had always been, and there was a strong sense of ... not permanence - that's a quality associated with monuments - but of protected and unchanging continuity. [...]
What I would like to say, to claim, to believe, is that I felt like the boy I had been, but I didn't; I felt like who I am now, conscious of a straining for the passage of time to dissolve." [85] [h]
That, I think, is a lovely note on which to close the first part of this post ...
Notes
[a] All page references given in the above post are from this hardback UK edition.
[b] Dyer places this line - then scribbles it out - at the front of Homework beneath a charming black and white photo of himself, dressed in a cowboy suit and probably aged about 4, pretending to push a heavy-looking lawnmower in his front garden.
As for the colour photo of a grumpy little fella with his parents on a day trip which is reproduced on the book's cover, see pp. 73-78 where Dyer provides a lovely reading of the image (with an almost obligatory nod to Roland Barthes).
[c] Having said that, Dyer is a child of the 1960s; whereas I regard myself more as a child of the 1970s.
[d] Dyer writes at length about Action Man, which he describes as the ultimate toy: see pp. 45-48. Like him, I owned four of these dolls, including the one who could talk.
[e] Funny enough, one of Dyer's aunties won "a quarter or perhaps even half a million quid on the Football Pools" [71] sending shock waves through his entire family.
[f] In his 1936 essay 'In Defence of the Novel', Orwell famously described hyperbolic book blurbs as disgusting tripe; not only exaggerated, but often misleading and a sign of declining integrity amongst those in the world of letters. Readers who wish to do so can read Orwell's essay online by clicking here.
[g] I'm not quite sure how Dyer identifies in terms of class. Perhaps, as the kind of nomadic writer and thinker that he is, he's now without class or, more precisely, one who moves freely outside of class. Interestingly, at one point Dyer speaks of himself as a son of the Gloucestershire peasantry - i.e., a man who has been significantly determined by the fact he is descended from generations of rural labourers. See p. 69.
[h] Readers familiar with Torpedo the Ark might recall some of the posts in which I have spoken about this desire for the passage of time to be rendered meaningless; see, for example, the post 'Temporal Reflections Whilst Sitting in My Back Garden' (11 May 2025): click here.
Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.
