Funny, vivid, ordinary in the most inclusive sense: author Geoff Dyer’s memoir of growing up in 1960s and 1970s Cheltenham – only child of a sheet-metal worker and a school dinner lady – summon up an era defined (partly) by Action Man, candy cigarettes and verrucas
There’s a photograph on the front cover of Geoff Dyer’s Homework, A Memoir. A photograph of a family of three: mum, in coral-coloured blouse, smiling at the camera. Dad, tilting back slightly on his heels, hands on hips, rust-red sweater tucked into trousers; also with the hint (perhaps more self-conscious) of a smile. A little boy is in the foreground, cowboy hat casting a protective shadow over still baby-chubby cheeks. His hand rests in comradely fashion on an inflatable toy nearly as big as he is.
Something — plenty — about this photograph summons (unbidden) strains of innocence: I Want to Hold Your Hand; Hello, Dolly!
(Twin-tubs; Orange Maid ice lollies; gran tying her curly-rags each night; Wrights Coal Tar Soap. Standing in front of rental shops to catch a glimpse of a colour TV…)
It’s not just the vehicles in this photograph: a sky-blue Victor, 3489 AD (in the days before number plates, like cars, would elongate way beyond those snappy digits). Or the little bus in the background, already beginning to date with its pre-60s curves. Its seats are empty, but you can see the ghosts of housewives — severe perms and no-nonsense glasses — bearing greaseproof-wrapped corned-beef sandwiches for a rare day out.
Nor is it just the sky, its blue almost-comically azure against picture-perfect clouds a child would crayon in. (Summers were unfailingly idyllic in our long-ago childhoods.)
It’s all of these things: a tableau as if photo-shopped to 60s’ perfection.
Who is holding the Kodak Colorsnap (I’m guessing the make), cheerily instructing these three to ‘Say cheese!’?
But that’s not the only secret this photograph holds.
The second secret is that this little boy, in his Ladybird-smart shorts skimming knobbly knees, will go on to become a famous writer.
And the third? The third we’ll come to later.
‘But, yeah,’ Geoff Dyer tells me. ‘I love that picture a lot.’
Geoff and his mum on the beach
‘I’m going to utter a phrase for the very first time,’ I say to Geoff Dyer. ‘I loved Homework.’
(A poor joke, but he laughs obligingly.)
His is the unexpurgated version of a 60s childhood. The one we (somewhat) post-War babies remember with clarity, before the 21st century (often quite rightly) tut-tutted those memories into silence. It wasn’t that we children approved of chalky-sugar cigarettes hanging out of our mouths in admiring imitation of our chain-smoking elders.
Or questioned that dads should work with oil and rags; and mums (if at all) were dinner ladies — as was Geoff’s — home in good time to cook our tea.
Or worried that Enid Blyton (on whom I was brought up) was xenophobic, racist, elitist, sexist.
We didn’t know, in those foreign-country days, to disapprove. These things just were.
And — for me — that’s one of the joys of Geoff Dyer’s memoirs about growing up in Cheltenham in the 60s and 70s. He details all the things that just were.
This is a book where Geoff’s friend Keith Williams, two doors away at number 3, has a mum who goes ‘mental’. As she hangs washing on the line in the back garden, she shouts across the fence to neighbour Lola, ‘What’s so funny?’
‘Something about laundry,’ Geoff writes, ‘especially hanging it out to dry, seemed to activate these bouts of what we would now call paranoia…’ Perhaps understandable, he speculates, considering the pressure of TV adverts for housewives to achieve an increasingly whiter-than-white wash.
(Mrs Williams eventually goes ‘to stay with her sister’. Everybody knows she’s in Gloucester’s whispered-about psychiatric hospital, Coney Hill.)
There’s Geoff’s much-loved Action Man — hair in three colours, skin in one — that his dad suspects is a way to trick boys into playing with dolls, ‘like girls’.
It’s a common concern. When an older boy tells Geoff in the playground one day that he’s a ‘homo’, there’s no knowing if this is a compliment or not.
Luckily, his pal Gary — a leading authority on the latest lexicon — is around to explain. ‘It’s a double spastic,’ he tells Geoff.
Then there are conkers that some pickle in vinegar (legal but not admired).
Bubble-gum cards with values as fiercely studied as bowler-hatted men scrutinising the Times’s financial pages.
And verrucas (are they still a thing?) caught at Alstone Baths (opened in 1887; by the 1960s in a parlous state) (now Waitrose, btw): ‘Though they [verrucas] were a source of intense pain it’s difficult, now, not to feel a certain fondness for…’
And sugar — white sugar! — today on a par with cocaine. Sugar that Geoff (and the rest of us) would load onto breakfast cereal, stir into dense tea, spread on white bread to make granular sandwiches. ‘And the extraordinary thing? It did us no harm!’
I am getting onto my interview with Geoff Dyer. (Dragging myself away from Lotus-eating memories; spellbound by his wonderful book.) Honestly I am.
I meet him first at his old red-brick primary, Naunton Park, where he’s giving a talk about his newly-published memoirs. It seems odd for this famous author whom I’ve long admired (Jeff in Venice; The Last Days of Roger Federer; many more prize-winning, genre-busting tomes), to be here in a school in the back streets of Cheltenham.
But, of course, it isn’t.
He lived just down the road until he was 11, at 1 Fairfield Walk, an end-terrace that aspired (so his mum considered) to be a semi-detached.
On one side of me in the audience sit his proud aunt and uncle, whom he mentions extensively and fondly. Auntie Rhoda (who isn’t altogether thrilled at Geoff’s remembered dislike of his grandparents) challenges a memory: beautiful Auntie Hilda married a self-made millionaire (second marriage), and once turned up at Fairfield Walk in a ‘white Rolls-Royce’.
‘It was yellow,’ Rhoda corrects.
Fellow pupils, who recall him in varying degrees, sit across the aisle on my other side.
How did it feel, I ask him (when we speak some weeks later) being transported back 60-ish years?
‘Going back to the old school was the same as going back to my old house at Fairfield Walk,’ he says. He was happy to be there; any thoughts of school were of the entirely clichéd variety: ‘Oh, the desks are really small.’
But in terms of memoirs…
‘When I was writing the book, I dropped a postcard explaining that I lived [in my old home] until I was 11 and it would be helpful if I could come and visit. And they were so nice; invited me into the house…
‘As soon as I was inside, I knew what a mistake it was — because it was slightly cancelling out my entirely intact memories of how it was, and putting a layer (or a filter) between how it is now — how I was perceiving it — and how I was remembering it.’
Memory. Such an odd, conniving, deluding, deceiving, delightful, sad, horrifying process.
‘But the more general process of writing the book has, of course, had a deep effect on me, which I’m still in the process of decompressing from. It confirmed lots of stuff that I already knew — and, yes, it deepened my awareness of the process I’ve come from.
‘And as my wife [art curator and editor Rebecca Wilson] joked after she read it: ‘I wouldn’t have believed it was possible but writing this book has made you even chippier than you were before’.’
From Cheltenham, of course. But not the town (once) beloved of retired British Raj colonels and (still of) Ladies’ College alumni. His was a two-up, two-down, with an extra toilet outside in the yard, out of action from December to March when his dad turned off the water to prevent freezing. The front room was almost never used, ‘left to bask in its own emptiness’, while other rooms madly multitasked. His dad would wash and shave every evening in the kitchen, keeping his shirt on during the whole operation. Geoff’s mum would use his semi-worn-out razors to shave her shins. (Nothing thrown away.)
His dad, an engineer, began with an apprenticeship at Gloster Aircraft Company, aged 16. He was called up in 43 and spent the bulk of his military service in India. (His only other stint abroad was a coach trip to France with Geoff’s mum, both in their 70s.) Books, beer, films, cars, music: all earned his equal indifference. Much of his passion was reserved for saving money: ‘My dad’s reaction to any price quoted by shop assistants was always a stunned, ‘How much?”
It makes me laugh, as I read, about the interviews with a certain Geoff Dyer, where he talks about how he hates spending money.
‘I was talking about this the other day: if I ever see somebody wearing a Rolex (and I wouldn’t even recognise a Rolex), my only possible response would be: What a dick.
‘A cheap watch will tell you the time.’
His (modest) confession is that he owns several Freitag bags: ‘Those bags made from recycled tarps. And they’re rather expensive.
‘The bit where I really feel that closeness to my dad in the book is the where I’m talking about being on one of those streets with branches of Dolce & Gabbana: places of heightened expense and diminished value. And I’m glad that I’ve inherited his — err — well, in his case, it would have been ignorance of; and, in my case, because I know about them, it’s turned into contempt for.’
The other great character in his book is Cheltenham itself.
Again, not the Cheltenham of Regency architecture, fluted columns and caryatids.
But the inner-urban wildernesses that existed in his day.
‘As manifested by the abandoned railway that was so near us; the railway line at Leckhampton Station.
‘Areas of either prior development, or that had been — over time — rewilded, to use the contemporary phrase. The great thing about that is you have access to it and it’s unsupervised. And, as you know from the book, you can have all sorts of both risky adventures and romantic adventures there.’
Now, of course, it’s pretty much all Tarmac and breezeblock.
‘You think — oh, where can people go now for adventures?
‘Well, they go for their romantic adventures on screen.’
Geoff in bedroom
We talk about so many things I can’t fit in that it feels as if much of the interview was an indulgence on my part. (The ultimate perk: to be able to converse with Geoff Dyer.)
About how a Cheltenham grammar, Pate’s (one of the best in the country) changed his life; introduced him to literature — Hardy, Shakespeare, Lawrence; helped make him a writer.
‘I turned out as I did due to the kind of institutional things that were put in place after the Second World War, when we booted out Churchill, set up the welfare state. Everything, for me, derived from that huge turning-point of passing the 11-plus and going to that amazing grammar school.’
About Dorothy Franks, a school cook, who lent him an LP of an abridged Richard III ‘with either Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing in the title role’. (I mean, the casting is telling in its own right: these were the days when Hammer horror could sit comfortably next to Wordsworth and Bach.)
‘Back then, there was a still-intact Arnoldian idea of culture as being things of a higher value, and so many things in society were directing us towards that.’
And — particularly interesting in the light of The Salt Path-gate, which broke after our chat — the rules of memoir.
‘You sign up tacitly to a distinctly different set of rules [from fiction or faction], where the contract reads something like: To the best of my recollection, this is how things were…
‘Part of the struggle is to bring these memories into the sharpest-possible focus. But it’s not like writing a biography whereby, of course, you have to cross-check and fact-check everything because you want it to be an objectively reliable document.’
‘I’m struck by — and this is not unique to Cheltenham; but one of the features of the last (I’m going to guess) 20 years — is the spread of quality cafes to what one might call small or provincial towns; by how nice much of Cheltenham is.
‘The main thing I’m struck by as an adult is what a real stretch of imperial monumentality the Promenade is: the Crimean war; the Boer War; the First World War; Edward Wilson. There it is. It’s not just the centre of the Cotswolds; it’s the centre of the Empire.’
Maybe he’ll see a bit more of it now. He and his wife have moved back to the UK in recent times.
‘I would love to be able to say that, like Thomas Mann fleeing the Nazis, Oh, I managed to get out as the Trump regime were closing in on me and cancelling all exit visas.
‘But the more honest answer would be: I just couldn’t bear the parking and the driving anymore.
‘The wonderful thing about being in Britain, we realised, is its proximity to mainland Europe, which we missed greatly.’
Geoff with his mum and dad in the bedroom
I promised a third secret in that photograph. And I’ve kind of changed my mind. It’s a secret you have to read for yourself. One that explains why Geoff’s mum, smiling in her coral blouse, is leaning against the car, one hand gently over one wrist.
‘It’s a sort of revelation but it’s — if you like — a discreet revelation; not the kind of revelation you get in so many memoirs of trauma or abuse or anything like that.
‘Because there was none of that. It was a completely loving, normal childhood with no awful secrets. Just this… and it wasn’t even a secret.’
Homework, by Geoff Dyer, is published by Canongate, hardback £20; geoffdyer.com
