‘Life, as far as he was concerned, ended the moment you died. But the idea of the afterlife is not so easily dispensed with; in his case it had moved forward into the current life.’
Geoff Dyer, Homework
Geoff Dyer was born in 1958. I arrived about fifteen years later, and yet Homework, his account of childhood in postwar Cheltenham, often reads like a set of memories I forgot to write down. Not because we were exactly the same. Different accents, different fathers, different decades. But because the structure of life, the rituals of ordinary working-class childhood, still held. War games. Doctor waiting rooms. Toy soldiers. Airfix models. The drinks cabinet that no one was allowed to open. The front room that was only used at Christmas. Dyer’s brilliance lies in not treating these things as quaint or nostalgic but as evidence: of class formation, of domestic ideology, of a vanished social contract that shaped us long before we ever understood it.
The book is written in the episodic, essayistic mode that Dyer has made his own. It’s a memoir, yes, but also a cultural archaeology of a particular kind of boyhood. The white, English, working-class, located somewhere between rationing and Thatcher. He’s less interested in plot than in texture: the smell of creosote on a fence, the daisy-flecked lawn you weren’t allowed to step on, the way a model Spitfire never quite fit together properly, no matter how many times you read the instructions. “Our idea of war,” he writes, “was built on a foundational network of simulation. The reproductions came first.” Only later did the documentaries and newsreels arrive, “confirming what we already knew.”
That reproduction logic. War as play, history as plastic—has its own uncanny legacy. I grew up in a different town, in a different decade, and still we fought the Second World War. Watched the same films. Nobody wanted to be the Germans. You fought to die well. And when it moved indoors, it was Britains soldiers or Action Man: plastic soldier, plastic scar, a wetsuit so stiff with cheap neoprene you needed talc to get even one leg in. I remember mine lying half-dressed on the carpet, thrown down in frustration (Dyer it seems experienced the same). The resistance of the suit became part of the ritual. It was never about the realism. It was about the kit.
Except the kit was crap. The plastic warped, the joints broke, the accessories vanished within days. Dyer remembers his prized black plastic Tommy gun. Coshing Keith Williams over the head with it (over a plastic helmet, naturally), only for “the barrel of my gun [to snap] off and [be] left hanging from the plastic khaki strap.” His dad glued it back together, but it was never the same. “Thereafter it was fragile—more fragile than it had been before it broke and had to be handled with a delicacy unsuited to the demands of battle.” This is the condition of everything in the book: plasticised, temporary, already fraying at the edges. Even the pleasures were brittle. Toys came apart. Rockets lost their decals. Beach balls burst within hours. “The rocket remained physically intact, was functionally unimpeded, but this cosmetic damage meant that it had been ruined within hours of its launch.”
Nothing was made to last, not even happiness. That too was rationed. Dyer’s childhood is full of these moments. Small, ordinary breakages that form a kind of emotional vernacular. It’s not tragedy, just the rhythm of use and loss. My generation inherited the same rhythms. We knew our toys would fail us. The difference was we stopped expecting anything different.
Dyer is alert to the kitsch of this world, but never snide. His observations about the unoccupied front room. Untouched, unused, religious in its vacancy, are among the best things he’s written. “It was, in this respect, a trophy or show room,” he writes. “What it showed – even if that entirely passive function was diminished by the way that no one even looked at it – was that we had more space than we needed, at least until we had to move to somewhere larger, because of a lack of space.” The paradox is the point. Affluence, real or imagined, required performance: the room, like the cocktail cabinet, was about what might be used one day. It was storage for a future that never came.
The cocktail cabinet itself is a masterpiece of suburban anthropology. “So there it was, in the unused room, the unused cocktail cabinet: another visible reminder that we had got a toe-hold in the age of plenty, had more than we needed.” The bottles were never touched. Babycham lived a half-life in the gloom. Dyer writes: “The lifespan of our drinks exceeded all reasonable and seasonal expectations of survival.” They were symbols of advancement, and the accumulation of symbols, not pleasures, defined the mood of the house. It’s a quietly brutal insight into the psyche of a generation still rationing in a time of excess.
These rooms, like the doctors’ surgeries he describes, aren’t just architectural. They’re ideological. The waiting room of the NHS doctor’s surgery was not an inconvenience but a miracle. No appointments, no complaints. “Since we didn’t have a phone – nor, I think, did any of our neighbours – we’d have had to go there to make an appointment anyway so it made more sense to turn up and wait, as we did at the barber.” I remember the stamped metal token, the ritual of comparing numbers. “There were never any disputes about whose turn it was even though no system was established to indicate one’s place in the dispersed and randomly seated queue.” That was the contract. You didn’t jump the line. You waited your turn, even if you were bleeding. Unless, like Dyer, you actually were bleeding, his arm sliced open on a shed window during a birthday party, at which point everyone in the room silently agreed he could go first. Even emergency had its etiquette.
It’s funny what you recall now, almost forty plus years later. Those cold metal discs at the doctors’ pressed into your palm like a ticket to order. Dr Myska always scared me, with his clipped manner and ever-hovering impatience. Dr Purcell, though, had a kind face and a soft Scottish brogue that made you feel, if not safe, then at least seen. His son ended up at my junior school, and one day Dr Purcell himself came in to speak to the class. I still remember him opening his leather doctor’s bag like it was a magician’s case. Stethoscope, thermometer, syringes, that little hammer to test your reflexes. Each tool explained with gentle authority. It was part science, part social contract. This was when home visits were still a thing. When the doctor didn’t just serve a catchment, but belonged to a place.
There’s something Raymond Williams–like in the way Dyer treats these spaces. He quotes The Country and the City in the epigraph and shares Williams’s sense that memory is not the same as history. That what’s felt can’t simply be projected backwards as evidence. But Homework is evidence, of a sort. It’s a record of a culture that no longer exists but that still clings, like coal dust, to everything we are. The creosote, the football pools, the Brooke Bond tea cards. I collected Panini stickers instead: rectangles of footballers in dead-eyed poses, always ending up with ten of the same bloke from QPR, always hunting for the shimmering silver club badge. “Every packet of loose-leaf tea came with a card and every box with two,” Dyer writes. “It’s possible that I’d lost interest years earlier and that my parents, from whom I had apparently inherited Freshwater Fish, went on collecting the last few series as a way of extending my childhood.” A sentence like that tells you what kind of book this is.
The playground, too, was a marketplace. Conkers, bubblegum cards, marbles. “We gathered in little negotiating huddles in the playground, taking turns to flick expertly through our sets while a potential swapper kept up the rapid accompanying commentary – ‘Got, got, got’ – broken by an occasional, excited ‘NEED!’” For us it was football stickers and Empire Strikes Back. Comics were Warlord, Commando and Victor, Look-In for the telly tie-ins. Everything was swapped, everything had value, even if it didn’t last. You learned about economics before you learned about fractions.
The best conker trees were next to the local church, their roots buckling the graves, their bounty scattered dangerously close to the road. This was hazardous work. Dodging falling conkers and passing cars, eyes always scanning for the tell-tale split in the green husk. I don’t remember much about the actual playing. For me, it was always about the finding. The hunt was the point. I got so wrapped up in it once—with my friends, scrabbling in the gutter for a perfect, glossy sphere—I missed my tea. My mother stormed up the road to drag me home, fuming with that particular mix of embarrassment and worry that only a working-class mum could deliver in a single look. I can’t imagine that happening today. There’s nothing left to be late for.
What emerges from Homework is a materialist account of feeling: how joy, boredom, shame and pride were all shaped by the systems we were born into. Not just class, though class saturates every page, but the lived infrastructures of the postwar British state. The municipal baths. The dented school bus. The foot rot and verrucas that everyone got and no one minded. “Though they were a source of intense pain it’s difficult, now, not to feel a certain fondness for the verruca as the municipal sole of the welfare state.” Dyer doesn’t mock this world. He honours it. And he documents its slow, quiet dismantling.
But Homework doesn’t end with the comfort of memory. It moves forward. Tentatively into grammar school and university, and into a different kind of alienation. Dyer describes these years not as a triumph of meritocracy, but a slow and uncertain drift. “The grammar school was meant to remove you from the circumstances of your birth and install you somewhere else. But this didn’t happen all at once.” He’s good at school, he says, but only in the sense that “some people are good at Tetris.” Success is mechanical. It has no direction.
At Oxford, the gap between expectation and experience only widens. “I was there, but I wasn’t there as myself,” he writes. The rituals are unfamiliar. The confidence of others is impenetrable. What was supposed to be the reward for social mobility becomes another lesson in self-removal. The system has functioned, but the subject doesn’t fit. “My relationship to academic success was governed by fear, not desire.” The grammar school sorted you; university confirmed you didn’t belong.
Most memoirs reckon with the past. Homework goes deeper. It reckons with the machinery behind the past, the quiet systems of class, care and containment that shaped you before you had language for them. It’s not just the story of a boy, but of a Britain that taught you to wait your turn and call it fairness, to treat modest comfort as a privilege and aspiration as betrayal. These systems don’t disappear. They fold into us, like the habits of silence, like the front rooms we were told were for best. And when the house is gone, when the street is renamed, when the doctor no longer calls, they’re still there—structuring what we miss, what we mock, and what we mourn.
So far, my book of the year.
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