26-05-2025
Childhood in the 1960s? Here's why it was positively Victorian
Whoever said 'there's nowhere more remote than the recent past' will reiterate the apothegm a thousand times after reading Homework, Geoff Dyer's buoyant autobiography, about his coming-of-age in the backwoods of Gloucestershire.
Born in 1958, Dyer grew up in a Britain where world wars were living memories. Buildings were pocked with shrapnel and weed-choked bomb-sites abounded. Everyone had grandfathers who'd fought on the Somme, or uncles who hadn't come back from Burma. Playgrounds were filled with noisy boys shooting each other with toy guns. Childhood could be rather feral, with packs of children running about unsupervised in the alleys and roads; but then there was little motor traffic in the early 1960s. Few families could afford a Triumph Herald or Ford Anglia.
Much of Homework is a nostalgia trip. Dyer waxes lyrical, for instance, about eating Peach Melba and Raspberry Ripple puddings, or procuring from the corner shop an Aero or Milky Way ('the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite'). It's shocking, looking back, how much white sugar people consumed. 'I loved sugar on and in everything,' says Dyer, remembering the cereals, fizzy drinks and jam. Like red meat and full cream, it was considered 'a source of pleasure and nutrition' not the harbinger of obesity and diabetes it is in the 21st century.
We weren't health conscious, you see. We also had terrible teeth. Toothache, mouth ulcers and abscesses were prevalent, and dentists more than happy to be paid by the filling. All adults smoked, everyone 'never not coughing'. Sweet cigarettes were on sale to children: the packs contained educational cards about the Birds of Britain or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Going for a jog or to the gym was unheard of, and you never saw people drinking bottled water – nor did anyone die in the street or office of dehydration. Regarding exercise, there were heavily chlorinated public baths, but all they were good for was catching a verruca.
In general, food was so bad, it must have been done on purpose. Think of the watery stews, lumpy gravy and roasted gristle; the 'evaporated carrots and swamp-boiled cabbage'. The height of gastronomic sophistication was chicken-in-the-basket in pub carparks. If I may add my own memory here, in South Wales we had scampi-in-the-basket. My mother thought she was Elizabeth David when serving Heinz Spaghetti Hoops.
Dyer says he was a sickly child, prone to eczema, warts and chesty colds. He had his tonsils and adenoids out – you never hear those procedures mentioned now. Appointments with the doctor or consultant happened instantly, after a quick phone call. With the population some 20 million smaller, the NHS was efficient and unburdened, able to dish out free ointments, tablets, bandages, injections and operations. When Dyer's mother needed a disfiguring mole removing, she was seen at once by Sir Archibald McIndoe, the leading plastic surgeon.
Dyer makes other areas of life sound positively Victorian. Streets were visited by tinkers, blade sharpeners, coalmen and ice-cream vans. Houses contained front-rooms that were never used. There was the brown furniture, like big wardrobes, now unsellable in junk shops. Cocktail cabinets contained unopened bottles of Babycham. 'Dead flies showed up blackly in the opaque glass bowl that hung under the light.'
What an odd society we were. We used disgusting handkerchiefs rather than disposable tissues; underarm deodorant was yet unknown, particularly for men; children's entertainment was mostly Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's string puppets; and neighbours with mental health issues or other afflictions were openly abused in terms my editors cannot print. Dyer's father was anxious that black immigrants didn't move next door: 'It would lower the value of the house.' Adults did say and think these things, egged on by sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part.
But for all that Dyer quotes Housman – 'The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again' – and lovingly describes the Kodachrome colours in the family photograph album, Homework spends too long with characters such as his father Jack (1919–2011), who must have been the most boring man in England. Dyer Sr creosoted fences, and toiled on an allotment. 'It was a source of pride,' Geoff writes, 'that he wore a jacket and tie to work', as well as on the beach. Jack didn't like books: 'His refusal even to consider reading as something to do was so steadfast as to seem almost principled.' Nor did he like films, or beer in pubs. He partook of two glasses of wine a year. And as for music, he 'would quite happily have gone through life never hearing a note'.
Jack's chief pleasure, as his son recalls, was in not spending money. Two words were often on his lips, a contemptuous exclamation: 'How much?' According to a relative, 'he was so mean, even if he had a mouth full of gum boils, he still wouldn't give you one.' He fretted over the 'unavoidable expenses' of running a car: petrol, brake lights, tyres. When it was parked, he removed the rotor arm from the engine to deter thieves. 'Central heating had been invented,' Dyer writes, 'but was not installed in any house that we knew of.' Everything had to be repaired, patched up, bought cheaply. Perhaps this was the spirit of post-war rationing: abundance meant profligacy. Yet Geoff recalls the problem as more than this: Jack was like 'a very slow hard-to-identify puncture', leaking all the fun out of things.
Geoff's reaction was to do well at school, pass exams, get to university and get away. Along the journey, we see him having clumsy sex – 'She let me undo her bikini top and feel her t-ts' – and getting drunk on cider and Cinzano. Homework ends with his parents' deaths, both in 2011, by which time Dyer is in his fifties and has long since become a pie-hot writer. He publishes whatever he wants, travels wherever he fancies, secures everything from fellowships to journalism gigs. He has written four novels, and today he's writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California.
Bully for him. For though I liked the parts of this memoir that sketch the same territory and era through which I travelled, in the end the rest isn't about very much. That loosened bikini is about it for narrative excitement. There are no sentences to savour in Homework, no perceptions to give you pause or make you gasp. In the total absence of swagger – perhaps this is why Dyer is such a success with committees: he's a safe pair of hands – we're given Barthes or Sontag reincarnated as someone incredibly ordinary.
Then again, as regards his father, is Dyer a chip off the old block? There's a strange scene at the end of the book, which goes unexplored, where our author by chance meets an old schoolfriend in Cheltenham, and begins chatting about who is still alive, who has croaked. Yet Dyer must rush away: 'I had one of those cut-price train-specific tickets.' As his parents' sole beneficiary, Dyer was left what, I wondered? It would have been interesting to know the size of his inheritance, after all the descriptions of frantic hoarding – literally, of banknotes under the mattress. One thing I hate: reticent autobiographies.
