A walk through Geoff Dyer’s childhood

We all know we’re supposed to draw a line between the artist and the art. The veteran English essayist Geoff Dyer himself once had cause to remind me, mid-enthusiastic gabble, that his book on D.H. Lawrence was, in fact, “a conceit.” But as a reader often more interested in the lives of writers than their works, I must confess the idea of a full-blown memoir – finally! – from Dyer had me excited. I was not disappointed.

In just under 300 pages of pure Kodachrome, Dyer recounts his early 1960s upbringing in deepest suburbia outside Cheltenham, where children roamed the streets all day sans risk, Germans remained the go-to “enemy,” companies had dependable, unimaginative names like “British Nylon Spinners,” and young boys could yet plausibly be called “Keith” (or, for that matter, “Geoff”). 

Against the background of a patchy peace dividend, people determinedly played the football betting pools, knife-sharpeners still came to one’s door, dreadful food was (inexplicably) completely standard, and the shiny new National Health Service worked so efficiently that when Dyer cut his elbow open at a birthday party he was stitched back up again and sent on his way in time to have another ice cream. 

The author is overwhelmingly the victim of his own anecdotes

Young Geoff gets up to the sorts of things that English boys have got up to for generations. There were the church-adjacent social activities, the “treat” activities that looked suspiciously like forms of unpaid work and the occasional light brush with the law. All fueled by a diet which seemingly consisted of little more than catastrophic quantities of white bread and sugar. Geoff was an only child and he collected absolutely everything: sets of collectible cards from tea and cigarette packets, model aeroplanes and, inevitably, music.

At high school, the focus of the memoir shifts to take in the looming presences of bullies (“Lawless”) and teachers (“Bernard,” “Fred”), the everlasting terror of mean nicknames – and just how much of adolescent life is bound up in the sheer, draining effort of being in the presence of a girl or discovering a taste for beer.

The beginning of Dyer’s great love of tennis and – almost synonymous, surely – the hyper-English frustration at outdoor events being washed out by pelting rain is mentioned almost in passing.

Townie setting notwithstanding, much in Dyer’s childhood harked back to Hardy-esque “sons of the Gloucestershire peasantry”; one of his ancestors had been an actual Wessex bird-catcher. His parents John and Mary, were, at best, “skilled working class,” constrained – John was “a passionate creosoter” of the garden fence – and practically teetotal. It was an “increment of status” that their house was on the larger end-lot of its row, and they sent their son for elocution lessons.

The adult Dyer processes all this with his trademark Anglo-English irony, slapping Walt Whitman’s poetry over the city map of Cheltenham, embracing childish puns, chuckling at his own cod-philosophical musings (did the garden fence exist “in order to be creosoted?”) and tickled by life’s tendency toward wonky facsimiles of itself, like his father being made redundant from the Gloster Aircraft Company and Geoff later being fired from a shop which sold the Airfix kits of the same airplanes.

Only Dyer could get plastic action figures and the Frankfurt School into the same (persuasive) sentence, but there’s nothing contrived or facetious about the fundamental truth that your first bike is “a passport,” whereas any of its replacements will be “just a bike.”

If the same cannot be said for – as he puts it – “the interminably uplifting experience of wading through The Great Gatsby” and numberless other quiet lit-critical stilettos, well, that casual (and decidedly British) balancing act has always been a particular selling point of Dyer’s writing. 

Homework is openly billed as an antidote to memoirs full of derring-do (derring-don’t?) but it does exactly what Dyer’s fans will want, ticking off their hero’s well-documented personal interests (militaria, tennis, painters and jazz men; the quest to find a decent pair of jeans) in the broader context of an average English kid’s life in the postwar period. 

Unavoidably, of course, the bulk of any such volume must actually be about one’s parents. Dyer’s relationships with them were not, we quickly realize, entirely frictionless. Rooted in the soil of rural scarcity, buttoned-up (“safeguarding a privacy no one had any interest in breaching”), and hamstrung by a limited sense of self-worth, John and Mary had a stubborn, self-defeating mania for penny-pinching, were obsessed with propriety and were indifferent to all the things that Dyer loves. Books, perhaps most painfully of all, became “something potentially divisive.” “Never put anything in writing,” John warns Geoff before he leaves for Oxford University. It’s funny now, but it’s clear that years of this sort of thinking left considerable marks in Dyer’s mind.

Getting stuck in to one’s parents is always good sport (the Dyers Sr. are no longer with us); it must be acknowledged that the author, but true to form, is overwhelmingly the primary victim of his own anecdotes. Always “at home in the idiom of the ironic switchback,” Dyer cannot help dating his mother’s death in 2011 to “the second week of Wimbledon.” I won’t spoil the scene by noting all the many ways in which this epilogue is extremely touching.

The 67-year old author had a stroke about a decade ago. Inspecting, Barthes-style, a childhood photo of himself dressed as a cowboy, Dyer remarks: “Maybe he seems sad because to gaze into the camera is to look into the future. He knows – often, these days, finds himself thinking: I could be dead soon.” I do hope not. 

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2025 World edition.