The author Geoff Dyer has written a memoir of his 60s/70s childhood in Cheltenham, specifically what it was like to grow up in a working class suburb, go to an average primary school and be changed by a grammar school education. Born in 1958, Geoff was the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet metal worker, and although he's seven years older than me I still found his account extraordinarily evocative. It's called Homework and these are 100 of the things he mentioned, in no particular order and with none of Geoff's authorial flair.
Playing out with mates on wasteland, cap guns, grazed knees, never using the front room, creosote, the Football Pools, John West salmon sandwiches, barely-opened spirits in a drinks cabinet, snotty handkerchiefs, calling people mental, Aeros, packaged pastilles, skewering conkers, "got got got NEED!", Dinky cars, shallow footbaths at swimming pools, borrowing LPs, queuing to see the doctor, chain-smoking, bubblegum, Airfix kits, Green Shield stamps, Action Man's fuzzy hair, coal fires, Robinson Crusoe, walking into a film partway through, throwing fireworks, weekly comics, rubbing transfers with a biro, enormous cushiony headphones, Valiant comic, the class pencil sharpener, John Menzies, the rarity of a family photo, a Sunday afternoon drive, foolscap pad, knitted sweaters, British Bulldog, garden bonfires, apprenticeships, Vesta curry, making do, warm school milk, leatherette, Double Diamond, the clutch, ten-shilling note, box of logs, twine, relatives with a wartime story, red Cortina, pick your own, Corona bottles, sugar on cornflakes, doing a project, the 11-plus, arrival of the buff envelope, cap with badge, Brooke Bond tea cards, racer bikes, duffing up, ouija boards, china figurines, youth clubs, never drinking water at school, fatty sausages in batter, sewn-on badges, the Electricity Board, "fight fight FIGHT!", Wall's choc-ices, hole punches, stewed fruit, reel-to-reel, art on album covers, "hello 56704", Melody Maker, bell bottoms, driving gloves, Luxembourg 208, Athena poster of skeleton slumped on toilet, watching the TVs in Radio Rentals' window, hooded hairdrier, Sta-Prest, Arbroath nil Hamilton Academicals nil, party line, Cinzano, kung fu, orange patterned wallpaper, penpals, Skol, seven-pint tin, Saturday job, night-storage radiators, Brasso, pop posters, Berni Inn, postal orders, Waddington's Jig-Map, chicken-in-the-basket, turps.
