As a child, the writer Geoff Dyer made regular Friday visits to the house where his father was raised and where his father’s sister, Auntie Joan, still lived. While his parents talked with Joan, Geoff slipped upstairs. The landing’s ageing wallpaper was “brown or gloomy yellow”. Here stood a glass cabinet of stuffed birds. Taxidermised rooks, sparrows and thrushes were displayed, seeming at once spooky and long dead, and “full of life” – poised to swoop or take flight.
Conjuring them in his memoir of growing up working class in 1960s and 70s England, Dyer wonders if they were perhaps heirlooms connected to his great-grandfather’s “rustic” occupation as a bird-catcher.
