Delving into his childhood, Geoff Dyer recalls the Airfix representation of international conflicts

Airfix offered a complete childhood vision of a world at war, on land, sea and air. Ships (bit boring) and tanks (the rubber caterpillar tracks were frustratingly difficult to fix together) all poured off the production line, backed up by the 1:72 ground forces that came in boxes with an oblong cellophane window through which it was possible to glimpse a few of the figures inside, arranged randomly on little plastic sprigs. The soldiers were attached to these sprigs by their bases and if, contrary to instructions, you twisted and pulled them free (instead of slicing them off cleanly with a razor) the remaining twist of plastic meant that instead of standing flat they ended up balanced awkwardly on a kind of wobble board.

There were forty-eight figures per set. As well as the expected action poses – firing from kneeling, lying and standing positions, running, marching, crawling, throwing grenades – there were always a few men wounded, dying or surrendering. In addition to the Armies there were various other sets like Cowboys (shiny brown gunslingers, bucking broncos) and Wagon Train (covered wagon, boxes of supplies, women in Victorian dresses). Bright green and slightly ridiculous, the Robin Hood set included one Robin, one Maid Marian, a Friar Tuck and dozens of unnamed extras with bows and staves. In the entire Tarzan set there was basically only one good piece – plus a monkey, a little boy, a few white hunters and hordes of natives. In the interests of completeness, I not only had the massed ranks of the Grenadier Guards (the only interesting piece a man with a sword, stamping his foot) but Civilians and Farm Animals.

These aside, the other sets were issued in such a way that they formed conflicting pairs:

Ancient Britons                                            Romans
Robin Hood                                                  Sheriff of Nottingham
Confederate Infantry                                   Union Infantry
Cowboys / Wagon Train                             Indians
French Foreign Legion                                 Arabs
WWI Brits                                                   WWI Germans
WWII British (or Russian) Infantry          WWII German Infantry
Eighth Army                                                  Afrika Korps
US Marines                                                    Japs

This added up, quite literally, to a static dialectic of history: a series of battles between two roughly equal sides. (The Germans were also fighting the Russians but while historically accurate this anomaly made no sense since there was, in our childish conception of the Second World War, no Eastern Front.) Only the costumes varied. In the Airfix version of military history no side was ever outnumbered (there were as many commando raiders as German infantry) and, regardless of the conflict, the casualty rate remained roughly the same: four per cent (two per box). Similarly, although words like bulkhead, fuselage, aileron and undercarriage became part of my vocabulary, there was never any sense of the real purpose of bombers like the Lancaster: to rain death and destruction on the civilian population of Germany.

This is an extract from Homework: A Memoir (Canongate) by Geoff Dyer. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy from Blackwell’s here.

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