With nine books under his belt, it’s clear that no matter
what Bill Bryson writes about, he can make it amusing and interesting. He has a
way with words and employs them to good effect.
His tenth offering (2006) is a memoir of his time as an ordinary kid in
Des Moines, Iowa.
‘So this is a book
about not very much; about being small and getting larger slowly.’
No great drama, no conflict, just
an insight into the curious world of 1950s America, when everything was good
for you, whether that was DDT, nuclear fallout or cigarettes.
As the
title suggests, this doesn’t just concern Bryson’s childhood. It’s about the
1950s too, when almost 90% of American families had fridges, nearly
three-quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners and gas or
electric cookers – all thanks to the thousands of factories that hadn’t existed
before the war and which had changed from making tanks and battleships to
making cars and labour-saving goods after the war.
People felt
good. They felt that they could actually have all those things they had dreamed
of and even some things beyond their wildest dreams. Yet for all the
acquisitiveness, they exhibited an amazing simplicity of desire. People were
thrilled to own a toaster, for example. Nowadays, technology is taken for
granted.
Something
new seemed to turn up every week if not every day. Men wore hats and ties
almost everywhere they went and women prepared food from scratch. A policeman
seized a youth on suspicion of possessing drugs when in fact the powder he had
was called instant coffee.
Before the
war, half of the US
states had laws making it illegal to employ a married woman. The war changed
attitudes.
Young
Bryson had an older sister and brother – don’t miss the anecdote about his
brother’s handkerchiefs... Apparently, his mother wasn’t a good cook – their
kitchen was actually called the Burns Unit – and it had nothing to do with
George and Gracie. His descriptions of the family diet are hilarious – ‘Apart
from a few perishable dairy products, everything in the fridge was older than I
was...’
As Bryson
remarks, time goes slowly when you’re a kid; it’s adult life that is over in a
twinkling. Because childhood days were filled with nothing very much, kids were
curious about everything. ‘I knew how to cross every room in the house without
touching the floor,’ Bryson says and you can picture him clinging to wardrobe
doors and bouncing on bed-heads, a veritable ‘Just William’.
Nobody thought anything of the fact that kids
were playing on lawns drenched in noxious insecticide. ‘Possibly it was thought
that a generous dusting of DDT would do us good.’ Bryson says all the events
are more or less true, though he has changed the names, which is
understandable, considering. You don’t really want to know why Lumpy got his
name, I assure you, yet you probably knew somebody just like him in your
childhood.
It seems
that they were indestructible in those days. ‘We didn’t need seat belts,
airbags, smoke detectors, bottled water, child-proof caps on medicines, helmets
on bikes... We knew without a written reminder that bleach was not a refreshing
drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust.’
These were the long lost days of common sense, before the lawyers really woke
up.
Thankfully,
we in the UK
never suffered any pressures from product advertisers. In America, the
shows sponsored by Camel cigarettes were forbidden to show villains smoking cigarettes
and no mention could be made of arson, flames or coughs! They even demanded a
game-show re-filmed because a contestant said her astrological sign was Cancer;
they made her Aries, instead. The script of ‘Judgement of Nuremberg’ was
altered to remove all references to gas ovens and the gassing of Jews, by order
of the sponsors, the American Gas Association. Only in America...
Inevitably,
there are moving moments as memories evoke long-lost images and emotions. He
writes about the time he visited his mom in the Women’s Department of the
newspaper, sitting at her desk, hammering away at her Smith Corona upright.
‘I’d give anything, really almost anything at all, to pass just once more... to
see... my dear old mom at her desk typing away.’ We all probably have at least
one of those precious moments treasured in our hearts and minds.
His mother
took him to the movies regularly but he never got to see the films he fancied,
such as The Blob and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Instead, they watched talk, talk, talk
movies where ‘the characters always turned away when speaking so that they
appeared inexplicably to be addressing a bookcase rather than the person
standing behind them.’
Where does
the Thunderbolt Kid come into it? At some point Bryson was convinced that he
was not of Planet Earth and his parents had simply adopted him. When he was
about six he found an old jersey in the basement with a rather striking
thunderbolt on the chest. Obviously, this was ‘the Sacred Jersey of Zap, left
to me by King Volton, my late natural father...’ The creators of Superman have
a lot to answer for, believe me.
We’ve
entered a boy’s magical world of make-believe that’s more real than anything
happening in the so-called real world. Bryson captures the essence of this strange
behaviour, when imagination ruled. They didn’t have much television or other
imagination-sapping entertainments, they had to use their growing and endlessly
curious brains to make their own amusements.
The only
girl in their neighbourhood anybody really wanted to see naked was Mary O’Leary
but that wasn’t going to happen, at least not while Bryson was around. He
didn’t have that much luck placating his burgeoning hormones, it seems, and it
makes amusing reading.
He also
dwells on the absurdities of the Communist witch-hunts, the ignorance of the
nuclear test officials, the obscene hypocrisy of the treatment of black
Americans. And of course he mourns the passing of a way of life, where even a
huge department store, once the centre of their universe, had to close its
doors; a place where school records and photographs were recycled – destroyed -
because nobody seemed interested.
In Bryson’s eyes, this was a
wonderful world and he won’t see its like again. We can sympathise as the world
continues to change around us, not always for the best.
If you’ve
read any Bryson book before, you won’t need urging to read this memoir. If you
haven’t, try it, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Recommended.
***
On the other side of the Atlantic we can read Richard
Littlejohn’s reminiscences on the same period, Littlejohn’s Lost World (2014), which has picked up many good reviews on
Amazon.
