Your childhood isn't dead. It isn't even past.
"One of the great myths of life," writes Bill Bryson in "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" (Broadway, $25), "is that childhood passes quickly." Characterized by such protracted stretches as the school day, car trips, waiting for birthdays and Christmas, childhood "goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling." To this I would add that not only is childhood immensely long, but it never goes away in quite the same way that passages of one's adult life do. It may be over, but it is still there, a huge presence to be considered and reconsidered and recalled and reformulated. I suppose people who have greater affairs on their mind than I do -- how to survive war and deprivation, say, or how to spend a $20 million year-end bonus -- don't waste as much time parsing their personal histories. Still, I'll bet I spend only twice as much time doing so as most others of "a certain age" do, but then I have two childhoods ever with me: a Midwestern one and an Irish one. I owe this abundance to my parents' indecision about where exactly we were all going to live. "We simply can't stay here" might be engraved on their tombstone. And now I have before me two entirely dissimilar memoirs: Bryson's, of growing up in Iowa, and Hugo Hamilton's "The Harbor Boys" (HarperCollins, $24.95), the second installment of his memoir of growing up near Dublin. Both writers bring back to me a sense of the time and places where -- all unknown to them, incredibly enough -- I spent my youths.
A few weeks after Bobby Thomson unloaded the most famous home run in history to deliver the 1951 National League pennant to the New York Giants -- a feat witnessed by Bryson's sportswriter father -- the author of "The Thunderbolt Kid" was born: It was fate, he suggests with decorous egocentricity, and indeed, he presents himself as an avatar of the decade itself. The book, which is very funny and bracingly uncharitable, is an exercise in hyperbole, the ideal trope for the United States during this time of monstrous fears (the bomb, Communism, race, juvenile delinquency) and gargantuan confidence in progress. Bryson presents the great advances -- both realized and projected -- with jubilant spirits: "Frozen salads. Spray-on mayonnaise. . . . A complete pizza meal in a tube"; mail delivered by guided missile; the Atomic Energy Commission's and its dark genius Edward Teller's proposals "to blow away irksome impediments to commerce and shipping like the great Barrier Reef" and, by further judicious deployment of nuclear devices, to banish "winters from the northern United States . . . sending them permanently to the Soviet Union instead." It could be that the decade actually defies hyperbole.
In addition to parading its grotesqueries before us, Bryson stops here and there to eulogize the age's more modest pleasures, among them childhood's freedom from supervision and enforced activity, and the simple joy that came from acquiring a household appliance. "It was the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron," he observes. "If you bought a major appliance, you invited the neighbors around to have a look at it." When his own family bought an Amana Stor-Mor refrigerator, it was, "for at least six months . . . like an honored guest in our kitchen." The book is also an affectionate and humorous account of Bryson's grandparents' farm, his abstracted, working mother (also a journalist), and his obdurately frugal father, who took the family on vacation trips of educational worth and stupendous tedium.
In Ireland we could always spot our fellow Americans in the street by their airbrushed, pneumatic bodies, their unguarded expressions, and their apparel: "I see my compatriots without ties in the streets here," my father noted in 1958, "but most of them do wear a camera." We were not Irish, but we did not feel American. We children were in some kind of national limbo and didn't know anyone like us. Meanwhile, only a few miles away, Hamilton was growing into an even more confusing estate, being the son of a German mother and an Irish chauvinist father who forbade the speaking of English, the language of the oppressor. Hamilton has described this brilliantly in his memoir "The Speckled People" and carries the story forward in "The Harbor Boys."
There are excellent stories in the present book, but the central presence, as in the last, is still Hamilton's father. Hamilton is a little easier on him here than in the earlier book, yet the older man's difficult, tormented nature comes through just as powerfully. It was his habit to transform practically every occurrence into an illustration of an idée fixe : that Ireland lost herself when she lost her tongue, and that the only way back was to reclaim it. His father, Hamilton writes, says the Irish are "all walking around like ghosts, following maps with invisible streets and invisible place names. He says the Irish are still hiding in a foreign language." Hamilton's mother, on the other hand, who had seen first hand in Germany what fanatic nationalism wreaks, possessed a deep sense of human obligation. It is an aspect of the father's intransigence that he can construe his wife's acts of compassion and decency as forms of political action, and such is Hamilton's deftness with the telling incident that the scenes in which this dreary alchemy occurs are bleakly comic.
Miscommunication and the burden of the past, national and personal, mark Hamilton's home: "Our family is a factory of remembering and forgetting," he writes. Outside, his two identities bedevil him; he is ridiculed at times as an Irish speaker, at others, more often, as a German -- a Nazi, of course, given the subtlety of mind of his torment ors. In his adolescence, the harbor, a separate world with its own denizens, routines, and drama, becomes his haven. Here he is a harbor boy, though he has to protect his autonomy by betraying, as he sees it, his mother, by hiding from her when she appears on a friendly mission. This is only one of the acts of treachery with which he scourges himself, and in truth, the book, like Ireland herself, is preoccupied with betrayal -- though, happily, the former, at least, ends with redemption.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 