Pranks for the memory

I see now that this was the equivalent of an artist’s early sketches. He was just steeling himself for the big one: to lay before his readers an entire childhood in Des Moines, Iowa.

Bryson is the Thunderbolt Kid of the title, perhaps because a publisher thought Bill Bryson: The Des Moines Years would not shift enough copies. America in the 1950s was bursting at the seams with comic superheroes, but young Billy — as he was then known — somehow found it necessary to create his own. At the age of six, he discovered an old woollen sports jersey in the family basement. It was deep green with a gold thunderbolt across the chest. He slipped it on, and the Thunderbolt Kid was born.

Bryson’s childhood was a memoir waiting to happen. His early life was populated with colourful characters who could have emigrated to the mid-West from a copy of Cider with Rosie. There was hefty Patty Hefferman, who was prepared to strip naked at the age of seven for inspection by 24 boys in a treehouse. And pretty Mary O’Leary, who wasn’t. There were Bill’s three uncles, who lived together on a farm in Omaha and appeared to do nothing at all until it was revealed that one of them had a secret wife. And most of all there were Bryson’s parents, who both worked for the city’s main newspaper, The Des Moines Register.

His mother was the home-furnishings editor, who would burst into the house each evening just in time to burn the family dinner. She was scatty and forgetful, and once sent her son to school in his sister’s lime-green trousers. Bryson’s father, also Bill, was a baseball writer once described as “the best ever, anywhere”. The good thing about Bill’s dad was that he took his son to games. The slightly less good things about Bill’s dad were that he was comically careful with his money and had a habit of wandering through the house late at night, naked from the waist down.

All in all, the Midwest of America seems a rather relaxed sort of a place. We live now in the Age of Pessimism. If the terrorists don’t get us, then we will surely burn in the fiery furnace of global warming. We cannot drive, fly, plug in an electrical appliance or flush our lavatories without a small feeling of guilt. By contrast, the 1950s was a time of great optimism for many Americans. They were excited about the possibilities that technology could offer. They looked forward to a future of atomic trains, space colonies, a gyrocopter in every drive, greater wealth and more leisure. “We didn’t need seat belts, airbags, smoke detectors,” recalls Bryson. “We knew without written reminders that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust.” The book is a reassuring portrait of that more innocent age.

In fact, the greatest danger to the good folk of Iowa seems to have been the Thunderbolt Kid himself. If you ever visited a public lavatory in Des Moines in the 1950s, only to find every cubicle locked but empty, then Bryson owes you an apology. This was his party trick. He would bolt the first door, then crawl under the divider into the remaining compartments to secure the rest. When he wasn’t taunting his weak-bladdered neighbours, he was dropping M&Ms into a coffee shop from the mezzanine floor above. “A peanut M&M that falls 70ft into a bowl of tomato soup makes one heck of a splash, I can tell you,” he reports.

What with burning a hole in his uncle’s head by training the sun on it through a magnifying glass, and sneaking underage into a strip show, the Thunderbolt Kid would need all his superpowers these days just to avoid being taken into care.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16.99 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst