Childhood Country

A lonely boy's landscape encompasses the U. S. Middle West
and California during the Great Depression 1930s through the
World War II home front and late 1940s. Broken shards of
youthful memory: rooming with strangers, moving from place
to place with sudden frequency and continual uncertainty
because of poverty and a mother's marital failures. Seen
through a boy's eyes from six to sixteen, here are children and
adults in the throes of financial hardship and tumultuous
wartime: an empty house with deathly echoes, relatives swept
into the cataclysm of war, a cousin gripped by suicidal grief, a
family betrayed, and unexpected humor, friendship, hope and
first love. He escapes into movies, comic books, adventurous
imagination with fantasy excursions, and fascination with
guns. Through it all is his mother, raised on dreams of a
luxurious life but thwarted by doomed relationships as she
searches for love and security when both are rationed or
transient. He lives an adolescence not knowing who he is or
where he belongs as events propel him toward the looming
horizon of manhood.