HARD TIMES IN TEMPLE
A SOLDIER’S SON: AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD
DURING WORLD WAR II
By John
E. Hodgkins
325 pp.
Down East Books. $16.95.
Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves
I may
be a Franco, but I am enough of an American to be a sucker for stories that
feature families who are down on their luck, poor but clever and plucky
enough not only to endure but also to triumph over their circumstances. In
such stories, the mother and the father are hardworking and decent, holding
the family together in the most dire situations. The children, as
hardworking and decent as their parents, tend to be little scavengers,
gleaning treasures from the castoffs they inevitably find. Often, one of the
children in particular will have some spark of talent or personality that
endears him or her to a rich person, who then helps bring the family out of
poverty.
However, John E. Hodgkins’s A Soldier’s Son: An American Boyhood during
World War II is not such a story. While this moving and at times
gripping memoir does have some of the above-mentioned qualities, the poverty
and the hard times, what it lacks are sharp, resourceful adults who are able
to lead the family out of troubled waters, so to speak. Instead, with only a
few exceptions, the adults tend to be petty at best and vengeful and
dangerously self-absorbed at worst, with little regard for the well-being
and happiness of the children. To put it bluntly, A Soldier’s Son is
no Little Women, with a strong and knowing Marmee to lead the way.
Instead, the mother in A Soldier’s Son is weak, nervous, and unhappy,
a scholarly woman who, in rebelling against her strict, religious parents,
marries the wrong man, a slightly sadistic alcoholic concerned mainly with
his own pleasure. Hodgkins describes his father this way: “Pa had no rules
that governed the behavior of a man except those that were not
governing—leave life to chance; if it feels good, it’s okay; society’s rules
are for others.” Not surprisingly, a feeling of dread thrums through the
entire book.
The
memoir begins in 1943 in Temple, Maine, where the author was born and spent
most of his childhood. Hodgkins is eight years old, and he has two younger
sisters, Nancy and Patty. Temple, “a town of churches and Grange Halls and
little schools,” is in western Maine and is considered very rural even by
the standards of a rural state. A place of natural beauty, Temple has ponds
and streams, and it is close to some of the loveliest mountains in Maine.
However, as Maine writer Sanford Phippen might ask, is beauty enough? The
answer, as always, is no, and only those who are secure would think
otherwise.
Hodgkins’s “Ma and Pa” have what might be called a dysfunctional marriage,
with Ma being too clinging and anxious to please and Pa being deliberately
and casually cruel, teasing in a way that is not funny. On an outing in the
car, Pa drives too fast, taunts Ma about her inability to drive, petulantly
stops the car, and throws the keys in the bushes. Dutiful Ma then cajoles Pa
back into a good mood and the keys are found and the journey continues.
Hodgkins writes, “Around home Pa had to have his way. I saw no partnership
between him and Ma….Their match bordered on turbulence, undercut by
uncertainty.” Intentional or not, Hodgkins’s portrait of his parents is so
disagreeable that I found it difficult to have any sympathy for them.
However, the world is full of disagreeable people, and, growing up in a
rural community, I have known a few couples like Ma and Pa who had an
oppressive, male-dominated relationship. So the story, difficult as it is,
rings true. Households run by tyrants are seldom happy.
When Pa
is drafted into the army to fight in World War II, the family’s situation
goes from bad to worse. Ma “is helpless without him. She doesn’t drive the
car; she has no aptitude or love for the care of animals or house repairs;
she relies on Pa for most rural necessaries.” In other words, Ma lacks
gumption. She also lacks money—their savings account is meager, and many
months go by before the army sends her a check. With the exception of her
ineffectual father-in-law, she lacks the goodwill of her husband’s family,
who also live in Temple. Aunt Marion, Pa’s sister and the matriarch of the
family, takes a particular dislike to Ma, and the aunt’s behavior is, at
times, just plain spiteful. While one can understand Aunt Marion’s
impatience with a woman like Ma, there is no excuse for standing by as one’s
family slides into desperate circumstances. The help could have (and should
have, in my opinion) been given in the form of food, fuel, or clothing.
As it
is, short on wood, short on money, Ma and the children are often cold and
hungry. And Pa’s response? Requests for money so that he can drink and
gamble. Ma, of course, complies, taking money from savings so that Pa can
have what he wants.
Fortunately for Ma and the children, they have friends and neighbors who
help. Large, boisterous Fern, who moves in with them, knows “the country
lifestyle” and takes charge of “sawing and splitting wood, driving the
car…and advising Ma.” For a while, she becomes the head of the house, and
without her, one wonders what would have happened to Ma and the children
during that first hard winter. Eddie, another friend, also helps, and
somehow the little family gets by.
Hodgkins, using information culled from diaries and letters, intersperses
his father’s experience in Europe with the children’s harrowing time in
Maine. To be honest, I didn’t much care what happened to Pa, whom I really
didn’t like. My heart was with the children, and I impatiently read the
descriptions of Pa’s wartime adventures, all the while eager to get back to
Hodgkins and his sisters in Temple. However, I did get the sense that the
discipline of the army was good for a man like Pa, who seemed to need the
order it imposed on his life. This is an ironic counterpoint to the chaos of
war, but nonetheless, for a brief time, Pa’s life had a purpose and meaning
that he was unable to find on his own.
I won’t
reveal the ending, but the overall sadness of this story is inescapable,
even haunting. Well written and spare, A Soldier’s Son is a
cautionary tale about what happens when adults don’t act like adults and how
children suffer because of it.
