Mainers who grew up during the Great Depression frequently brush off the hardships. Since everyone was pretty much the same, they frequently say, they didn’t know they were poor.

Not so Thomas Hanna. He begins his humorously rueful memoir, “Shoutin’ into the Fog,” with this statement: “If they ever hand out medals to survivors of the Great Depression, my brothers and sisters and I should move straight to the head of the line.” Oh, he does admit that many a neighbor also struggled, “But unless they’d lived a year at the Hanna bungalow, they hadn’t really known poor. At least that is the way I saw it.”

Hanna grew up in Five Islands, a town on the northeast edge of Georgetown Island, linked to Bath and the mainland by a series of bridges. Reid State Park is nearby, as is Robinhood, where artists William and Marguerite Zorach summered. Five Islands itself is now home to many a seasonal cottage, with the summer residence of former Gov. Angus King located nearby, but that’s not the geography of Hanna’s tale. His world is that of piles of used lumber weathering in yards with the hopes of someone finding the time, energy and money to build a second story, and of a school baseball field cut in half because the town has discovered gravel under the sod and so appropriated half the schoolyard for the roads. This was a time when salvaging was everything. The interior walls of Hanna’s own 24-by-26-foot bungalow were constructed from the cardboard cartons in which the National Biscuit Co. shipped their goods to the local store. “It was just for the time being, my father promised – until he could afford something more solid,” writes Hanna. The cardboard was there the day the elder Hanna died.

Despite the fact that Hanna’s family did seem to have been more depressed than others during the Great Depression – helped along, of course, by a succession of eight children – Hanna cloaks his pathos and anger with a boy’s enthusiasm and a kind of gallows humor. A child, after all, can ignore the mosquitoes breeding in his swampy yard and instead revel in the spring peepers. Hanna deftly captures his era’s childhood obsessions, such as collecting box-tops and ice cream lids for prizes, that is until the day he went after two Hood ice cream lids floating in the water under the wharf – without knowing how to swim.

Hanna’s father, a descendant of seafarers and entrepreneurs, had been exposed to nerve gas during World War I. Too small and weak to work on the water, he served as a caretaker for the Methodist summer community on Malden Island, one of the offshore islands that gives Five Islands its name.

But Thomas Jefferson Hanna was fired when a stomach ulcer prevented him from doing a caretaker’s heavy lifting. He then became a general laborer, as much as he could, and a salesman. For this he owned a succession of used cars, including an old Studebaker with side curtains and a fold-down top.

Many adventures were had in the Hanna cars. Though they were frequently in disrepair, this never thwarted Grandma Hanna from insisting on her right to a ride. One afternoon, she walked down the hill from her house to theirs. She didn’t stay long – no relative seemed to have stayed long in that chilly, child-packed bungalow. What Grandma Hanna came for was to be driven home in her son’s automobile – only this day the transmission was out and all that worked was reverse. That didn’t faze Grandma. She climbed into the car and, “looking as high and mighty as Queen Mary herself, sat enthroned on the black-leather rear seat,” while the car backed up the road to her house.

The best of memoirs offers clear insights into the life of a community as well as the story of an individual. Hanna’s reveals a world so scrappy and troubled that even now his humor seems to be a great act of courage. Should a child of today be living in the conditions that Hanna describes – eight children stuffed into two rooms with cardboard walls dividing them, in such poverty that Hanna was encouraged to leave school and go to work at age 14 – the parents would lose their children to the foster care system. Forget any notion of the good old days in “Shoutin’ into the Fog.” Indeed, the title seems to refer equally as much to a family crying for help in an unseeing world as to the actual foggy passage Hanna recalls, crossing Sheepscot Bay after an excursion to meet some girls on the Southport side.

Times truly were hard; there was little sense of a supportive community, or even much of a supportive family. And yet, the force of life shines absolutely strong throughout Hanna’s many-storied tale. When there was fun to be had, Hanna not only had it, but tells of it with some laugh-out-loud antics that make this memoir exceptionally poignant, compelling and often quite hard to put down.

Donna Gold helps families and communities recall their stories through her business, Personal History, www.personalhistory.org. She can be reached at donna@personalhistory.org.