Word: borstals
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...BORSTAL BOY (372 pp.)-Brendan Behan-Knopf...
...latest addition to the Eton-Harrow-Rugby tradition deals with Borstal,*an equally exclusive institution reserved for young English criminals. Brendan Behan, a Borstal Old Boy, has written about his three years in Borstal tie and short, school-uniform pants ("like a bleedin' boy scout"). The second published work (1958) by an author known in the U.S. chiefly for his play, The Quare Fellow (TIME, Dec. 8), Borstal Boy is a rousing reform-school saga...
...Irish Republican Army. At 16, in 1939, he traveled to England with the intention of blowing up the battleship King George V. After less than a week and nothing blown up, British po; lice caught Brendan with the explosive goods on him in a Liverpool slum tenement. At Borstal, one of the "screws" (warders) showed a keen sense of British affection for unsuccessful revolutionaries. Said he to the chubby would-be martyr: "Now, Guy Fawkes, lead on to the dungeons . . . You've got an 'ole suite of rooms to yourself . . . And I bet you ain't satisfied...
...naivete of his British fellow prisoners, who wanted to know about his bombing program: "Why didn't you do in some of the big pots . . . like that old Lady Astor?" There is the usual prison rough stuff where bullies must be identified and overthrown. Behan ("Paddy" to his Borstal pals) was good at both. His worst words are reserved not for the tough screws but for two unpleasant fellow prisoners called James and Dale: "I was no country Paddy from the middle of the Bog of Allen to be frightened to death by a lot of Liverpool seldom...
...during his writing bouts. Not that it is easy to stick to work, now that the vagabond liver has money and fame. Brendan has started a novel about Dublin, but, he says, "I can't get on with it with all this blanking success." Meanwhile, since his Borstal Boy was banned as "obscene" by the Irish government, he strides about bellowing (to the tune of MacNamara's Band...