Old School Noose

BORSTAL BOY (372 pp.)--Brendan Behan--Knopf ($4.50).

An Oedipus complex about Alma Mater has long nourished English letters. From the days of Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown's Schooldays), almost the first things heard out of an English writer are usually the half-strangulated noises of one noosed in an old school tie. As an obsessive theme the Old School has no counterpart in U.S. fiction, unless it is the Home Town and the shouts of the boys who cry Wolfe.

The 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.

Gabriel's Gab. As is proper for the hero of his own story, Behan went to his hard school in obedience to family tradition; like his father before him, he was a member of the 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 . . . That's the Irish, all over . . ."

Several qualities combine to make Bad Boy Behan's book a pleasant exception in the usually dreary field of schoolboy or prison reminiscence. He has Gabriel's own gift of the gab, a cold eye for himself, a warm heart for others, and the narrative speed of a tinker. On the whole, he also makes good his claim to "a sense of humour that would nearly cause me to burst out laughing at my own funeral, providing it was not my own."

Why Not Lady Astor? Behan as a boy revolutionary had to put up with the usual political 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-fed bastards . . . No, be Jesus, I was from Russell Street, North Circular Road, Dublin, from the Northside where, be Jesus, the likes of Dale wouldn't make a dinner for them, where the whole of this pack of Limeys would be scruff-hounds would be et, bet, and threw up again--et without salt. I'll James you, you bastard."

The pleasant thing about this narrative --often grim, untainted by self-pity, and no more boastful than might be expected --is the respect that grew up between "Paddy" and his Limey captors. The worst thing the Limeys did was to deny him martyrdom. The best was to teach him Rugby and lend him Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree. When they gave the boy back his long trousers after three years, and handed him an expulsion order and a ticket back to Ireland, they sent him home a man. Eton never did better, although Behan makes clear that an unofficial Borstal school song is a good deal more spirited than the Eton Boating Song. More or less to the tune of the famed cockney ballad, I Don't Want to Be a Soldier, it goes:

Oh, they say I ain't no good 'cause I'm

a Borstal boy,

But a Borstal boy is what I'll always be, I know it is a title, a title I'll bear with

pride, To Borstal, to Borstal and the beautiful

countryside.

I turn my back upon the 'ole society, And spend me life a-thievin' 'igh and

low . . .

I should have been in Borstal years ago, Gor blimey! I should 'ave been in Borstal years ago!

*The term derives from the village of Borstal, Kent, where the first of a number of corrective institutions for "juvenile adults" (between the ages of 16 and 21) was located.

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