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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.