BOOKS
335
TOM BROWN IN QUOD
BORSTAL BOY. By Brendon Behon. Knopf. $4.50.
In 1939, Brendan Behan, aged sixteen, was sent to England
by the I. R. A. on a mission of terrorist bombing. Behan had been in–
volved in the Irish Republican movement from the moment of his birth:
his father had been captured during the Civil War, "and when I was six
weeks old my mother brought me up to the jail and held me up, on the
road outside, for him to see...." After 1922, the title
1.
R.
A.
was lim–
ited to that intransigeantly nationalistic wing of the revolutionary army
which had refused to accept either the Treaty or Partition; it was de–
clared illegal in Eire, the jails filled up with its members, and they were
excommunicated. Behan grew up within this movement; its history was
his, its cause his cause. As a small boy he had belonged to the Fianna)
or Irish Republican Boy Scouts, and when he was thirteen years old he
began training in the
1.
R. A. The bombing campaign in the service of
which he had been sent on his first and only mission was intended to
force the English to free the six Northern Counties. Other bombings, in
which innocent people were killed, had already been brought off in Eng–
land;
1.
R.
A.
men were being captured, tried, and sentenced to death.
Less than forty-eight hours after he arrived in Liverpool, even be–
fore he had time to unpack his "Sinn Fein conjuror's outfit" (his
bombing kit), young Behan was picked up by the police. He expected
to be beaten, tortured, perhaps even hanged, and with the resoluteness
of a youthful fanatic was prepared to become a martyr for "Holy Ire–
land." His mind was swarming with superstitions about the English:
when he heard some Anglican prisoners singing a hymn to the tune of
Deutschland Uber Alles
he was puzzled until he recalled that "the Brit–
ish Royal Family were all Germans and spoke German in their own
palaces." It was also overflowing with those names and events, so sing–
ular and exotic, yet so passionately clung to, with which anyone who has
known Irishmen for very long soon becomes familiar: Roger Casement,
the "Republican saint"; "Bloody Sunday, when the Black and Tans at–
tacked a football crowd in our street; the massacre at Cork; Balbriggan;
Amritsar; the R. A. F. raids on Indian villa:ges"; "St. Stanislaus Kostka,
the boy Prince of Poland"; "Dr. Gallagher [driven] mad with torture
when the Fenians were doing their solitary confinement in Tom Clarke's
time." At any time of the day or night young Behan was likely to break
into a tirade beginning, "A synod of Irish Bishops held at Drumceatt
