Frank McNally, , probably the most erudite, cultured, witty and unashamedly Irish man making his living by writing
for a newspaper, amazingly tells us that he has just acquired Borstal Boy, which he has never read before.
But otherwise he is in fine form today, 17th June, when Amhran na bhFhiann is to compete for the Ascot Gold Cup.
Yesterday, June 16, would have been my Mother’s 120th Birthday. It was on her third birthday that the (first generation)
Dubliner, James Joyce, met the Galway woman Nora Barnacle, a day immortalised in literature as Bloomsday. My mother, whose family was long established in Dublin, used expressions such as “kinatt” for an untrustworthy bowsy
and “Rossie” for an unruly female that I never heard on anyone else’s lips, nor encountered in print other than in the
works of James Joyce, which I first encountered in my mid or late twenties. Most of my contemporaries, unless they went to University, never read Joyce, nor did anyone I knew read the Irish Times before it was edited by Douglas Gageby in the early 1960s.
It was about 1960, as I was looking through an album of old postcards that one fell out. It featured a photograph of
of the bridge over the Munster Blackwater at Fermoy, a magnificent river and a handsome substantial bridge which may endure forever
It was built by the most useful and reliable forebears of the wastrel John Stanislaus Joyce, and his scrounging genius son,James. In fact John Stanislaus had briefly attended St Colman’s College in Fermoy when its Principal was the future Archbishop Croke, who, according the Obituary in the (London) Times, had little time for books, particularly books of sermons.
Anyhow the postcard was from a young teacher at St Colman’s to his nine-year old God-daughter in Kilkenny and it was addressed and written in Irish. It encouraged her interest in the language, which he had himself only taken up about three years earlier on the suggestion of her father, who had once been his next-door neighbour in the village of Cloughjordan in the County Tipperary. The child was my Aunt Eileen, the writer was Thomas MacDonagh and the friend was Patrick Kennedy, then running his own school, The High School, Kilkenny. Five years later,Kennedy
and MacDonagh were instrumental in founding the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland, and at its first Dublin
meeting in the Mansion House the young lecturer Ed de Valera acted as an usher. You may wonder, “What ever happened
to him?”
I think the only banned books I ever read in Ireland were “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” by the humourless bore D.H.,Lawrence,
and the gloriously humane, generous and funny “Borstal Boy” by Brendan Behan. When I first visited London, in September 1964,
I bought a copy for about two shillings from a market stall, Arriving in Dun Laoire from Holyhead, I wrapped the book in a copy of THE IRISH PRESS, and tucked it under my oxter.
But a Customs Officer confiscated it.
I have read the book frequently since, either in whole or in part. And its final paragraph is wonderfully ironic. In 1943 or
thereabouts, Behan was discharged from Borstal and the British Home Office issued a voucher for a return to Dublin.
via Dun Laoire, where a Customs Officer, knowing where he is coming from, gives him Cead Mile Failte, and, in Irish
says, “It’s must be great to be free” to which Behan replies, in the same language -“Indeed it must be.”
(Myself, my books and effects are suffering the disorganisation that goes with our ages, and I apologise for not rendering the
original Irish passages verbatim in that language. “Forgive my English” as they might say in France!)
(For further musings on Behan see my Blog “BRIEF ENCOUNTERS”
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