Boy

This novel, published in 1931, details the experience of Arthur Fearon, a 14-year-old boy forced into a tough adult world after having his schooling cut short due to his parents' poverty in an Irish district of Liverpool. He is terrified of his violent father and when he cannot cope with the demands of work in the docklands, he decides to stow away on a ship rather than face the wrath of his father. On the ship's journey to Alexandria, he is abused and taunted by most of the crew but receives some kindness from a few individuals. When they arrive in port, the boy is taken by one of the crew to the city's red-light district and introduced to a lust that he had not previously been aware of having. Before the ship leaves, he is determined to have another visit to the young prostitute.

The author, James Hanley (born 3 September 1897) was the Liverpudlian son of Irish parents. He left school in 1910 and went to sea in early 1915. In April 1917 he jumped ship in Saint John, New Brunswick and soon had joined the army at Fredericton, enlisting in the 236th Battalion. He served in France with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force in 1918. He was gassed near Bapaume, was invalided and subsequently discharged.

Although the author’s own experience informed this novel, he rejected the suggestion that some of the events had happened to him. Writing in 1953, the author outlines how he as young seaman “overhears a conversation on the bridge of a ship, from which emerges the terrible fate of a young boy, who is undoubtedly the central figure of Boy.” (reminiscences described in his son Liam Hanley's preface to a 1990 edition of the novel). The telling of a story of another boy who went through similar experiences to himself falls into the same pattern as many novels written by survivors of the First World War. Such writers, often shaped by survivors’ guilt, imagined the tragic death of someone like themselves.

There is little reference to the First World War in this novel. The central character, Arthur Fearon, when asked by his teacher to explain his distractedness in class, reveals that he's the only surviving child of his parents:
“I had one brother and sister. Both died during the war, sir.”
Note that he uses the word ‘during’ — it would be wrong to presume that they were killed in the war. If we presume that the strike which Arthur’s father has recently participated in was the general strike of 1926, then the novel is set about 1927. Arthur was, therefore, born about 1913. It would seem unlikely that his brother and sister were that much older than him that they would have served in the war. Perhaps they succombed to disease, such as the influenza pandemic (the death rate from this outbreak of 1918 was as high as 215 per 1,000 in Liverpool).