The word 'borstal' is correct and usable in written English.
It is a British English term that refers to a type of reform school for juvenile delinquents. Example: The young offender was sentenced to five years in a borstal for his crimes.
Director Alan Clarke's evisceration of the borstal system was a grim tale of survival, with shocking scenes of violence, racism, rape and suicide.
But one student said it was like being in a borstal.
He shows me other tattoos, some self-inflicted, including four tiny dots on the fingers of one hand, by all accounts a Borstal reference to suggest the inherent corruption among all police officers; and the words 'Rat Boy' inked on the inside of his bottom lip.
Here's a question for the conspiracy theorists: how is it that a onetime borstal boy, whose reputation as an actor is outstripped by his notoriety as a hellraiser, has been present for so many of the most significant moments in British culture over the past quarter-century?
Alas, the Almighty has rather more on his plate than ensuring that attending a sporting event nowadays doesn't have to equate to visiting a borstal where the inmates have been on the meths.
Sillitoe's next adapted novel The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, directed by Tony Richardson, featured Tom Courtenay as a borstal boy who rejected his chance of early release by defying the governor during a cross-country against a private school to prove he was his own man.
One result of his arrival at the ministry is likely to be the cancellation of Mr Grayling's plan to build a "secure college" for 320 young offenders – or a modern-day borstal, to its detractors.
While there, he passed six O-levels, and when, in 1984, he spent three weeks in Pentonville Prison for wrecking a nightclub, he found himself serving time under the same governor who'd overseen his stay in borstal – much, he says, to the amusement of them both.
From Alice's eccentric and world-weary father to Noor, her hormonal teenage chum from the borstal whose mother is dying of cancer, all are flawed yet endlessly sympathetic.
Family: He went to boarding school at 11, was expelled aged 13, and sent to borstal at 15. Career: Started as a stand-up comic and had his big break in the 1980s with The Comic Strip Presents.
"And borstal is tailor-made for you to buck against".
