Abstract
Townies is the sequel to Robert Hunt’s memoir Corner Boys and takes us back to the mean streets – and schools – of St. John’s in the 1950s and 1960s. This is a coming-of-age story about the friendships between young Robert and his fellow students of Holy Cross School, who often lived in fear of punishment from the Irish Christian Brothers who taught them. Poverty and iron-fisted authority ruled supreme in the lives of the boys from Brazil Street, and the pleasures they knew were simple and fleeting. With a complement of interviews with his former Holy Cross schoolmates, Robert Hunt paints a picture of days gone by that are funny and nostalgic for some, while painful and haunting for others.