Pool_2

>> Anocht << "Tonight" (Belfast, 1964)

You have to go back, back to innocence. We get to where we are from there. "Gavin! Glory! What are you doing here? Da will kill me. Off with you! Go away. Jesus, go, before anyone sees you!" Katharine was emphatic enough, but there was no dismissing this love starved puppy. Her father would be furious if he knew that Gavin was here on this street. Da, William MacCullah, raised in Scotland, had been impressed here - his own term for working in Belfast - by his employer Host~Continent Hotels. Katharine had good reason to be alarmed. Da's concern was realistic no matter how bigoted it seemed. The MacCullah name, though long Anglicized, had considerable respectability here because of its ancient Ulster origins. In a sense this family had returned to its roots. Yet, the longer his professional stay in Belfast, the more Da felt alien and the thicker his Scottish burr became. He found himself continually trying to insulate his children from the cultural iciness of these arctic people. So why does a young boy's infatuation raise such anxiety? There is something off in these surrounds. Something basic. You lose it in the details. But he, a born writer, had captured it, exactly, in one of his notorious essays which found their way into print in a progressive college daily. You wouldn't know that he was too young to attend, as he wrote: