This is a biography and autobiography. The biography is of Willie’s father who was an Ulster MP in Westminster, leader of the Ulster Unionists and Grand Master of the Orange Order. As a youth before WW2, he had seen himself as a playwright and poet, studying Divinity at Trinity in Dublin. The question as to why a creative, sensitive student should have become a conventional, reactionary leader after the war is intriguing and is explored in the book.

Willie, the eldest son, was born into a privileged Ulster family and sent to private boarding school but rejected the tribal values of his family and followed a different lifestyle, working in the shipyards of Belfast and, as an actor in the theatres of Dublin and Belfast.

After a breakdown, he moved to Iona in Scotland, where he met his wife, and then worked as a hill shepherd in the Highlands. After a tractor accident put an end to that life, he went to University and became a teacher/ counsellor/writer.
Two parallel lives. Father and son with an understanding never to talk politics, Willie being a socialist and republican, the father a Unionist and Conservative.