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"Followed one of the trails, just beyond the 'lodge', to an old quarry and, on the moors just beyond, a cluster of weird outcrops formin a nat'ral citadel - remindin me o the Cullowhee Knobs, where a Cherokee Chief gave himself up to the Great Spirit. Cathy says ya can see a giant face on the quarry, but I couldn't - tho maybe I'm expectin the profile o that there Chief and he ain't there ... Anyways, on the further side of the rock, halfway down, you can scramble into a cave. It looks kinda small when you first see it through a tumble of that coconut-smellin gorse and nettles: you wouldn't think it would go far, just an alcove tryin too hard to be sinister, like some corny act at a Halloween party. That pamphlet I told ya about, it said you could only pass through it if you was a virgin ... where would ya be without the power of legends?

In that summer of '63, it was great to be young and abroad, at first. The beach was dirty, the seals was lazy, but it seemed the panorama of ole Europe was there before me. Now, I guess I fear for the kids, the kids everywhere. Back then, though, it was radiant days, radiant days.

A vulnerable and bullied boy vanishes from a boarding-school in an austerely beautiful part of the Scottish county of Fife. A young nurse from the American South encounters love - and culture-clash - at the school. Her beau, a teacher and former army officer, is a tense and troubled man. A precocious young aesthete stumbles towards maturity. A lecherous, alcoholic headmaster quotes Shakespeare at inopportune moments. Tragedy? Farce? Both? Offset by praise-poetry to Fife landscape and folk culture, Tom Hubbard's complex, sardonic tale scurries through unexpected corridors and caverns, up and down dubious stairs, its secret architecture reflecting the "Big Hoose" in which much of the action takes place ...