6 Victoria Road, Colchester, Essex.
10.7.66
John Boyd Esq., B.B.C. Broadcasting House, Ormeau Avenue, Belfast.
Dear John, I'm sorry I couldn't wait over the weekend, but BEA said it might otherwise be 5 days before I'd get a booking and I was lucky to get a cancelled one on the Saturday. Thank you for lending me Brian Friel's book of stories which I enclose. Lovely stories, and, as you said 'The Death of a Scientific Humanist' is the one. Only one thing worries me (and maybe it's my own fault) – the intricate gamut of care which the whole book shows. Will he – I'm sure he can – step outside for a moment and look at the house he has been living in, turn the paper-bag of love inside-out? The nice inexhaustible themes of Ultster – the Cockfight, The Visitor to the School – come up alarmingly good (alarmingly because he's good) as if a new and young Michael McLaverty had started to write again. 'Who will rid me frrm the body of this death?' I come back in my mind to Frank
