The Silent Weaver (18 page)

Goldsworthy, who moved to live in southern Scotland, specialised in making representative and abstract constructions from natural ingredients. He used mud, pine cones, snow, stone, twigs and thorns. He also used flowers and leaves. This was, he thought, courageous – ‘I think it's incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.'

Andy Goldsworthy's art-school-trained, studio-built leaf collages of the 1980s and 1990s differ from Angus MacPhee's
wild, outside creations. Goldsworthy had access to different varieties of leaf, such as maple and iris, which were unavailable to MacPhee. And Goldsworthy was interested in a heritable effect; in something which would last as long as possible, whereas MacPhee was not. So Andy Goldsworthy's gorgeous colours and patterns were often achieved by the judicious use of evergreens and dry, autumnal leaves. Angus MacPhee, living and working in the moment, was interested in the complexion of fresh summer deciduous blossoms, which faded to a uniform brown when the days shortened and the temperature fell – if by that time they had not been raked onto a bonfire and burnt.

By the 1970s most of Angus's close Uist family had died or dispersed. His oldest sister Mary Ellen and his youngest sister Peigi had both married Englishmen and moved away to live in the south. His Aunt Anna and his father Neil had long been lying in Ardivachar cemetery, at the western edge of the Iochdar machair.

But Patricia remained with her husband and her children on the croft at 52 Balgarva, and Patricia never forgot her brother. As the two middle siblings in four, Patricia and Angus had been close. Her sister Peigi said that Patricia ‘would promise my father that she would bring him home'.

Patricia's daughter Eilidh Campbell knew nothing about her uncle Angus until her early teens, when a cruel joke by a South Uist schoolmate hinted at his existence.

So I asked my mother, and she told me that Angus had been in the Faroes, and that he wasn't well after that. I think she wanted to shield us from it.

Later, in the early 1980s, I was living in Inverness, and that's when I started going to visit him at Craig Dunain. My
visits were lovely. I'm not sure he knew who I was. I took along family photographs and introduced myself, and I'd chatter away to him in Gaelic, and sing to him in Gaelic, and he would just occasionally say yes or no, in English. I'd talk to him in Gaelic and he'd reply in English. Perhaps he thought I was an inspector or an official come to spy on him!

Angus was so good physically, and they'd used his energies on the farm. I'd see him at work in the big strawberry patch. He had his own private corners, surrounded by rhododendrons. He had his little tool of bent wire or fence staple, and his leaves and his pile of grass.

And he had horses. There was a beautiful chestnut horse with a white dash on its head that used to hang around the fence. It would sometimes lean over and go for the pile of grass, and Angus would tap it on the nose, as if to say, ‘Get off! That's my building materials!'

I'd go in to see him, and he could be anywhere in the grounds – they'd say, ‘He'll be back for his meal, he always comes in for meals.' I'd take him black bogey tobacco and a copy of the
Stornoway Gazette
. I never saw him smoke, but somebody once told me that he used the
Stornoway Gazette
for cigarette papers.

He walked in big strides, stooping slightly, with his hands behind his back. I say this because when my brother Iain went with me to visit Angus, we watched him stride back to his enclosure and Iain said, ‘He walks just like the old men in Balgarva used to walk, when I was young.'

He wore his boots with coils of woven grass around them, which would work themselves loose when he walked. He was in a little enclave of his own, with his knitting and his horse. He was happy.

Angus MacPhee's sister Patricia did not live to return her brother to South Uist. She died in 1985, and the croft at 52 Balgarva was assigned to her son Iain. He in his turn married a woman from Balgarva, and like so many before them
they raised their family looking over the strand to southern Benbecula.

Early in 1985 Angus MacPhee passed his 70th birthday. ‘I went back with the car one time,' said Joyce Laing, ‘parked my car, and there were vague words with the nurses about him getting awful old – “We think he's dementing a bit.”

‘I thought, well, old age, not too surprising. But I did wonder if he was dementing, because that would alter the work. So I asked to have lunch with him. We took a table to ourselves. I sat down, had a drink of orange juice or something and watched him.

‘And I thought, he's not dementing. He's losing his sight. Because he never spoke, he hadn't asked for spectacles or anything. They thought, he's getting muddled and confused. But he was going blind. All the leaf things that I saved were done when he was almost blind.'

In the early 1990s Eilidh Campbell received at home a phone call from Craig Dunain Hospital. ‘They said, “It's about Angus MacPhee. There's a note in his file saying his family don't want to be bothered while he's still alive. But we're going to close here, and they're going out into the community.

‘ “Where do you want Angus?” '

The note in Angus's file did not say that his family did not want to be bothered with him while he was alive. It said, ‘In the event of death, it is the wish of his relatives that Angus should be buried in South Uist. These instructions were received on 25.9.85.'

He was still remarkably fit in 1985, still striding independently about the grounds. A swollen leg which threatened to incapacitate him was successfully operated on in 1989. But
he was, as Joyce Laing had noticed, losing his sight. By the early 1990s it was noted that he was blind in his right eye and suffered severe glaucoma in his left.

In 1994 a nursing report noted that Angus MacPhee ‘spends his days walking around briskly. He pulls the long grass and fashions this into ropes. He no longer makes the complicated items.'

Old age had stolen his talents, but death was cheated of its power to relocate his human frame. It was not death that returned him to South Uist. That was an accomplishment of Care in the Community.

Care in the Community was a controversial mental health policy established by the British Conservative government in its National Health Service and Community Care Act of 1990.

It was at root a cost-saving measure. Care in the Community was predicated on the fact that by the end of the twentieth century, anti-psychotic drugs were so sophisticated and strong that very few people needed to be treated and contained behind locked doors. The massive asylums inherited – in spirit if not in actual premises – from the Victorian era were therefore redundant. They could be closed down, saving the National Health Service a lot of money, and transferring the financial burden to local authorities, who were expected to provide social care and domiciliary services to the incapable.

Care in the Community was supported by the libertarian views of asylums as places of confinement and the suppression of personality and free expression that were formulated in the 1960s and 1970s and found an international audience in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. Care in the Community was justified by the widely held belief that ever-expanding residential mental hospitals such as Craig Dunain were not only unnecessary, they were undesirable.

‘Institutional care' for schizophrenics and others was deemed to have failed on two levels. It had evidently abandoned its mission to cure. In the hundred years between 1864 and 1964, the population of Craig Dunain had risen from 200 to over 1,000 patients, while the population of its catchment area had fallen. And, it was argued, mental health hospitals had contributed to the problems they were supposed to ease by institutionalising men and women to the extent that generations of the afflicted had become entirely dependent on 24-hour, year-round service and attention. That had apparently resulted in the depression of levels of expectation. Mental patients were not all expected to hold down a job for a day, but most of them were expected to be able to boil a kettle and occasionally pull bedsheets into order.

In the words of American advocates of this argument, residential mental hospitals had created ‘dependency, hopelessness' and their residents had ‘learned helplessness, and other maladaptive behaviors'. ‘Deinstitutional isation', replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with community mental health services, was proposed as the answer.

The opponents of Care in the Community argued that its image of residential mental patients as spoiled little aristocrats who had been taught to depend upon a posse of servants to perform the smallest chore was misleading. They protested that the policy gambled with the lives of vulnerable people. Rather than turn into useful citizens and become respected members of the community, they said, left to their own devices many severe schizophrenics would forget or refuse to take their medication. They would easily turn to other drugs, would become homeless, would beg, would assault and be assaulted, would steal and be stolen from, and could kill themselves and others.

Those opponents were right. The first years of Care in the Community were marked by a notable increase of homeless people and beggars on the streets of British cities. In a few well-publicised incidents, recently released young schizophrenic men killed strangers. In many more unpublicised incidents, recently released young schizophrenic people killed themselves. Care in the Community, wrote Patrick Cockburn, ‘must be one of the most deceptive and hypocritical phrases ever devised by a government'.

Too few people realised, before the passage of the Community Care Act in 1990, that the abandonment of the vilified Victorian asylums without an effective replacement did not represent progressive reform, but rather signalled a return to pre-Victorian standards of care. ‘Prisonlike many of the old asylums may have been,' wrote Cockburn, ‘but at least they were a haven for people too mentally ill to find work, food, and shelter for themselves. Inside their walls, life may have been institutionalised, but one could safely behave bizarrely or even madly without derision or persecution.'

But most of the suffering caused by Care in the Community was inflicted on people, particularly younger people, in the urban centres of Britain. An old soldier from South Uist who had spent 50 years in a Highland institution was always likely to be offered alternative care, even if it was not quite ‘care in the community'. In the early 1990s the staff of Craig Dunain Hospital, agitated by approaching closure, looked for a new home for Angus MacPhee.

They hit at first upon the possibility of sending him to a care home in the town of Stornoway on the island of Lewis. To an eastern-Highland mentality, that was justified on a couple of levels. Like South Uist, Lewis was a Hebridean island full of
Gaelic speakers, where an elderly Gaelic-speaking Hebridean would presumably feel at home.

By the 1990s Stornoway had also become the headquarters of the local islands' Health Board, which covered the Uists. When Angus MacPhee was admitted to Inverness District Asylum on the last day of 1946, South Uist was part of Inverness-shire. People from the Uists were therefore subjects of the county seat in Inverness. In 1975 that ceased to be the case. A new Western Isles local authority was created to administer the 11 populated islands between Lewis and Barra Head, including the Uists. Subsequently a Western Isles Health Board was also formed, to administer the National Health Service in the same chain of islands. By the early 1990s Angus MacPhee of Balgarva in South Uist, whose health had in 1946 been indisputably the responsibility of Inverness, was technically a dependant of Stornoway.

Those bureaucratic niceties failed to take account of the fact that to almost any Uist man or woman of Angus MacPhee's generation, Stornoway was a foreign place. Their fishermen might have occasionally put in there, but everybody else in Uist looked east to Skye or south to the mainland. They did not look north to Lewis. Stornoway itself was as different from Iochdar as any other industrious Protestant Scottish burgh was from the placid Roman Catholic croftlands of South Uist. His sister Peigi, his nephew Iain and his niece Eilidh wrote to Craig Dunain protesting vehemently against any proposal to post their brother and uncle to Lewis.

Their appeal was successful. A place was found for Angus MacPhee at Uist House in Daliburgh.

The small township of Daliburgh was 20 miles due south of Iochdar, but it was in South Uist. It was the seat of the first
hospital to be raised in the island. The Hospital of the Sacred Heart was funded by the Marquess of Bute and was built in the early 1890s by Iain ‘Clachair' Campbell, the Uist stonemason whom Margaret Fay Shaw had photographed 40 years later in his retirement, expertly weaving coils of heather rope outside his cottage door. The old four-square premises built by Iain ‘Clachair' was still standing firm in the 1990s. Operated for almost a century by nuns, it had been adopted, modernised and extended by the National Health Service and included a small care home for two dozen elderly people, that was named Uist House.

Early in 1996, in his 81st year and after half a century in Craig Dunain Hospital, Angus MacPhee was driven through Inverness to Dalcross Airport ten miles east of the town.

When he had arrived from the west 50 years earlier, Inverness was a sleepy country burgh with some 25,000 people huddled together on the hillsides and floodplain east and west of its broad eponymous river. In 1996 the town's population was greater than 40,000, and its sprawling new suburbs contained as many people again. In 1946 Craig Dunain was some distance from the western boundaries of Inverness; by 1996 Angus MacPhee could see new housing estates crawling relentlessly across the farm's green fields towards the old asylum on the mount. Inverness in the 1990s was as raucous and neon-lit as any town in late-twentieth-century Britain. It had become home to a huge new hospital at Raigmore and the offices of a regional development agency. In 1946 Inverness and the Uists shared a similar atmosphere. By 1996 it had evaporated.