The Silent Weaver (8 page)

It was customary for the priest in charge of the Mission to celebrate mass on this day in the ruins of the old Church, where almost all the people of South Uist, Catholics and Protestants assembled, from the ford of Benbecula to the sound of Barra.

All took their ponies with them, each lad having a lass behind him. When the mass was over, horse racing commenced. If the tide answered they went to the strand where there was a most beautiful and long stretch of an even plain where they could try to perfection the mettle of their steeds. In case that the tide was not answerable they were never at a loss as there were other plains which answered equally the purpose.

Alexander Carmichael qualified his comments by pointing out that ‘occasional “oda” have been held in all these places since the years mentioned'. The old religious festivals may have declined, but horse racing continued in the Uists well into the twentieth century. In 1922 and 1928 Finlay Mackenzie, the hotelier who in 1939 closed the bar at Lochboisdale to allow the Lovat Scouts a sober passage to Kyle of Lochalsh, won bareback horse races at the Askernish Games in South Uist. Donald John MacPherson said that the horse races held at annual camp appealed strongly to young Uist men who joined the Lovat Scouts in the 1930s.

We do not know whether or not Finlay Mackenzie used marram grass reins in 1922 and 1928. We can be sure that the Lovat Scouts did their best to obtain leather bridoon before travelling to summer camp or going to war. But the tradition was still alive when Angus MacPhee was a boy. He and his father made and used horse tack of marram grass, just as a few miles to the north, in Baleshare, the MacVicar family ran a small commercial sideline by making marram grass horses' collars and reins and selling them to their neighbours.

When the Second World War was over, in the 1950s and 1960s tractors began to arrive in the Uists and the horse culture passed quickly into history. In a few short years the custom of plaiting grass into reins, halters and baskets was all but forgotten by people other than Angus MacPhee. He did not forget it. He could not forget it.

Angus and his sisters enjoyed a peaceful childhood in the crofting democracy of Iochdar in the 1920s. They were bundled together in their small thatched cottage by the sea, and bundled out of it onto the machair or the strand whenever the weather
allowed. They lived an indoor and outdoor rural life that, a few decades later, the girls would cheerfully apostrophise as ‘pretty primitive . . . but everybody was pretty primitive, so you were no different to anybody else that we knew. There was no class system.' And their upbringing left happy memories – ‘Och yes, good laughs. Good laughs, yes.'

They attended Iochdar School, a walk of a mile from their Balgarva croft, with the sea on their left and fresh water lochans on their right. As an infant in 1914, Mary Godden was taken home by her mother from Edinburgh to the neighbouring township of Kilaulay in Iochdar. ‘I was at school with them,' she said.

Angus had a very intelligent family. I never saw his mother, but his father was a very clever man. He was full of old folklore, and stories and rhymes. And his sisters – Mary, Patricia and Peigi – they were very clever. I was good pals with Mary.

But I didn't know Angus much. You weren't allowed to go dancing or anywhere until you'd left school. Then when you left school there were dances – pipers and good dancers – in the school. But I don't remember Angus MacPhee at any of the dances. He kept himself to himself, you know.

The only chances I had of talking to him was, there was a wee shop in Balgarva there, which was run by the MacQueens. I used to walk from home in Kilaulay to the shop. I could go either by the road out there or round by the beach. And usually it was round the beach, which took me past Angus's house. Every time I left MacQueens' shop the MacPhees' house was the next house.

So he always used to be standing at the corner of the house, you know. And I always used to stop and talk to him. But he was rather a quiet person himself, you know, and I wasn't that talkative either! Just a quiet normal sort of boy –
I never ever thought of him as anything other than that. He was a very nice, quietly spoken boy.

His sister Peigi said that Angus was a studious as well as a reserved child. When at nights the girls sat knitting or sewing, their brother would be curled up by the peat fire in their small crofthouse reading a schoolbook.

His niece Eilidh was told that Angus was a great lover of horses . . . ‘Angus and his pals would be down at the end of the croft, out of sight of the house, riding the young foals all summer long. They would break them in. When the time came for the foals to leave, they'd be broken. His father, Neil, would say, “How did these horses get so mild?”'

Angus MacPhee left Iochdar School in 1929, at the age of 14. His father was still fit and strong, but was almost 70 years old. Angus worked the croft with a view to inheriting it, while also bringing some cash into the house by freelance hire as a labourer. They planted barley and potatoes. They kept a domestic milking cow, and sheep and cattle for market. On Sunday they walked to mass at the old church of St Michael in Ardkenneth. Like his Uncle Francis, Angus MacPhee anticipated an unremarkable life. It could only properly be sustained if it was unremarkable.

In September 1936 Anna Bheag, Neil's older sister and the children's Aunt Anna, died at home. She was 82 years old. Her death was uncertified by a doctor and its cause was recorded as ‘supposed old age and natural causes'. The girls were grateful to Anna Bheag, but knew that they had missed their mother Ellen, in small ways and large: ‘The bobs my father used to give us, because my mother was dead,' said Peigi. ‘My father used to give us the haircut. We had bad luck in our family; about three generations lost their mothers.'

The children began to spread their wings. In 1933, when she was 14 years old, Peigi MacPhee left Iochdar for the southerly island of Barra, where she assisted an English doctor. On 20 January 1934 – four days after his 19th birthday – Angus MacPhee of Iochdar joined the Lovat Scouts Territorial Army unit at Carnan Drill Hall in South Uist.

In February 1934, a month after joining up, Angus passed his physical examination. A medical officer and a recruiting officer both confirmed that at the age of 19 years Angus MacPhee was a perfect specimen of young Celtic manhood. He stood exactly six feet tall. He had a fresh complexion, dark hair and dark blue eyes. He weighed 11 stone 3 pounds, and when he breathed in deeply his chest expanded almost to 38 inches in circumference. He carried no indications of congenital peculiarities or previous disease. He was certified fit for service in the Corps of Scouts.

Angus went to every annual camp. He went off to the mainland for 15 days in 1934, 1935 and 1936, and for 18 days during each of the next three summers. In January 1938 his initial four-year commission expired. Trooper Angus MacPhee was re-engaged in the Lovat Scouts for a further two years. Then he went to the 1938 summer camp.

On a clear morning in Balgarva, Angus MacPhee could see to his south-east the sun rise over the heights of Hecla, Ben Corodal and Beinn Mhòr. He could look north to the 1,000-foot-high shark's fin of Eaval in North Uist. In the middle distance there rose and fell the modest brown hump of Rueval in Benbecula. He lived on a small piece of land. Each side of it could easily be seen from the middle, and even the far south was often visible from the north. But it was central to an infinity of sky and an inter-continental ocean. It was the
fulcrum of a universe of shifting air and water which gave it light and colour and life and constant change. It was intensely familiar. Every meadow, every spring, every hillock, every change of atmosphere and tide had a name.

In the foreground, to his right the low green spit that formed the tidal islet of Gualann reached towards the white southern shore of Benbecula. Between the south of Benbecula and the north of Gualann, as he knew but could not see, the ocean raced through a narrow channel. Everywhere was turf, and dune, and white sand, restless sea and Atlantic sky. Before the house at 52 Balgarva was the strand, and that rocky shore strewn with tangle.

One day when the tide had ebbed he went down to the rocks and carved three letters on the adamantine surface of a boulder of Lewisian gneiss. He chose an outcrop a few yards west of the stone which still carried Angus Bowie's initials. Angus MacPhee's Gaelic mind knew the importance of the prefix ‘Mac' – ‘son of' – to his name, so the three initials he chose to leave were ‘A M P'. He etched them beautifully, in the form and shape of a Latin inscription, with a delicate serif at the base of each downstroke. He depressed the crossbar of the ‘A' into a stylish, shallow v-shape, like a medieval Masonic symbol or the upper-case ‘A' in the twenty-first-century Nylon Regular typeface. When he had finished, he had not finished. He encircled the three letters in a rectangular frame with rounded corners. Then he engraved another rounded rectangle outside the first one, framing his initials with neat and regular and perfectly parallel tramlines in the stone.

Then the Second World War was declared and Angus MacPhee rode up the machair to Lochboisdale, southwards into the storm.

‘A significant and consistent change in the overall quality of some aspects of personal behaviour, manifest as loss of interest, aimlessness, idleness, a self-absorbed attitude, and social withdrawal.'

On 27 December 1940 Angus MacPhee disembarked at Leith on the south-east coast of Scotland. He was taken under escort by train to Stirling, the fortress at the gateway to the Highlands.

The military hospital at Stirling had been established 141 years earlier in a seventeenth-century townhouse below the castle walls. Its amenities and function had hardly changed since 1799.

He spent three months there in January, February and March 1941. On 24 January 1941 he was put on the ‘Y' list, which meant that there was at first some hope for his recovery and subsequent transfer to another unit. But on 4 March 1941 he was removed from the ‘Y' list.

The following month, on 5 April 1941, Trooper Angus MacPhee was discharged from the British Army at Stirling
Military Hospital as ‘permanently unfit for any form of military service'. Eight years afterwards, in 1949, he was awarded the 1939–1945 War Medal with Star. It was posted on 19 December, in time for his eighth Christmas since returning from the Faroes.

His disability was registered as ‘simple schizophrenia'. The World Health Organisation would later describe this as

An uncommon disorder in which there is an insidious but progressive development of oddities of conduct, inability to meet the demands of society, and decline in total performance.

Delusions and hallucinations are not evident, and the disorder is less obviously psychotic than the hebephrenic, paranoid, and catatonic subtypes of schizophrenia. The characteristic ‘negative' features of residual schizophrenia (e.g. blunting of affect, loss of volition) develop without being preceded by any overt psychotic symptoms. With increasing social impoverishment, vagrancy may ensue and the individual may then become self-absorbed, idle, and aimless . . .

Simple schizophrenia is a difficult diagnosis to make with any confidence because it depends on establishing the slowly progressive development of the characteristic ‘negative' symptoms of residual schizophrenia without any history of hallucinations, delusions, or other manifestations of an earlier psychotic episode, and with significant changes in personal behaviour, manifest as a marked loss of interest, idleness, and social withdrawal.

Patricia MacPhee travelled to Stirling and took her brother home to South Uist. ‘His father wanted him back,' said Patricia's daughter Eilidh. ‘Everyone wanted Angus back. They thought he could work the croft, that he would take over the croft.'

‘He couldn't cope with it, for some unknown reason,' said his youngest sister Peigi in 2004. Peigi was 21 at the time of Angus's return.

My father had him home from the military hospital thinking that he would be alright, that everything would sort itself out. But it didn't . . .