Threads of Life by Clare Hunter

Author:Clare Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2019-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

11

Community

It is early afternoon in the Scottish Storytelling Centre Gallery and all the seats are taken. People have come for the Edinbrugh launch of Material Matters, the community textile project I have been working on over the past year with people from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. Now its results – twelve small textile panels – are to be unveiled, each telling the story of a piece of fabric or embroidery which has special meaning to its maker. One by one, participants remove the red cloth that covers their creation to reveal the story beneath.

Kathleen has chosen the blue and gold ribbon from which hangs the valour medal awarded to her grandfather in the First World War. She inherited it when he died and keeps it in her handbag as a talisman to protect her against her own uncertain courage. Flora is wearing the 200-year-old skirt she inherited, woven and worn by one of her crofting ancestors, before her family were forced off the land at the time of the Highland clearances in the eighteenth century. She has traced their exodus to America, the waves of the Atlantic Ocean embroidered with the Gaelic words for loss. Eve holds up a pair of child’s denim dungarees that she re-fashioned in the 1960s from her own pair of jeans. They were made for her toddler son, a task of thrift when she was a young mother struggling to make ends meet. He is pictured on her panel as a child and again fifty years on, surrounded by replicas of the pattern pieces she used, made ghostly in net fabric.

The originators of the final panel, Jim and Bill, cannot be here to unveil their creation. Jim died just two weeks ago at the age of eighty-seven and Bill, now ninety-six, is in hospital after a fall. The young community worker who brought them together, Ryan Mackay, will be their voice to tell us their story. He talks about their experience of growing old, of how in widowhood both men became socially isolated. Jim, in his later years, had been the main carer for his wife until her death. Looking after her had meant relinquishing the social activities and network of friends they had enjoyed over the years. He was devastated by her death and hadn’t the spirit to pick up the pieces of his old life. Instead, he got stuck in loneliness. Bill, living alone with his family at a distance, had lost his social confidence bit by bit, until he found himself marooned, cut off from the community life. They had both become members of the Older Men’s Health and Well-Being Group run by the Pilmeny Development Project (PDP), a community support organisation based in Leith, a dockland area of Edinburgh just five minutes from the city centre. When the PDP discovered that Leith had the highest suicide rate of men over the age of seventy-five in the Lothian region, it decided it had to find a way to mitigate the social isolation of its ageing male population.

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