With the power of love

Iain Crichton Smith takes the playful banter in good part and is soon delivering a droll, off-the-cuff speech to a roomful of Oban admirers. His line in throwaway jokes would make many a stand-up comic envious.

There's the man in the pub who asks if he is the author of Consider the Daffodils (Smith's best-known novel, about the Clearances, is of course Consider the Lilies); there is Neville Chamberlain trying to

stem the tide of Nazism with an umbrella; there are the women teachers of his youth who looked like hysterical parallelograms; the kilted ex-Serviceman and fellow student at Aberdeen University whose MC citation was for exposing himself to the enemy. And much more in similar vein.

Could this really be the solitary, shy poet whose wrestling with the Calvinist inheritance of his strict and straitened upbringing in Lewis casts a shadow over much of his writing? Indeed it is. And, astonishingly, this happy, rumbustious occasion was filmed a bare six months before Iain Crichton Smith's death from cancer in 1998 at the comparatively young age of 70.

No-one knows more about the complexities of Smith's private personality and creative persona than his widow Donalda. She still lives in the cottage in Taynuilt which she shared with him for two decades. It's a homely place in this pretty corner of Argyll under the shoulder of Ben Cruachan.

The garden sports spring flowers and black bags (Donalda collects aluminium foil for charity). Inside is cheery. There are lots of china figurines and various of Iain Crichton Smith's poems framed on the walls. Neither the latter nor the fine portrait of him by Mike Knowles in the hallway were the poet's idea, one gathers.

''What will people think, coming in and seeing my face stuck up there?'' Donalda remembers this most modest of men saying about the portrait. But she adds with her ready laugh: ''He never actually went to the length of taking it down.''

He was similarly reticent about his appearances on radio. When friends would say they'd enjoyed hearing him, his wife would have no idea he'd been on the air. When tackled on the subject, he'd protest: ''Donalda, you speak to me, hear me, all the time! What do you have to listen to a radio programme for?''

Donalda Smith says of herself: ''My problem is I lack this modesty that he had! I'm living off his life, basking in all the glory from somebody else's hard work.'' The self-criticism is patently unjustified. This kindly, outgoing woman was the sheet anchor of Iain Crichton Smith's later life.

They first met at Oban High School when he taught her English in her last year. She wasn't an ideal pupil, for she had her heart set on nursing rather than things academic. Years later, a mother of two young sons and seeing her marriage coming to ''a sticky end'', she decided to take up teaching. ''I met Iain in Oban. He said: 'I'll send you exercises.' That's how it all started.'' She duly passed her exams and,

after training, worked in Glen Etive for two years.

During that time, Iain's mother died and ''I think he was rather lonely,'' she recalls. Donalda and he ''went out'' for seven years before they married. Shyly she proffers a little poem he wrote for her at that period:

In your yellow costume

you climbed the stone stair

to my lonely flat.

I opened the door

and there you were,

like a burst of sunshine

perfect and complete

Donalda had ''got on quite well'' with Iain's formidable widowed mother, the prompting source of some of his most powerful poems. ''She was very religious and you can see from Iain's writing that he had quite a strict upbringing,'' Donalda recalls. Though there were two other brothers, ''Iain took a lot of responsibility on his shoulders''. His mother was ''very demanding'' and it was impossible for him to stay out at night - although the fair-minded Donalda would tell Iain he used his mother because he wanted to write at that time and it was a good excuse for not going out!

Donalda pays tribute to the poet

as a person: ''He had a very kind nature, very helpful. I don't think he would have done anybody down. We actually got on very well. I suppose it was the Highland background, although mine wasn't nearly as strict or even as poor.''

''I miss the laughter an awful lot since Iain died,'' Donalda says, recalling her spouse's mild eccentricities, like putting on his pullover back to front. ''Does it really matter?'' he would say, reasonably.

The leitmotif of his kindness comes up time and again in conversation. He got on particularly well with the elder of his two young stepsons and also enjoyed the extended family of Donalda's sister who lived next door. Donalda recalls how, typically, he would sit up all night to keep her company when she was tending her infant nephew who suffered from high temperatures.

Donalda says she once went to a talk about her husband in Oban and didn't recognise the person being talked about at all. ''He came over as somebody very dark and solitary. To an extent he perhaps was, but I never saw that side.''

There was, however, a dark time in the life of this quiet, complex man. In 1980 he took a nervous breakdown: it might have been partly caused by too many changes in his life at once, his wife believes, but a lot stemmed from ''his childhood in Lewis and the religion, which he fought against all his life, partly because it was so restrictive. And I think he had guilt feelings about this''. Then she jokes gently: ''Iain had guilt feelings about breathing!''

The Smiths had moved from Oban to Taynuilt. The poet became convinced that he could not write there because it was too quiet. ''It was a nightmare experience to be honest,'' Donalda says, though it had

its moments of humour. ''He didn't believe anything was real.''

At one point he took off for Glasgow. He tried to take his own life and was treated briefly in a psychiatric hospital at Lochgilphead. Then, thanks to medication and the invitation of Professor Douglas Gifford to be writer-in-residence at Glasgow and Strathclyde universities, he recovered. The whole episode lasted only a few months.

Mrs Smith had said earlier that her husband's breakdown had helped him. In what way? ''Before this happened,'' she replies, ''Iain was quite introverted. Afterwards, he found it very easy to speak to people. It seems to have lifted some weight from him. He was much more communicative with people. And that never left.''

The Smiths travelled a lot -

to France, Italy, Israel, Madeira,

Canada, China, Canada, and Australia. ''I liked to get out and about,'' says Donalda, ''and, I think, tried to get Iain to come along - and he enjoyed it.'' Out of these widened horizons came indirect literary inspiration. The poet twice went to Canada on his own and explored his Canadian-Gaelic connections.

His last poetry volume - The Leaf and the Marble - has Rome as a backcloth. Dedicated to Donalda, it is a testament not just to the power of love but a paean to the values of light and greenery over the dour circumstances of his Hebridean youth. There is the strongest sense that the poet was still developing and reaching out, both as artist and man.

Iain Crichton Smith died in the autumn of 1998 of cancer of the oesophagus, diagnosed only two months earlier. His widow praises his strength and selflessness during this period. He was far more concerned for her than for himself, and even when unwell insisted on carrying out a demanding commitment as tutor on a reading-holiday course rather than let people down.