The Boy from Nowhere

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So there was never any choice about what was for supper, nor were those the days of sweet potato with cumin and rocket and a poached egg on top. Plain food, plain lives, few expectations … there was no experimentation whatsoever. It was mince, stew, big pots of really good soup and baking. Gregor enjoyed his food. His mother made rhubarb tarts and apple tarts, she did a top-class fry-up and she also made the best shortbread he could ever hope to taste. Plainly, she and her sisters were a family of bakers, for Aunt Agnes had been at one time industrious enough to start up her own bakery shop.

But this was an extremely male-dominated society. Women like Cis, fathered by and wedded to the stern Presbyterian working men Scotland excelled in, were fantastically strong copers, but they kept their emotions in check. Life taught them not to expect too much. They kept house at a time before bathrooms or washing machines or detergents; they raised children on meals magicked from very small incomes; they toiled from early to late as slaves to men like John Leckie – and he was a saint compared with most men, for he did not drink. Women like Cis were not schooled in any kind of delicate niceties and displays of emotion; kissing and hugging were unheard of. Hers was a loving household but one devoid of displays of physical affection. Until her old age, even a pat on the head was a very unusual thing.

Decades later, when Gregor went into show business, everyone was hugging and air-kissing each other all the time – the whole luvvie thing. Recalling this, he flaps his hands in comic revulsion. ‘Christ, I couldn’t cope, I couldn’t bear it! It was like, “What are you doing? Get away from me! There’s a barrier here, can’t you see it? Come on, what’s going on? I’m a Scotsman. Please don’t do that, you’re making me feel very uncomfortable.”’

At the time, locked in the intensity of his one-to-one relationship with his new mother, Gregor had little or no concept of the needs of other members of the Leckie family. All children, but especially needy ones, are entirely self-centred. Instinctively, they manipulate the person who gives them most succour and affection. From his perspective, he clung to Cis for emotional and physical survival. Looking back, he realises he caused tensions but he now understands why.

I don’t think I was a very nice little boy. To be honest, I think I was a right little pain in the arse. Looked nice, you know, lots of nice blond curls and all the rest of it; nice to look at, but not nice to spend any time with – the little shit in the Ladybird shorts. I don’t think the rest of the family liked me very much because I was so desperate to gather in every bit of affection that Cis could give me.

Though loved and secure, he was at the same time an outsider who watched and remembered. When John Leckie was around it was best for Gregor to play in the corner. In the silence he absorbed and listened. The other male role model in his life at that time was Uncle Wull, a man every bit as eccentric as John Leckie, both of them rich fodder for the child who would one day put their idiosyncrasies to good use. Wull was a bit simple. Gregor liked him. Cis’s half-brother, he was much older and illegitimate – her mother had had a child out of wedlock that nobody knew about. Cis and her siblings didn’t know of his existence until much later, when Granny died, and he was then taken under Aunt Agnes’s wing. During the week he lived with her in town and went to work at the Parks Department in Glasgow; on weekends he always came to stay at Neilston to be fed and looked after by Cis.

Wull would be classified as special needs now. Back then he was just a bit different and everyone accepted it. He was kind to young Gregor too. Wull mostly communicated by grunting. He’d take out a 10-shilling note and make lots of guttural noises, showing the note to the boy before he folded it up, reached over and squeezed it into his hand. Gregor knew not to say anything – it was between the two of them, an unspoken West of Scotland thing, ‘Don’t tell your mother.’ According to family legend, Wull only spoke once or twice. Every year, when the relatives arrived on their annual visit to Aunt Agnes from the Borders, Wull would open the door and distinctly grunt: ‘Are ye back again?’

He was once handed a box of Milk Tray and Aunt Agnes said to him, ‘Remember and give your cousin one.’ And the cousin got one, just one chocolate. No one else got any. That was Wull; he was very literal.

People would find him jobs. Cissie used to send him across the road to Miss McMaster’s, an old, retired matron, and he would cut her hedge for her. He cut it with a manual hedge trimmer, a vicious-looking machete-like blade on a pole, which he would flail around wildly, grunting. He was good at that job.

Uncle Wull was small, square-jawed. He didn’t impress John Leckie, who sat in his usual spot by the fire and ignored him, dismissed him with his silence. Wull didn’t seem to notice. Both men had idiosyncratic toilet habits, which fascinated the small boy. Way before his time John Leckie was the master of recycling. After he had been to the outside loo, he would come back in, carrying the pieces of newspaper used to wipe himself, and throw them on the living-room fire because he didn’t want to block the plumbing. And he wouldn’t waste money using Izal toilet paper. That was the way he lived.

Sometime in the 1960s the family abandoned the outside loo and had a bathroom and a toilet installed inside the house, which caused a lot of excitement. That was when the bath arrived, insisted on by the girls. All the new facilities were on the ground floor, but upstairs there was still nothing. Gregor watched, wide-eyed with glee, as Uncle Wull would come gingerly downstairs in the morning, carrying a large Ostermilk tin in front of his body.

‘Full to the brim of pish.’

That was just the way it was, no questions asked. The child stored away the cameos and memories with relish. Besides, at that point in his life Gregor had decided he was going to be a church minister, opening his heart to the frailties of all mankind when he grew up. Apart from John Leckie, who never left the fire, the entire family was very churchy. Gregor’s big sister Margaret certainly was, in a vaguely intellectual way, to the extent that she would attend lectures by the famous Scottish theologian Professor William Barclay. There would always be a copy of Life & Work, the Church of Scotland magazine, lying about the house. The Leckies’ home was next door to the manse, where the minister Robert Whiteford and his family lived. Reverend Whiteford, a striking man with a big shock of hair, cut an imposing figure to a small boy. Two of his four children, John and Bobby, were the same age as Gregor, who often played with them in the large manse garden. They had bikes and he didn’t, although he was desperate for one, and he once got into terrible trouble with Mrs Whiteford for stealing one.

‘It was Bobby’s bike. I took it for a joy ride and then parked it at my house, intending to keep it. It was lunacy – because we were near neighbours, but I thought I would never be discovered.’

Religion was an optionless situation. Gregor attended Sunday school and he went to church; he loved Robert Whiteford who, although he didn’t understand half of what he was talking about, gave a very good blessing too.

Gregor Fisher lifts his hand and his diaphragm and slows his voice to its strongest and ripest. ‘“The blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Ghost be with you this day and for evermore.” And I went “Ooh” and shuddered. I thought it was all rather fabulous. I think I’d have made a good Catholic, actually – do y’know what I mean? It was the theatricality of it that got me. I just thought it was “Oh, this is marvellous! Gimme some of that!”’

On the wall in the Sunday school there was a big picture of a kindly Jesus in white robes. Gregor loved the robes and the queue of all the children of the world in their national costumes snaking off into the distance, waiting for their chance to sit on Christ’s knee. In the picture he was holding a little black child and Gregor decided that this was what he wanted to do when he grew up: be a missionary. That was the job for him, thank you very much. He started praying to be allowed to be one. Gregor was for a while very busy with his prayers.

I was usually asking things like, please make me as good-looking as Bobby Thorpe or somebody else who was the leader of the gang, because that’s what I wanted to be. I seemed to take to prayer. Did a lot of it. I think there was plenty of guilt involved when I was a child, I always felt guilty about something. Hellish guilty about the fact that I wasn’t very good at school or even Sunday school … you had to learn by rote the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, and you would get a little badge. The Reverend Whiteford would test you on this – it was almost Victorian.

So those were abiding memories, walking up the hill to church holding Cis’s hand. With her faith, and her Sunday hat and her huge heart. She was the patron saint of lost people, blessed were those she found. Cis looked after the simple Wull; certainly she rescued Gregor, and she also rescued old dogs and nurtured chickens by the fire. She would never see anyone, or anything, in trouble.

Some family secrets remain buried forever, with the complicity of everyone involved. Others, however, are shared at a certain point. It was inevitable that there would come a time when Gregor would question why his mother was so old and where, if she hadn’t given birth to him, had he come from, that day in the snow? Given the bond between them, this was always going to carry a lot of emotional freight. When it did happen, it was devastating, leaving both in distress. This was the only time Gregor ever rejected his mother; shut her out from him, closed the door on her love.

It was during one of those scones-and-jam family suppers when the mood had lifted because Mr Leckie had gone to work. There must have been a christening in the family because it was the subject of discussion. Churches, godparents, babies … Cis, Margaret and Una chatting.

Out of the blue, Gregor, unthinking, opened his mouth.

‘Where was I christened?’

An awkward, loaded silence fell over the room; an ear pop of tension. Sensing something, and never slow at coming forward, Gregor repeated his question. Immediately the subject was changed. One of his sisters offered him another scone, his mother chipped in with a change of subject. ‘Uh-oh,’ he thought. Preoccupied with himself, like all 14-year-olds, he picked up on the evasion, the awkwardness in the room. There was a mystery, some secret being withheld from him. Something that pertained to him, which everyone else was party to.

Nothing more was said and he went to bed as usual. Then came a knock on his door – an unusual occurrence because it was the sort of household where no one locked or knocked on doors. His mother came into the room.

‘You’re adopted,’ she said.

She stood there awkwardly, looking at him, unsure what to do next. It was the classic, blunt-edged West of Scotland way of doing things. In the 1960s no one was schooled in communication and child psychology; no one read manuals on how to discuss sensitive issues with children. Unlike today, there weren’t numerous books and websites on how to deal with an adopted child. There were few social workers, hoops to jump through or guidelines to follow. What followed was a moment of most extraordinary drama. Cis was not given to physical demonstrativeness, but she reached out with her hand and patted her beloved son on the head.

Not once. Twice.

A single pat was unheard of. Two was a sign of almost uncontrollably high emotion. Cis was obviously as moved as she was uncomfortable.

‘We look after you now, you know. We wanted you, we love you,’ she muttered.

And she turned and left the room.

We’re on our first expedition together, Gregor Fisher and me. A most unlikely Johnson and Boswell, more Dastardly and Muttley. It must surely be a comedown for him – usually he’s in a Mercedes. This time he’s in my silver VW Polo; a man both cheery and wary, a passenger I barely know. I wonder what he’s thinking. I know more about his ancestors than him, the living flesh and blood. Some months ago he had approached me out of the blue, through a mutual friend, because he wanted, finally, to pin down the story of his life.

We’re heading up the hill into the village of Neilston, me driving, him navigating.

Gregor is telling me about what happened when Cis died, in 1983.

‘She left me some money.’

He is silent for a bit.

‘I’ll never forget it – it said in her will, “I leave so much to my daughters and I leave so much to Gregor Fisher, who lived with me.”’

His voice catches. I suddenly realise he’s crying.

‘Why did they have to say that? “To Gregor Fisher, who lived with me”.’

Tears are running down his cheeks. She was his mum but he wasn’t her son. Even beyond the grave he wasn’t allowed to be her son. The authorities wouldn’t even give him that comfort: a rejection from the woman who never rejected him.

‘It’s just legal language,’ I say, desperate to console him. ‘Bloody lawyers, they have to say these things just so. A technicality.’

He’s wiping his face with a hankie.

‘I know that, I just can’t forget it,’ he says. ‘Gets me every time.’