Читать книгу The Boy from Nowhere - Gregor Fisher, Melanie Reid - Страница 10

‘When you laugh at something awful, it shrinks’

Joan Rivers

The letter arrived, out of the blue, at the farm near Langholm. It was summer, 1971. Gregor was still living down in the Borders, bouncing companionably around his Fisher relatives. He’d quit the wool factory and was doing bar work in the town, a goofy teenager killing time until he heard from drama school. The letter was brief:

Dear Gregor, I don’t know if you remember me, I am your sister. Would you like to meet up at some point?

He was so taken aback that he didn’t remember anything else it said. It was signed Maureen.

He was baffled, because this was obviously something to do with Jim Fisher, Cis’s brother, whom he was convinced was his father because he looked like him – or at least everyone said so.

They’d look at Jim and then me, and say, ‘You cannae deny that yin.’

But he really didn’t know anything about a sister. And he wasn’t altogether sure he wanted to. In what was to become a lifelong habit when it came to turning over stones to see what was underneath, Gregor’s initial reaction was wary. Suspicious. He didn’t really know whether he was quite up to it or not. Emotion. Upset. Tears. Stuff. But then he thought, ‘Why not?’, so he borrowed Billy Bell’s best suit and cousin Carol put him gently on the train to Glasgow, where the rendezvous had been arranged.

Central Station, he’d suggested in his letter. But it’s a huge concourse. Somehow, between the two of them, gauche teenagers, they chose to meet outside the lost property office. Well, every station has one, doesn’t it? The pathos of it completely escaped them.

Gregor shakes his head. ‘I’m not making this up, please believe me. Outside the lost property office! We, er, we … I dunno why, I dunno why we did this, it was just the way it happened.’ He laughs, but it sounds a little hollow.

‘I know, I know! It didn’t seem symbolic at the time, but that’s where we met, outside the bloody lost property office. I didn’t have a clue about life, I didn’t know which way was up in those days.’

So the short, stocky 18-year-old, in his borrowed farmer’s suit and tie, green as the grass he’d watched from the train windows for the last 90 minutes, got off the train and made his way through the crowds to lost property. He hadn’t a clue what she looked like, and they hadn’t arranged to wear red roses, or carry rolled-up newspapers as a sign. So he stood there, awkward, self-conscious, looking at people, thinking, ‘Maybe that’s her there … Maybe that’s … What does she look like? … No, she’s walked past.’ Then a little skinny girl approached and he thought, ‘That surely can’t be her,’ because of all the things that Gregor Fisher never was, never has been, it was skinny.

‘Are you Gregor?’ asked the girl.

‘Yup, right, that’s me,’ he said.

Pause.

‘You must be Maureen.’

What followed was an awkward, messy sort-of-hug between the two: the young, daft, embarrassed boy and his slightly older and more emotional sister.

A mismatch of expectation and affection.

Gregor didn’t like hugging anyone, let alone weepy girls who were complete strangers. Maureen was hugging the long-lost adored little brother she had been so cruelly separated from. She had recognised him instantly – he hadn’t changed from when he was a boy.

They went for a cup of tea and started talking. Gregor felt awkward. He also felt immediately he was a disappointment to her.

These things are never how you expect them to be. I expected some sort of connection, but there wasn’t, really. There was some kind of communality because she could remember when we were small, and once she mentioned things I vaguely remembered, but there was no instant bond. I once saw a documentary about two Japanese families whose children got swapped … the ramifications of that were absolutely fascinating. It’s to do with the time you spend together and the shared experiences.

Maureen and I have shared a lot since then, so it’s changed, but at that time there was no instant potato about it, and as an 18-year-old stupid boy I don’t think I coped with it particularly well. I just don’t think I handled it very well and I don’t think I was what she wanted me to be.

Story of my life.

But Gregor’s life contained many stories and he was about to hear a completely new one. As well as getting to know each other again, he and his sister had a mystery to unravel. And Maureen knew far more about it than he did. The more she told him, the more unbelievable it all became, unfolding like a soap opera while their cups of tea grew cold between them.

Here was where the Fisher connection came from. Jim Fisher, brother of Cis, Agnes, Wull, Archie and Babs, was a pig breeder who lived in Lanarkshire. He had married a woman called Ellen Sellars and in 1948 they had a child called Linda. Five years later, when no more babies had arrived, the doctors told Ellen that she would be unable to conceive again. It was the days when very little could be done for fertility problems, so the couple accepted the verdict and decided to adopt. They wanted a sister for Linda. Formal adoption was a rather more lax affair in those days.

‘More a case of, how many do you want?’

The Fishers’ hunt took them to a children’s home in Clackmannan in central Scotland, about an hour’s drive away, where there was a girl of four available for adoption. Perfect. A lovely, healthy, well-behaved little girl called Maureen. But the only problem was, she came as a pair: she had a brother, Gregor, aged two and a half, and the two of them weren’t to be parted. That was what the authorities had told the matron of the children’s home. It was the family’s wishes, whoever the family had been: Maureen and Gregor must be kept together as a package. The Fishers pondered it a while, then decided to take both children. After all, he was a lovely-looking boy too.

So, on 19 June 1956, Gregor and Maureen were wedged on the front seat of Jim Fisher’s van, between their new father and mother, and driven to Closeburn, a house up a long track in the mining area called Cornsilloch, outside Larkhall in Lanarkshire. There was the dark mountain of a coal bing (a slag heap) nearby. Jim Fisher, who was 39, owned a piggery and cured bacon; the business brought in £500 a year and he also owned the house. ‘A three apartment detached cottage, with kitchen and bathroom, found to be quite well furnished and in a clean and tidy condition,’ said the curator’s report in the adoption papers Gregor Fisher was to read decades later. Ellen was 41 and Jim was her second husband: she had married in Derby in 1936 and then divorced at the end of the war on the grounds of desertion.

The story of Jim and Ellen Fisher came tumbling out of Maureen. She desperately wanted Gregor to remember, to bind him to her in the past. She told him she had memories, although very, very faint, of being in a children’s home with him before they went off to live with the Fishers – just the two of them, in cots, alone in a room.

‘Do you remember the red wellingtons?’ she wanted to know.

And to his amazement, out of the fog something stirred. He was in a room somewhere and there was a pair of red wellingtons in front of him. And because he was a little boy, and he needed a pee, he pulled down his pants and piddled in both boots. The image was clear in his head, now she had brought it back: the supreme satisfaction of doing something so neatly and cleverly. But he also remembered, afterwards, the repercussions – the sense of trouble and harsh words. It was probably the first time he had ever been told off in his life and he recollected a bad feeling.

Maureen told him about her memories of what happened after they arrived at Cornsilloch. Ellen was very kind to them. The two of them had been treated very well, and she remembered being happy and content. They had toys to play with. A social worker used to come and visit them. Linda, their new big sister, was friendly to them. Their new dad had cut Maureen’s straight hair; and then Maureen, getting the idea and envious of Gregor’s white blond curls, had given her little brother a short back and sides. They went to Sunday school – and as she said it, Gregor realised he probably remembered that too – a vague sense of pitch pine floor and white walls.

In April 1957 the adoption was finalised and the papers lodged at Hamilton Sheriff Court. But by then, as can happen after adoption, Ellen Fisher had become pregnant, a surprise for everyone, including the doctors. She duly had the little girl she had always wanted, a baby they called Helen. But Ellen was, for those days, an extremely elderly mother; she had a tricky time and was unwell after the birth.

Quite what happened next remains opaque with horror. Ellen was recuperating at home. Gregor, prompted by Maureen, had the vaguest recollection of there being some other woman in the house at the time, someone kind, who was helping look after everyone while their adoptive mother spent most of her time upstairs in bed. They were all in the house the day Ellen had come downstairs, still in her nightgown. It was winter. Christmassy. The fire in the living room was stoked and roaring to heat the house. Maybe she had been drying nappies by the open fire in the living room, or perhaps she took a funny turn. Either way the flames caught her nightie and in her weakened state, screaming for help, she was terribly burnt.

As Maureen told Gregor the awful tale, images stirred in his head that fitted the jigsaw: of commotion. Upset. Shouts. He could, he believed, remember going to the hospital with Jim Fisher, presumably with Linda and Maureen and the baby too, for who was there to leave them with? He vaguely remembered the strange sight of a big grown man sobbing, and knowing that something very, very bad was happening.

Ellen Fisher died in early January 1958, in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, of multiple burns and pneumonia. She left two birth children, Linda and the new baby Helen, and two adoptive children, Gregor and Maureen. It was the second time in two years that Gregor and his sister had been left motherless in traumatic, bewildering circumstances. Were this fiction, you might suggest the author was trying too hard. But it was not, and you do not need to be a modern child psychologist to imagine the cumulative impact of such events on infants. The sudden loss of a second mother also managed to do what up until then the authorities had managed to prevent: it led to the separation of the little boy from his sister.

Those days, people dealt purely with practical things. For Jim Fisher – for any husband – the situation was impossible: a working man widowed with four young children and no one to care for them. How could he cope? Within hours of hearing the news, his sisters swooped into action. The authorities, those being the days before social work departments, did not seem to be involved at all. In the short term the children would have to be split up. Aunt Cis, the eldest sister, said she would take Gregor, and that’s when he remembers being driven up the hill in the snow, making a pattern with his pee in the snow, seeing the lights of the city twinkling below him in the dark. Maureen was whipped away to Aunt Agnes the baker, in her flat opposite Queen’s Park. The baby Helen went to Aunt Babs, who also lived on the south side of Glasgow, and Linda, the eldest girl, to her maternal grandparents in Derby.

These were to be temporary arrangements until things settled down and Jim had managed to organise childcare. He did this in the pragmatic way of many widowers. Not terribly long after Ellen was buried, within the year in fact, he had remarried to a policewoman called Flora. Once she was settled in at the pig farm, and had given up her job, the word went out that all the motherless children could now be gathered back into the Fisher fold at Cornsilloch for her to bring up.

The baby Helen went back, along with Maureen and Linda, but when it was suggested that Gregor joined them, the wise and feisty Cis, maybe unsure of her new sister-in-law, or perhaps just too much in love with her blue-eyed boy, refused. The child was staying with her. There was friction in the family as a result, hence the power struggle between the two women at the family party that Gregor vaguely remembered; and hence the fact he saw almost nothing of Jim Fisher from then on. Cis, gentle but fiery when called for, became his mother. He wanted that, she wanted that. End of story.

But not for Maureen, it wasn’t. The judgement that Cis had implicitly passed on Flora’s mothering skills, it seems, may have been correct. Flora and Maureen had a very difficult relationship. Not only was the little girl separated from her precious brother – and nobody explained to her where he’d gone or why he never came back – but she was now in the care of a stepmother she felt had little affection for her.

Sitting there, in the Glasgow cafe, Maureen struggled to explain to Gregor quite how bad it had been. Flora very quickly had two children of her own, Flora and Margaret, which made six altogether, a big family, and once she had her own family she no longer seemed interested in the children she had inherited with marriage. She may have left the police, but old habits died hard: Maureen remembered having to clean and tidy up the busy house to high standards. The minute she came in from school, she was told to start on the washing up and look after the wee ones. She could not remember any love or cuddles; she did not remember ever receiving praise. She remembers being shouted at and made to feel she was in the wrong all the time. Linda, the eldest child, left fairly soon afterwards to return to her grandparents but Maureen, entirely alone in the world, did not have that option. She also recalls being told by Flora that her real mother was dead, she was adopted, and that she, Flora, was all she had. Maureen met Gregor very occasionally at family parties but he didn’t remember her, or need her; she could see he was totally wrapped up in Cis’s happy, loving force field.

Sitting there talking to her brother again, now 18 and a stranger to her, Maureen recounted how she wore hand-me-down clothes while the others got new, and how she used to sit under the table hugging Helen, the motherless baby. And how she used to cry in the dark.

Jim Fisher wasn’t in the house much, but occasionally, when he went out in his van collecting bread for the pigs, he took the older children with him, presumably to get them out from under Flora’s feet. Maureen told Gregor that she thought Jim was a good father; she called him Dad.

And so the years went on. About the same time as Gregor was raking round the fields in Neilston and running home to indulgence and home baking from Cis, Jim Fisher gave up on the pigs and moved his family to nearby Motherwell. He could earn more money in a job at the Ravenscraig steelworks. This unfortunately meant he was out on shifts much of the time, and so there was no buffer between Maureen and her stepmother.

Gregor is pensive. ‘Poor Maureen, she drew the short straw going back to Jim and Flora. She was that bit older than me, which I think makes a huge, huge, huge difference. If you’re more knowing, it’s harder. I think I’ve been the fortunate one here. I was at an age of, you know, this is where I am and this is what’s happening and I’ve got a full belly and a warm bed and love and affection so I’m sorted. And no questions. I wasn’t the questioning type.

‘I think back to the red wellingtons and that feeling of being in trouble and the sense that there was no one who loved you despite what you’d done. I’m not saying I was beaten or anything because I’ve no memory of that – but the way you might treat other people’s children is so different from the way you’d treat your own children if they did something like that. If they’re your own, you’d be a bit grumpy and think, “Oh God, don’t do that, I’ve got to clean those wellingtons now.” But Maureen, she had no one on her side. It was positively feckin’ Dickensian, some of the things that happened.’

Eventually Maureen, anchorless and unloved, went off the rails. She hated her stepmother. Her bad behaviour reached the point where, when she was 11, she was put back into the care system, this time with foster parents. That was not successful. In her own words she ‘lost it completely’, and when she was 12 years old she had a nervous breakdown and ended up in Bangour Psychiatric Hospital. Just beside the M8 motorway in West Lothian, Bangour was a villa-style campus originally built in 1906 to house Edinburgh’s lunatic paupers and which stayed open until 2004, latterly one hopes with a rather more kindly mission statement. The little girl was to spend a year there, being treated as well as child psychiatry knew how in 1964, although one doubts if any satisfactory treatment has ever existed for abandonment and lack of love. Of all the many casualties in this story, Maureen’s plight is at this point one of the most heart-rending.

Somewhere along the line, however, she became aware of one very big fact. As well as her little brother Gregor, she had an older sister. And it was during Maureen’s spell in Bangour that a girl called Ann McKenzie, six years her senior, came to see her in another of those ‘You-don’t-know-me-but-I’m-your-sister’ moments. Ann filled in the momentous detail: that there had been the three of them, all born illegitimate, and they had lived near Menstrie, a village in the country near Stirling. They were taken away and split up from each other when they were little because their birth mother had become ill and died. Not because she didn’t want them. Though how, the girls wondered, could anyone want illegitimate children, especially three of them? The very word ‘illegitimate’ cast a dark stain on them, made them lower their voices and feel deeply ashamed.

Ann told Maureen that they had different fathers. Ann’s father had disappeared before she was born. She said that Maureen and Gregor’s father was someone else, but she didn’t know who he was. The two little ones had been separated from her after their mother died; Maureen and Gregor were put in a home, Ann taken in by a disapproving aunt. She too had been terribly unhappy, and had been thrown out of the house when she was 18 because her boyfriend was a Catholic.

Maybe it helped Maureen to know that she was not alone in the world. Perhaps it meant something, too, to learn that her mother had not chosen to abandon her. That she had been loved after all. Maureen recovered from her breakdown and was placed with foster parents. She went on to nursing college, married young, and then, when she was 19, decided to look for Gregor and at the same time settle some scores.

Maureen told Gregor how she had turned up at the door of the Fisher house in Motherwell and, ice-cold, driven with inner fury, confronted them. How could they have treated her the way they did? She also demanded to know where her brother was. Flora, she said, was hard as nails, but Jim drove Maureen back to the railway station and told her that Gregor was still with Aunt Cis. He was very contrite and apologetic for all the bad times.

Thus Maureen had written the letter and found Gregor; and so here they were, lost property, brother and sister, strangers to each other. Suddenly, what had been a taboo subject, a large, unwieldy mystery in their past, was no longer secret. Oh, there was still mystery, but illegitimacy was their new, unwelcome label. The stigma was still profound. Now, for the first time, they were forced to address a whole new raft of questions. Who were they? No, who were they really? Why Menstrie? Where was Menstrie? Why had they been split up? wondered Maureen bitterly. Why had Cis been allowed to keep Gregor, and he be loved and happy? Why had Maureen ended up with a stepmother whose perceived lack of kindness haunted her for most of her life?

Gregor got on a train back to Langholm with lots to think about and plenty of judgements to pass. Illegitimate, huh? Father unknown. Mother a bit of a tramp, perhaps? Not quite what a naïve teenage boy wants to hear. He and Maureen had decided that they wanted to find out a bit more. They would meet up with their big sister Ann, for a start. A few weeks and several letters later, and it was all arranged – the sisters would come down to their little brother. Gregor was still dodging about the Borders, staying either at the farm or Uncle Archie Fisher’s council house near the old station in Langholm – it was handy for the bar work.

I was always itinerant – funnily enough, it’s been like that most of my life, actually. Yeah, I’d lay my head anywhere and be quite content. I don’t know why that is, it’s still that way. Used to it, I suppose, from early doors. It was just normal kind of behaviour.

So it was in Uncle Archie’s small front room that Ann, Maureen and Gregor were reunited for the first time since their mother had died, 15 years before. It wasn’t the easiest of meetings: the room was crowded with strangers and fractured with emotion. The sisters had hired a car and driven down from Glasgow with their husbands. Gregor’s Fisher family was represented too, in the shape of cousin Carol, to give him moral support. Archie, a retired farm worker, wisely made himself scarce.

But the sisters didn’t feel like sisters to the gallus 18-year-old boy, and they wanted to talk about things he had sealed away quite successfully and didn’t want to address. Gregor was not, at that age, blessed with any kind of tact or finesse. He listened to them pondering what little they knew of their mother’s circumstances and the riddle of their illegitimacy. Ann told them their mother was called Catherine McKenzie (some people called her Kit McKenzie). She had been ill for a long time. Ann used to have to come home from school at lunchtime to give baby Gregor his bottle. Mum had died and they had been split up.

And that’s when Gregor said the awful thing about his mother. He remembered saying it, not knowing whether it was to hurt Ann, the bringer of all this difficult information, or whether it was a general expression of his own anger.

Well, you could forgive somebody one, couldn’t ye? Two at a push but three? Come on!

The words came out of his mouth and hung, harsh, cocky, in the air.

Nearly 45 years later and several centuries wiser, he squirms with discomfort. He knew immediately he had cut Ann deep. But their childhood was a mess, something that could never be righted. Ann’s loneliness, Maureen’s troubled behaviour, Clackmannanshire social service’s decision to split them up … No wonder the sudden ugliness of his feelings towards a mother he never knew.

You could blame this, that and the other. That’s why my first idea of a title for this book was Nobody’s Perfect. And nobody is perfect. I don’t know what the perfect scenario would have been.

Gregor admits to an ingrained sense of distance – pushing back if anyone expects too much or comes too close. There’s a line, and if someone crosses it, uninvited, they’ve gone too far. He didn’t want to feel obliged to feel emotion for a woman, a mother, who meant nothing to him; whom he felt had let him down.

The minute somebody comes over the line I go: What is it? What do you want, you expecting something? I don’t know where this comes from. I’ve never worked it out. I’m fine, I’ll give and I’ll share and all the rest of it, but once somebody gets too needy I’m really no good at it. Maybe it’s because I think if they get in too close, it’s all going to go tits up or something. Because everything else always has.

After the meeting in Langholm, he saw little of Ann, who retired, hurt. She had always been the most isolated of the three in the sense that she had a different father; the other two at least shared the same parentage, even if they didn’t know who he was. Gregor and Maureen built a friendship and went on to discover one significant thing: they could make each other laugh uncontrollably to the point where everyone else in their company, looking on from the sidelines, would say, ‘Strange people, don’t know what they’re laughing at, it’s not even funny.’ There was the time, years later, during a church service they had been invited to, when Gregor and Maureen disgraced themselves by taking a fit of the giggles at a priest swinging the incense, two middle-aged people who should have known better, corpsing, stuffing their fists in their mouths, laughing to the point where they thought they were going to have to leave – ‘It was like some kind of fit.’

If he’s honest, Gregor always felt there was a bit of tension between himself and his sisters. He was the lucky one, the blue-eyed boy; the one who found a new mother to love him. They, by comparison, had been thrown to the wolves, left to survive, desperately alone and unloved. There is of course another way to look through the prism. He was luckier, yes, but Gregor by no means got off scot-free. And had he not been saved by Cis, it is debatable where he might have ended up, possibly worse off than his sisters. Arguably, it is because of Cis that everything else that subsequently happened in his life happened because she put so much love into him, nourished the laughter and the confidence. Certainly, right then, as he waved a horribly awkward goodbye to his blood family on the doorstep, Gregor knew which way to turn: enough of being a bastard, enough of having some poor wretch for a mother. He didn’t fancy these unwelcome realities about his origins; he didn’t want to find out any more.

His great allies in the Fisher family, Cis, Carol and Agnes, understood. And if, as they shut the front door, Carol whispered, ‘It’s OK, don’t worry about them. That’s in the past, you’re one of us now,’ she was speaking for all of them. In the Fishers he was blessed with a family that, give or take the usual nip and snide comment to be had in every household, always gave him the feeling that he was loved and wanted. They made that obvious, and they also made it obvious that they thought it would be easier if he let it go. His life was working out fine with them, why complicate things?

Oh, just put the blinkers on, put it away back there, lock it away. That’s fine.

And so he did. He pretended none of it was true and that he really was Cis’s child. Yes, she was his real mother. Because she was the woman who only once, in the 30-odd years he was with her, withdrew her life-giving love. And that was a moment that shaped him for life.

We’re exploring Neilston in the car.

‘Down here,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you where Johnny Monaghan used to live.’

The narrow lane winds around and down the hill. Lots of expensive houses with gates and walls and private gardens behind high hedges; the posh end of the village.

It’s a leafy dead end, a cul-de-sac of class. I turn the car in Johnny Monaghan’s former drive, wondering whether anyone will suspect us of being burglars casing the joint, and jot down the numberplate. Probably. It’s a Neighbourhood Watch sort of street.

‘So you and Johnny and Andrew Robinson used to play here, in this gateway, did you?’

‘That was Andrew’s house, there.’

He points.

Pause.

‘Andrew had lots of Dinky cars. I didn’t have any so I stole one. But I couldn’t take it home because Cis would know immediately.’

‘So what did you do?’

We’re heading back up the hill towards scruffier climes.

‘There, just there, in the wall.’ He’s turning in his seat, jerking the seat belt. ‘There was a loose stone. I used to take out the stone and hide the Dinky car behind it.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Andrew Robinson’s mother never let me play with him again.’

I’m digesting it. Children may steal if, subconsciously, deep down, they feel they’ve been deprived of love. Maybe it happens with some adopted children, I think – but I can’t remember where I heard this stuff and I don’t want to offend him with half-baked armchair psychology.

‘Did I tell you about the Burdall’s Gravy Salts?’ he asks.

I shake my head.

And he begins to talk.

It came about because the sweet shop in the village, just up here by the junction we’re coming to, used to be run by a little woman called Miss Gilmour. Occasionally Gregor was given a penny, an old penny, to spend en route to school. That worked well until he saw that other children had slightly more than a penny and were getting more sweets than he was. When you’re small, and you like sweets, as he did, such injustices burn deep. Gregor was aware his mother had a tin, a Burdall’s gravy salt tin. Burdall’s gravy salt was a thing of the early twentieth century, a forerunner to Bisto or Oxo; a potent black mixture of salt and caramel that housewives stirred into their mince to darken and flavour it. Inside the Leckie household, however, this particular Burdall’s tin was used to store shillings specifically for the gas meter. Gregor cunningly decided to take just one shilling for sweets, reckoning it wouldn’t be missed, and sure enough, it wasn’t.

But, in the manner of urchins, he got greedy. He decided to treat his friends and himself to Mars bars so he took three shillings, which he didn’t think would be missed, but he entirely overlooked the fact that his mother and Miss Gilmour were very chummy. Nor did he consider for a minute the fact that he had form with Miss Gilmour, who had never quite forgiven him for pinching a small box of Omo out of her shop. Gregor had needed the Omo, of course, because with the unalienable logic of a small boy, he thought it a very good wheeze to put it into the waterfall in the local burn, down in the valley, and watch the bubbles. All in the interests of science …

He was about seven or so, because from that age he always walked home from school by himself. On that particular day his mother, however, unusually, was standing waiting for him at the school gate. Whether she had come po-faced from a conversation with Miss Gilmour, he knew not; all he knew was that she took him by the arm in silence and frogmarched him home.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked plaintively.

She never said a word.

He knew exactly what was wrong: he had been found out. Cis’s punishment was devastating. She didn’t hit him, she didn’t shout, she didn’t scream, she just ignored him, unless speech was absolutely necessary, then she would speak briefly, communicate what was needed, and she would place food for him on the table. Her silence lasted three weeks; and for the child utterly hooked on her love and affection, whose very existence depended on her, it was a lesson he never forgot. She taught him honour and the difference between right and wrong.

Gregor visibly softens round the edges, smiling at the memory.

‘I can never forget because it had a direct bearing on another event in my life, 50 years later. Cis is long dead and I’m married, I’ve got three children, we’re living in Lincolnshire. In fact, it’s my daughter’s 21st and it’s a big affair – there’s a tent, a marquee, in the garden, there are 150 guests, there’s the whole jingbang. So that takes place and it’s all very jolly, the house is moving with people, everybody’s using the toilets up the stairs, this, that and everything.

‘Anyway, about two weeks later we were going out to a do and my wife Vicki said: “I can’t find my diamond earrings.”