Читать книгу The Boy from Nowhere - Gregor Fisher, Melanie Reid - Страница 9

‘All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed’

Sean O’Casey

Gregor lay in the dark, his mind churning with the unwelcome news. Cis was his mother but if this revelation about his adoption was true – and he knew deep down it was, because he’d grasped, somewhere along the line, that neither of them were really his parents – then vague memories dimly made sense. What he didn’t know, however, was far greater than what he thought he didn’t know. The secret was to get a whole lot more complicated yet.

When he woke the next morning he decided to play the sympathy card for all it was worth. If this revelation was true, then he was going to make Cis hurt as much as he was hurting. He would punish her for not being his mother.

‘I was very nasty. I was a bastard. Much to my shame now, I behaved terribly. I did horrible things like … oh, she would give me cereal in the morning and I remember holding up the cereal bowl disdainfully and saying, “What’s this?” She said, “Well, that’s the cereal you like” and I … I was a bastard.’

He stopped speaking to her for what seemed a long, long time. Withdrawing his love was the only weapon he had. For those two, maybe three weeks of being sent to Coventry, Cis accepted his sulk and treated him as if nothing were different. She didn’t get cross, or try to encourage him to talk, or command him to sit down and discuss things with her. She simply took the hurt on the chin and carried on, loving, generous and undemonstrative as ever.

And then Gregor woke up to the realisation, in glorious technicolor, that he was behaving appallingly. Inside that mix of child and young man, beset by hormones, some logic asserted itself. Taking a deep breath, he went downstairs and, as best a 14-year-old boy can, he apologised to her. He told her that as far as he was concerned she was his mother, and he had to put things right and make it better.

‘I realised what an absolute shit I had been. I can’t remember what I said. No hugs or kisses, just “I’m sorry, Mum.” I think there was another pat of my head involved, which meant a state of high emotion, you know. But it was a case of her saying, “Ach well, it’ll be fine” and that’s it, passed, finished, you know? That’s it, gone.’

He laughs.

‘It was a loving household, my household, but it wasn’t the thing, it’s just not what you did. It was never discussed again.’

Everything carried on as normal. We are all good at burying secrets. Gregor wanted his life to have started when he was three, when he met Cissie. Before that, he had only the vaguest of brief, confusing memories, unexplained stuff – the instinctive sense of trouble a child picks up when grown-ups around are acting strangely. There were assumptions he had grown up with, but had chosen not to address. The revelation that he was adopted helped a few things make sense.

His name, for one: Fisher, Cis’s maiden name. And with that the conscious acceptance, finally, that she was not his real mother, even though deep down he’d always known she wasn’t. He also knew – and he had always known this – that John Leckie was not his father. But Cis had two other brothers, apart from Uncle Wull, called Jim and Archie. Gregor began to accept, from fragments of memory, that Jim Fisher might be his real father. Something had happened to his first mother and he had been sent to live with his father’s sister. So, Cis was really his aunt. That explained everything. Well … nearly. But it explained enough for a big, young lad who preferred eating cake to rocking any boats.

The 14-year-old Gregor, head deep in the sand, did not want to ask questions. He knew what family tension felt like, and he didn’t relish it. And he sensed, around the adoption issue, there lay trouble, so why go looking for it? He wasn’t sure about details, but people said he looked like Jim Fisher. When he walked, he turned in one foot exactly the same way Jim did. He shrugged, end of story. Much more importantly, what was for tea?

Nearly 50 years later, Gregor still struggles to articulate how he felt. ‘It was that I wasn’t part of anybody; I felt I didn’t belong, I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t part of this lot, or that lot, or any bloody lot. It wasn’t discussed again because I think like a lot of adopted people the reason I was so keen not to ask was because it seemed like a reflection on my mother. If I’d started digging about and trying to find out stuff, that was like saying I wasn’t happy in my present situation with her. But I was – I adored her.’

Jim Fisher was a shadowy figure in Gregor’s early memory but one incident stuck in his mind. He was at a family christening at Aunt Agnes’s flat, a happy, come-one-come-all kind of place. Games were always played on these Fisher family get-togethers, children and adults having fun. They would string a sheet across a door and then someone would flash a leg from behind it, and the rest of the family would have to guess whose leg it was.

Gregor, not yet five, excited by the family nonsense, bouncing off walls, was looking for Cis. He went running into a room where Jim Fisher was, with a woman. Later, the child learnt that she was Jim’s new wife, Flora. He has a fragment of memory as sharp and scary as a shard of glass.

‘“Where’s Mum?” I said.

‘Flora leant forward, took my arm and looked into my eyes.

‘“I’m your mum,” she said.

‘I remember feeling freaked out because I thought, “Shit, she’s going to take me away from Cis, my mother.”

‘“No, no, no, no, you’re not his mother, I’m his mother,” said Cis (it was her way of saying, try if you dare).

‘I remember a bad atmosphere after that. None of them were child psychologists, were they? It wasn’t the time, those weren’t the days. I remember my little red-haired mother getting angry. Looking back, there was obviously some kind of power struggle between her and Jim’s new wife, though that makes it sound more dramatic than it was.’

Years later, Cis’s daughter Una told Gregor that Jim and Flora had arrived in Neilston at one point and said they had come to take him back. There was a big silence. ‘Mummy wasn’t happy. She said, “Well, I think we’ll just keep him because you’ve got enough on your plate, haven’t you?”’ Una recalled. Jim was not very pleased but Gregor stayed with Cis. She didn’t want to let him go. After that, Gregor didn’t see much of his father.

Not that he was bothered. He had better things to do, like going out to play with his friends. It was the kind of childhood where, at weekends, he left the house on a Saturday morning at half past seven and didn’t get back until night-time. Nobody turned a hair then; it’s what kids did, nobody fretted about where he was. From an early age, Gregor and his gang, full of nonsense and mischief, would be raking about the village, building dens, climbing trees or catching up on the goings-on in Sherwood Forest.

The old lady across the road, a retired matron, had a television set. Gregor was allowed to go over and watch Ivanhoe or, his favourite, the actor Richard Greene, in the black and white series of The Adventures of Robin Hood. The signature tune is imprinted in the minds of anyone born in the 1950s: ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men, feared by the bad, loved by the good, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood’. Greene, the handsome, charming hero, starred in 144 episodes between 1955 and 1960; the Sheriff of Nottingham was a humourless villain; Maid Marian, one of the boys rather than Robin’s girly girlfriend, put on her tights and mucked in with a bow and arrow instead of sitting around in a long gown, waiting to be rescued.

‘There, that was the site of the Pavilion!’

I’m negotiating a roundabout on the outskirts of Barrhead. I haven’t heard him so enthused.

‘The cinema, the local fleapit, but as far as I was concerned it was the manifestation of heaven on earth. In the foyer there was a little booth, where the woman punched the lever and a little ticket came shooting out. It was 9d for down the stairs and 1s 3d for the balcony; I went for the balcony. The children’s matinees, we’d all stamp our feet when the curtains parted and that famous tadadadadadadadadadadaa Pearl & Dean jingle started.

‘And all those silly adverts, where people with English voices from another planet would announce, “MacDiarmid’s Garage, Barrhead, East Renfrewshire, faw all yaw motoring requahments”. And everybody’s saying, “MacDiarmid’s, whozat? Whit’s that, y’now?” I mean, you could handle it if it was Kia-Ora or some other thing, but the local garage … “faw all yaw motoring requahments …”

‘We’d watch anything, it didn’t matter what; usually on a matinee there’d be something cut out for kids, fairly gory stuff like Three Hundred Spartans, where everybody ended up dead. There was a lot of that Greek thing going on then – Jason and the Argonauts, with lots of sword fighting and skeletons.’

He’s lost in the dark: a small boy, wide-eyed at the big screen.

‘Circus Boy with Micky Dolenz, later of Monkees’ fame … and sometimes some not terribly funny British film, Swallows and Amazons, which involved a lot of posh kids on a boat, saying things like, “Let’s go home and have some cocoa.” What are they talking about? Who are these people?’

I’ve pulled in at a lay-by. Outside, an old man crosses the road and ambles into the bookies.

‘He probably went to the Pavilion with you,’ I say.

But Gregor’s not listening. He’s too busy doing the important maths those Saturday afternoons demanded.

‘Cis gave me two and six, half a crown. One and thruppence got me into the cinema. If I walked down to Barrhead, that meant I had one and thruppence on my tail. I didn’t do that very often because usually it was raining. So, it was thruppence down on the bus and thruppence back on the bus, so how much did that leave? Ninepence – and that was spent on crisps and chocolate. Smith’s crisps, thruppence a packet, with the little blue bag of salt, and a chocolate bar, not a very big one, it has to be said – they were obviously on the make.

‘There was an old guy at the door – everyone was older because we were so young – saying, “Get your crisps and chocolate before you go in now. Get your crisps and chocolate before you go in now.” Even that in itself was thrilling – all the little rituals that happened when you went to the pictures.

‘I never quite recovered, you see, from when I was first taken to the cinema by Aunt Jean, who wasn’t really an aunt but a great pal of Cis when they were young. We visited them and she took me on a special treat on a bus to a cinema in Dumfries and the first film I ever saw was Swiss Family Robinson.

‘It was fabulous, I couldn’t believe it – I’d never seen a film in my life. And I must’ve been quite wee – six, seven, eight, something like that. Anyway, fabulous!’

I’ve never seen him look so happy.

Some Saturdays, Gregor would get up and head for his best friend’s house. Johnny Monaghan lived in the smart part of the village, down a pot-holed private road with a selection of big houses. ‘Funny,’ the boys from the other side of the tracks thought, ‘that rich people should have such a rough road.’ The Monaghans lived in a house called Barnfauld and Johnny went to private school – Belmont, and then Glasgow Academy. Johnny had lovely toys and – oh, bliss beyond dreams – a Scalextric set. Money brought other subtle class differences too. They had a drawing room, not a sitting room. And central heating – Gregor couldn’t quite figure out what that was. Great clunky old-fashioned radiators, with a metal thing on top that you moved to let the heat out, and a boiler … and the best bit of all, an oil tank, which he found quite exotic. To have an oil tank of your own, that was like owning a garage. He thought it was pretty special.

Gregor and Johnny had been close since they were five years old. The first time they met, Gregor had gone to Johnny’s house with another friend, Andrew Robinson. But Andrew had to go home for lunch and then Johnny was called in to have his. Gregor stood outside the imposing door, a very small boy in cheap plastic shoes, not quite sure what to do, thinking he’d better clear off. He remembers a woman coming out, Johnny’s mother; remembers the posh Glasgow accent.

‘“What’s your name?”’

‘“Gregor.”’

‘“Well, Gregor, you’d better come and have some lunch then.”’

‘So, I went in for lunch and I was a feature there every weekend for years to come.’

Those were wonderful times, another period in Gregor Fisher’s life when the stars came into alignment. His happy little band of friends centred round the Monaghans’ big, welcoming house. The friendship influenced his life hugely because they were a kind family, who had the money and wherewithal to show their son’s friend a different world to that which Cis could provide for him. Gregor’s eldest sister Margaret had once taken him to the theatre in Glasgow, but the Monaghans introduced him to much more: the excitement of performance on stage and the thrill of getting in a car and going somewhere as a family. It was almost as if, from that first day, Margaret Monaghan had read in Gregor’s face the craving to belong, the fear of rejection, and in a way she adopted him too. She treated him and her son as equals. If Johnny got a tube of Smarties, Gregor got one too. He was included in family trips to the theatre, to the Pavilion in Glasgow to see shows such as Beat the Clock, starring Calum Kennedy. The boys would pile into the back of the family’s old black Bentley – how Gregor loved that feeling of anticipation – and they would head out into a world of city lights and noise and fun, worlds away from watching John Leckie sit morosely by the fire and smoke Capstan.

Years later, as a teenager, some time after Gregor learnt of his adoption, Johnny Monaghan found out he had been adopted too. His reaction to the news was much the same as Gregor: he chose to put it to the back of his mind and move on. Life was good; he didn’t want to upset his mother by asking questions. It was decades later, three years after her death, before her adoptive son started digging to find what was what and who he was. But it helps to explain something. Did Margaret Monaghan know the circumstances of the little boy with the curly hair, whom she invited in for lunch with her son? Had she guessed he was adopted too? Maybe she had seen Cis and drawn her own conclusions. Gregor does not know but in Mrs Monaghan he was lucky for he had found another good woman with a kind heart and space in it to offer to him. It would become a lifelong pattern.

He enjoyed primary school, mainly because he fell in love with his teacher, Miss Fay. He thought she was an angel, presiding over the safe little world where they made Easter cards for their mums and decorations for the Christmas tree. Everything started to fall apart, though, in his final year at primary. He was a bright child and it was assumed he would go to Paisley Grammar School, but like so many boys he was not ready for his 11 Plus.

I was a dreamer or a lazy bastard, whichever you prefer. I used to sit and look out of the window at the clouds and wonder what it was like, being a cloud.

Instead, he was consigned to the rough house of the local secondary modern, where the whole purpose seemed to be to teach the boys metalwork or woodwork (cookery for the girls) and then churn them out into the workplace. With hindsight, Gregor is extremely bitter at the way secondary modern pupils were treated like drones, second-class citizens, condemned for life for failing a single exam. That was the way it felt to him: a rejection, even if he did not articulate it at the time. Failing the 11 Plus was a self-fulfilling prophecy of further failure, and it meant that school became largely a waste of time for him.

Back then Barrhead High School was a tall, forbidding place, built in the 1920s in the shape of a courtyard, with separate entrances for boys and girls. Gregor caught the red Western SMT bus down the hill from Neilston and spent the day longing for the final bell. Going home was the best part, especially because it involved a bit of daredevil stuff, skipping off the bus while it was still moving. The bus stop was some way past his house, no point going that far and having to walk back, so he had it down to a fine art – waiting until the driver changed gear on the steep bit, then letting go of the pole at the back of the vehicle and springing off, knees bent, running. Everybody did it, if the bus was passing their house, but on a slippery day there might be trouble and pupils could end up with skinned knees. It was more fun than books, though.

I was useless at school, worse than a man shot. The only things that interested me were cigarettes, gambling and sex, not necessarily in that order. The first two I did really quite well with: I was a world-class smoker, a very good card player, but the sex was just never forthcoming. Those were my obsessions and as for maths, science and arithmetic, I was utterly, utterly useless. I don’t think I was particularly thick, it was just that at that time I wasn’t interested.

Pupils were streamed by ability, from A to E. Gregor started off at C and moved swiftly down to D. School was tribal; a jungle. The A and B stream kids wore a collar and tie; they were always nicely turned out, leather shoes polished, with parents who cared. Not that Cis didn’t care but that was the way the A and Bs made the other kids feel – like scruff. Gregor and his chums behaved according to the role expected of them. The headmaster was Mr Burnett, a former Greek teacher, who gave the impression he would much rather have been head of a grammar school than a secondary modern and seemed bitter that he hadn’t made the cut. Mr Burnett, nevertheless, made the most of his status. Every morning, at assembly, wearing his gown, he conducted a messianic entrance: there was a balcony all round the big assembly hall and he would walk right along the top corridor, very slowly down the stairs, with the entire school assembled beneath him, walk to the podium and take the morning service. The pupils sang rollicking great Christian hymns, and the A and B students would perform on their recorders. Often it was just too much pomp and ceremony for the reprobates to bear; it positively begged for a bit of disruption.

Laughter, Gregor was fast discovering, was a most subversive weapon. He was learning its power. There was one assembly in particular, he remembered vividly, when Mr Burnett stood at the podium and announced pompously that it had come to the attention of the janitor that someone had been blocking the toilets in the downstairs loo. One of Gregor’s pals said – and he didn’t mean it to be so loud – ‘Oh, someone must have shit a brick’ – and his words echoed round the cavernous hall. Time stood still and then came the wave of suppressed giggling. Mr Burnett pointed his finger and the offender was hauled out for punishment, probably the belt. Discipline was still fierce in schools in the 1960s, and while Gregor and his friends headed towards a reputation, the A and B pupils headed towards success – ‘Towards sainthood … Oh, they were probably lovely kids and nice people but school was tribal,’ he says.

With adolescence, Gregor had grown into a husky, strong young man. Not tall, but fairly broad. It changed the balance of power at home, up the hill in Neilston, where sometimes, inevitably, if there were less than happy memories, they were in the shape of John Leckie. The older man was not remotely interested in interacting with the boy who had invaded his house, usurping his wife’s affections. Perhaps Mr Leckie might be forgiven his resentment at seeing his wife’s attention switch to the cherubic little cuckoo in the nest, the child who made her laugh and brought her joy. Previously, her husband’s welfare had been her main priority – suddenly he felt second in the pecking order.

There is a duty to understand and respect; and if Mr Leckie seemed a profoundly negative influence, especially towards children, perhaps those judging him needed to walk a mile in his shoes. Scotland in the 1950s was, for all but the very few, a grey landscape of hard graft. Since the Industrial Revolution, work in the heavy industries – mining, shipbuilding, steelmaking, engineering – meant a lifetime of long hours, physical labour, the risk of frequent industrial accidents and low wages. It was just the way things were; there was no alternative. Men, both skilled and unskilled, toiled week-in, week-out, and hoped their sons would secure an apprenticeship to do the same.

John Leckie was a skilled man, an engineer at Weirs of Cathcart, where he had worked all his life – and mostly on the night shift, in itself a profoundly dislocating and unhealthy existence. Weirs, founded in Glasgow in 1871 – and in the twenty-first century still a global concern – were one of the powerhouses of the mechanical world. During the course of Mr Leckie’s career at the factory their design engineers pioneered munitions for the First World War, developed the autogiro to enable the first helicopter flight and manufactured Frank Whittle’s invention, the first jet engine. Mr Leckie was, in his day, one of up to 9,000 employees.

If his joylessness was oppressive, events in his early life can explain why. Born in 1901, John Leckie was a miner’s son, with three younger brothers, Sam, Campbell and Hugh. When all four boys were small, their father died in an explosion in the shed where the mine explosives were kept. In those days compensation for such incidents did not exist. Not many years after that, their mother died – of a broken heart, it was said – and John was left to bring up his brothers on his apprentice’s wage at Weirs. Given such burdens, perhaps it was clear why he did not laugh a lot. We can also guess why, in his late fifties, ground down by a lifetime of work, when he felt he had earned some peace, he resented the arrival of another dependent male child, another mouth to feed. It was history repeating itself.

Victorian by inclination, John Leckie had no apparent affection for, or interest in, Gregor – and the feeling was mutual. In this, there was nothing exceptional. Mr Leckie was typical of his era, his class and his locality. Scotland bred dogged working men who built an empire, but it was at a cost to their humanity. Such men were strict, intolerant, negative fathers, domestic tyrants light years from modern parenting ideals, because that was how their fathers, in turn, had raised them. Permanently tired and prematurely aged by the burdens of their role, they knew no other way. Being nice to children was women’s work. Mr Leckie was not physically abusive but when roused he shouted and swore at the little boy and said some harsh things. On the plus side, his daughters adored their daddy. Growing up, they had seen a softer side of him. Plus, quite simply, they were his flesh and blood.

Gregor learnt to avoid him and to keep interaction to a minimum, but at mealtimes it was impossible to do so. There would be stupid arguments. If the boy did not finish his soup, Mr Leckie would lean forward and tap his plate with a spoon then say with heavy sarcasm, ‘Same price as the rest.’ Or Gregor would play with the sugar, or take the wrong half of a slice of bread, and that would enrage him. One of John Leckie’s peculiar droits du seigneurs was over the top part of the slices of pan loaf. He only liked the top half, the well-fired rounded bit. No one else could touch those bits; everyone else had to have the bottom half, with the square corners.

‘You’ll be good for bugger all but digging the roads,’ he would tell Gregor. Other than that, there was little conversation. Gregor does not remember them talking civilly about anything. No guidance, no fatherly, let alone grandfatherly, chat.

Cis was always defensive – ‘Ach, his bark’s worse than his bite. He just says these things.’

Nothing in Leckie’s behaviour gave any indication, as the 1950s drew to a close, that he perceived the younger generation as anything other than profligate. Young people were wasters. Literally. He and Cis would share a banana for lunch. On his days off, he withdrew into self-imposed isolation, staring at the fire. Today, we might diagnose over-work, clinical depression, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a troubled mind, exhaustion, burnout, stress; unresolved post-traumatic stress disorder. Back then, Mr Leckie was simply a man with a hard life who found his rewards in silence and sitting still, doing nothing, his legs hard up against the hearth. He did not read books, the 1930s wireless was rarely on, and there was no working television in the house until later on, when Gregor bought the family a colour set with his early wages.

Nothing must disturb Mr Leckie’s routine. There was calamity when, on one occasion, Cis was unable to prepare his lunchbox. The calamity wasn’t that his wife had broken her leg – she slipped on some hen droppings in the sloping garden and had been hospitalised. It was that his daughter Margaret made up his lunch wrongly. Because he always had cheese, cheese, cheese, she thought she would ring the changes and bought some ham. How incorrect she was. Her father came home angry the next morning. Ham in his sandwiches, indeed! But that was the sort of man he was.

He was not a drinker, unlike the majority of men of his milieu for whom alcohol was a release, an excuse and a way to forget. The families of drinkers suffered cruelly and the problem was endemic. Gregor remembers the only time he ever saw John Leckie with a drink in him, after Aunt Babs’s silver wedding celebrations. The Fisher family was travelling home on the train and Mr Leckie, by this time an old man, was in his cups.

‘Do you still love me?’ he blurted out to his wife as they sat with the family in the railway carriage, rattling past the Glasgow suburbs.

The teenaged Gregor was repulsed. He wanted the ground to swallow him up to escape the embarrassment. Witnessing such a display of emotion from a buttoned-up old man was unbearable. Getting off the train at Neilston, Mr Leckie slipped between train and platform and skinned his shin. The next day his daughter Margaret, returning to the station to go to work, was told by the stationmaster: ‘I see you are keeping better company today.’ Of the many unfairnesses in John Leckie’s hard life, this seems one of the most gratuitous.

The family had no car. John Leckie would take the same train from Neilston to Cathcart for work at Weirs. Only latterly, as he neared retirement after 50 years at the plant, did he have the luxury of a lift in a car, sharing the petrol bill with somebody in the village who worked at the same place.

Gregor, older now than John Leckie was when he as the cuckoo entered the nest, holds real regrets. He would love another chance at the relationship and now thinks he understands the whole story, but by the time he found out the known unknowns, let alone the unknown unknowns, the old man was long dead.

When Gregor got some way into his teens, by which time John Leckie had retired, the boy was sent down to Langholm in Dumfriesshire during the summer holidays. Perhaps it was partly to keep him out of John Leckie’s way. Aunt Agnes had a daughter, Carol, who had married a farmer called Billy Bell, with a place down there. They kept battery hens and she had a young family. A useful pair of hands, Gregor stayed on the farm for the entire holidays, collecting eggs, shovelling chicken manure and doing other chores. He enjoyed the country life; in his bones it suited him and he was perfectly happy there. Always there was a wheeze of some kind, either killing the rats that were nesting under last season’s bales of hay or heading down to the Solway Firth to catch flounder.

Returning to Neilston for school in late August, though, after a summer of work and freedom, there were tensions. John Leckie, now home all day, sat by the fire and ordered his wife around. Cis, a pensioner herself, was a slave to his needs and Gregor, watching, his body filling with testosterone, found it less easy to remain detached. He could cope with the old man’s misanthropic ways in general, he just couldn’t bear to see his mother talked to like that. One day, when Gregor was about 15 – and by which time Mr Leckie would have been nearly 70 – things came to a head.

Memories of family meltdowns are horrible to store – sour, embarrassing, guilt-inducing moments – so we try to forget them. Gregor cannot remember what had been said, just that the old man had shouted something nasty at Cis. Young lion provoked by very old, worn-out lion; fighting over the woman who sustained them both. In a flash of anger the teenager, determined to defend his mother against bullying, picked up a brush and struck him. Mr Leckie fell right to the floor and Gregor shouted at him, ‘Don’t you ever speak to my mother like that again!’

It was brief but nasty. John Leckie didn’t say anything. He got up, walked back to the fire and resumed his position. Even today, nearly half a century on, Gregor squirms at the cruelty of his actions.

Young and stupid, not my proudest moment, I have to say. It’s a relationship in my life that I would dearly like a re-run at. I hate not understanding … You know, I don’t mind if you don’t get on with somebody and you think, well, you’re not my cup of tea and that’s fine and I’m not your cup of tea either and that’s fine too – because we can’t all be lovey-dovey creatures and that’s just the way it is. But I just wish … it’s a regret. Always has been, always will be.

The relationship between Cis and John Leckie still puzzles him. Why did such a warm, vivacious woman, so lovely-looking when she was young, marry such a curmudgeon? They look happy and handsome in their wedding photos. Why did she let him treat her like that? Because you just don’t know what happens in people’s marriages, Gregor muses. He couldn’t possibly have been an old grump for all his life, so what turned him into that? That was the fascination of John Leckie. Of course he’d had a lifetime of drudgery, and so had Cis, but she had remained warm and kind. What made him behave in that way to his wife?

Back at school, Gregor was expertly managing to waste six years of his life learning little but how to amuse his friends. The only subject to engage him in any way was art, so the sum total of his high school career was an O-Level in drawing still life and stitching embroidery. Big embroidery: collages, tapestries. And he was very good at doing paintings of plants. Again, this was down to luck and random connections. The art teacher, Mrs Burkett, saw something in the mixed-up boy and encouraged him. It was always fun to be in her class.

But something else had happened at school, when he was 13, which changed his life. It came in the shape of a teacher called Alan Ball. Mr Ball taught the A and B classes so Gregor didn’t know him but things must have been said in the staffroom. The art teacher had spoken up for that silly but creative joker in fourth year, name of Fisher, who was heading for the factory floor unless someone got him interested in something. On the strength of such random conversations careers can hang. Mr Ball organised amateur dramatics and he was rather keen on Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. One day he passed Gregor in the corridor and spun on his heel, hailing him.

‘“Fisher!” he said.

‘And he gave me a little booklet and it was the Gilbert and Sullivan script of The Mikado.

‘“You’re playing Pooh-Bar,” he said.

‘“But sir,” I said. “Sir, sir, sir! Why me? No, no, I haven’t done anything!”

‘And inside I was like, “Naw, why’s he picking on me?” I couldn’t believe it. It was punishment. I mean, you were in real trouble with your peers if you got involved with that kind of shit. It was only the As and Bs with their leather shoes polished that did that – and it was all right for that section of school to be involved in poncey things like am-dram, but not me.’

At break time Gregor went and knocked on the staffroom door and pleaded with Mr Ball. Told him he couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t want to … any wild excuse he could grab out of the air, twisting and fidgeting in desperation. But Mr Ball refused to take no for an answer and was obviously gifted with natural psychology; he persuaded the aghast teenager that he’d be really good in the role. Flattery works for all actors and it worked for the boy who was yet to become one.

The reluctant player dodged his mocking mates, duly turned up at the hall for after-school rehearsal and started speaking his lines.

‘Speak up, Fisher, for God’s sake, we can’t hear you!’

Mr Ball, at the back of the hall, appeared quite gruff, but as with a lot of big men he was actually a gentle person, sensitive enough to cajole and flatter and bully his unwilling star into delivering his lines. The Grand Pooh-bar was a haughty character in this hugely popular comic opera, written in 1885, which satirised the self-importance of British politics and the pretensions of the high-ranking establishment. Set in Japan, to avoid censure, the operetta involved a lot of fun and farce dressing up in kimonos. The Grand Pooh-Bar is designated Lord High Everything Else and the name has survived in common parlance for mocking those with huge self-regard. So too has the expression ‘short, sharp shock’ from one of Pooh-bar’s jolly songs, just made to be chanted by rowdy schoolboys with painted white faces and chopsticks stuck in their hair.

To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,

In a pestilential prison, with a lifelong lock,

Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,

From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!

Not only did Gregor enter into the spirit of the whole thing, he made an extraordinary discovery: he could get a laugh. Not only that, he could make lots of people laugh at one time; could have a whole hall-full of grown-ups cheering for him, their faces split wide open with pleasure. He remembers it still, the wave of warmness that swept over him from the hall, that feeling of – ‘Oh, this is good, maybe I’ve found something I can do after all.’

An audience of about 300 turned up for the production in the school hall – all the mums and dads and aunts and uncles of the cast, plus Cis and his unofficial sisters, Una and Margaret. It was obvious to everyone but Gregor that he was the star of the performance; what he clearly remembers, however, is coming on to take his bow and being annoyed when Mr Burnett, the pompous headmaster, stood up before everyone, the VIPs, school inspectors, councillors, and basked in his reflected glory.

‘This boy,’ he told them, ‘is only 13.’

I thought, ‘You don’t even like me, you hardly know me, you two-faced little shit.’ … He really bugged me.

After The Mikado, he told himself, I’ll be an actor, without a clue how difficult it would be. But that actually was the start of Gregor’s career. His star quality was evident. He then acted the part of Reginald Bunthorne (‘a Fleshly Poet’) in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, soaking up the applause, loving that unfamiliar sense of, ‘Oh, everyone wants me.’ The school also put on a production of a Noël Coward comic one-act play, Hands Across the Sea – how sedate and inappropriate were the 1960s am-dram choices of a tough secondary modern in working-class Scotland! In this Gregor was called upon to mimic a colonial English accent – ‘How was India, old boy?’ – ‘Oh, very large’ – and his power of mimicry was also given its first chance of an outing.

I was terrible at accents then, but I thought I was very good; it was amateur night out. I’m sure it was dreadful. There may have been, if I’m kind to myself, a talent there – but it was very raw, a diamond in the rough. Very rough.

Then, very swiftly, it was the summer of 1969, he was 15 and faced the shock of his life: on the other side of the school gates with an O-Level in art and apart from that no prospects, no future, no qualifications, no apprenticeship, no college to go to. He remembers thinking, quite seriously, ‘You’ve messed that up, haven’t you?’

Before he left, he saw the careers officer. Gregor waited in the corridor outside his office in a queue of other gormless teenagers, picking their noses, counting their spots, facing the rest of their lives.

‘Next!’ shouted the teacher.

Someone had briefed the man.

‘What are your interests? I hear you’ve been doing these school plays.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Mumbling.

‘Have you considered acting?’

‘Dunno, sir.’

‘Well, take this. It’s the prospectus for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.’

Gregor left the office with the prospectus, but it was the word ‘Royal’ that put the wind up him; put him right off. If it was Royal, especially with a capital ‘R’, they wouldn’t want him. He took it home to show to Cis and told her the careers teacher had told him to apply – he didn’t say he wanted to apply there. Hedging his bets, shielding himself, anticipating failure. His mother wasn’t keen. He didn’t blame her; she came not just from a different generation but a different world – one where working people said, get yourself an apprenticeship. The family were worried about the cost of further education, despite the fact there were full grants available. In the end, Cis came round a bit. She and Gregor agreed he should apply. But he couldn’t do so until he was 18 and there was the small matter of finding work until then.

What followed was a succession of dead-end jobs. First, Thomas Thomson Tapes, a company now long gone, which made the equivalent of Elastoplast, which they shipped to Africa. For £9 a week he was a machine operator; and it was a simple fact that machine operators making Elastoplast in those days, long before Health & Safety, used to go home drunk every night from the fumes.

Even at 16 going on 17 he realised he didn’t like it; he was also shrewd enough to see that it could go on for the rest of his life. Working lives were decided that way, if you let it happen. But there were enough jobs available in those days for young men to sample different industries before they committed. He decided to go for a more glamorous job at Shanks in Barrhead, a nearby town. John Shanks, a plumber, had patented the ballcock and filling valve for a flushing toilet, and his company, which might be said to have helped change the world more than most, was internationally famous. But making loos had its limitations and for Gregor the U-bend was a dead end too.

His job was pot boy. The lavatory pans were made by pouring molten porcelain into a mould and the pot boy’s role was to make sure the liquid didn’t spill out of any of the holes, by blocking them with a little clay pot. And then he had to remove the pan and put the two parts of the mould back together again, making sure it was good and solid for the next go. He found it a pretty senseless task and didn’t last very long – ‘I don’t know what I didn’t like about it, I just knew from the minute I thought, “God, why am I here?” I mean, making lavvies the rest of your life?’

The only good bit about being the bottom of the heap, job-wise, was being sent to the canteen, where the women fried copious eggs and bacon, which he carried back to the older men.

He seized upon the idea of getting a job in the open air and blagged his way into a post cutting grass, claiming to be experienced. Having lasted four days he was sacked on one of the world’s less well-known grassy knolls, just off the new M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh, when the boss turned up and Gregor was having an unscheduled fag break. Because he’d been sacked on the spot he couldn’t get the van home, nor had he any money. He had to walk all the way from the other side of Paisley to Neilston, which took him a good three hours and was a bit of a shock to the system. History does not record what John Leckie thought of it. ‘You’ll be good for bugger-all but digging the roads,’ hung in the air, unsaid.

At that point Gregor went back down to Billy Bell’s farm in Langholm and got a job in a dye factory. His task was making the rainbow wool for the multi-coloured jumpers and tank tops of the 1970s. Everybody in that decade would wear one. One worker took the end of a pole with hanks of wool on it, someone else the other end, and together they would walk up and down the tank with the hank dipping in the dye between them. Then the hank would be turned round and trailed in other tanks with different dyes in them. The company was to become a vast retail empire called The Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

In every job, unbeknownst to him, Gregor was building his future. He listened and studied the people he worked with: the characters, the idiosyncrasies; the verbal tics. The Scottish working man – his grumbles, his pleasures, his chat, his put downs, his profanities, his mannerisms, his cynicism. Gregor soaked it all up like a sponge, filling the library in his head with voices and noises. As soon as he reached 18 he filled in the form for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) in Glasgow and sent it off.

He was a young man with dreams, lacking in confidence in everything except the manufacture of rainbow wool. It was around that time, when what he didn’t know was still far, far bigger than what he did know, that something happened.

Out of the blue he got a letter from someone called Maureen. She claimed to be his sister.

His real sister.