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.
CHAPTER 3
You Don’t Know Me But I’m Your Sister
‘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,