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