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