Victorians by birth, William and Matthew were God-fearing men of status, pillars of the community. One was a government law officer, the other a church organist and teacher at Sunday school. Freemasons, they abided by the social rules of a different age. One would die soon, but tragedy was to stalk them both. And one day scandalous events would unite them in a long-buried tale of betrayal, love and survival.
Let’s ask, just this once. Is everything random, or do we believe in fate?
CHAPTER 1
The Curly-Haired Boy in the Corner
‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’
Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire
Thump.
Pause.
Thump.
Pause.
Thump.
Three thumps – never more, never less. No cheery ‘Hallooo!,’ no cry of ‘That’s me, Cis,’ just three dictatorial thuds on the bedroom floor with his foot. John Leckie wanted his breakfast. After a lifetime working the night shift, this was the signal to his wife in the kitchen below to say that he had woken up. It was 5pm, and Cis would prepare tea, toast and marmalade and take it upstairs. Mr Leckie ate upstairs and then came down: a tall, stern, well-built man, ready to go to work. The child, sitting silently, for it was best to keep quiet, would look up and see the great long legs of his boiler suit appearing down the stairs.
John Leckie was, it’s fair to say, as much a creature of routine as he was a man of few words. There was no conversation. He put a long, dark trench coat over his overalls, clapped his grease-stained engineer’s bonnet on his head and picked up the lunchbox Cis had prepared earlier. His lunch, his ‘piece’, was a thing of precise wonderment. It stayed exactly the same for nigh on 50 years: an ancient little Oxo tin containing sugar and loose tea, mixed before it went in, and cheese sandwiches in waxed bread paper, made with the well-fired top of the loaf. John Leckie was as set in his ways as he was undemonstrative. Leckie would nod to his wife and leave for the night shift in the great engineering works in the city. Nor were things much different when he returned home in the morning, weary and grimy. He came in, said little or nothing, took off his overalls, ate the meal Cis had prepared for him and climbed the stairs to bed. Soon it would be time to bang on the floor again for breakfast. Such was the unflinching, unchanging traffic of his life.
At weekends, John Leckie, in an old shirt and trousers and tank top with holes in it, would sit, not in an armchair but on a wooden slat-backed kitchen chair by the fire, his legs spread wide on the hearth, both hugging and hogging the heat. It was always cold in the 1950s. He would spend hours sitting there, hour after hour, in his own silent, still world, staring at the fire. No radio. No books. No conversation. He ignored anyone else who might be in the room. On the mantelpiece were his smoking paraphernalia, neatly arranged – a box of Capstan untipped full strength and the occasional half-smoked cigarette, extinguished early and saved. He would take the tobacco out and re-roll it. There were no matches – he made tapers from tightly rolled sheets of newspaper. When he stood up to smoke, which was frequently, he lit the taper from the fire and put it to the cigarette. The taper was carefully stubbed out and propped at one side of the fire to be re-used. He’d smoke his cigarette standing over the fire, and then sit down again. Occasionally he coughed. And if he needed to fart, he simply lifted one cheek of his backside and farted. No apologies. No glance around. ‘This is my house,’ announced the fart. ‘I’m the main man here.’ It was a thing of wonder to the little boy who observed. And Mr Leckie would continue to sit there, legs astride the fire, coal bucket sitting beside him. Eventually the fire would start to burn lower.
‘Cis,’ he would call in the direction of the kitchen.
Not a question, an order.
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Coal.’
And she would leave off what she was doing and come through to load coal upon his fire to keep him warm, while he sat there, unmoving. If he did speak, when she had done as he asked, it would only be to criticise the quality of the fuel she had put upon the fire.
‘There’s too much dross in that.’
The small boy remembered the day he arrived at John and Cis Leckie’s house, at the tail end of 1957. It all seemed so simple, back then. He was only three years old and Cis was his mother. Of this he had no doubt. He remembered the day he arrived there because it was snowy and they drove him up to where she lived, at the very top of the hill. He needed a pee and they had to stop the car on the slope. He remembered the pattern his pee made in the snow. He was a sturdy, smiley little chap with heart-melting blond curls and bright blue eyes. That first night, when her husband was at work, Cis carried the child outside to the loo because in 1950s Scotland most people still had outside toilets. The house sat high up to the south above Glasgow and it was a cold, frosty night – he could see the city lights twinkling and he thought he’d died and gone to heaven.
Safe, really safe, in Cis’s arms, looking at the lights.
He’s outside, pacing the decking, smoking a Gauloise. It’s Stirlingshire, Scotland, May 2014, and he’s on a flying visit from his home in France. Restless, wary, but eager, he really wants to talk. This has been a long time in the brewing, more than 60 years.
‘It’s really quite complicated, my story,’ says Gregor Fisher, actor, comic legend, man o’pairts. He pauses. ‘I just remember thinking that it was like trying to sort out a pile of spaghetti, or finding the ends of a tangled ball of wool. I didn’t know how to get to the bottom of this, or if I ever would, actually.’
It was a great place to grow up, that house at the edge of the village of Neilston in Renfrewshire, where there was countryside, animals, freedom, friends, mischief – affection and laughter. The family had an acre of land, once a market garden, up there on the hill, and the new child was the prince of all he surveyed. Some would say kindly that it was an eccentric house, others, more judgemental, that it was like Steptoe’s yard. Hens pecked around the back door, the odd goose waddled across the yard, a friendly old dog mooched. Primitive but of its era, the kitchen housed a deep Belfast sink that had a big, wooden step on the floor in front of it, so that Cis, who was not much more than five feet tall, could reach into the water. There was also a very old black range, with a built-in oven and hob. Later, in a nod to the 1960s, it would be taken out and replaced by a Baby Belling: a two-ringed cooker. In the living room was John Leckie’s open fire, with chipped tiles around it and a back boiler to heat the water. The fire was his territory; Cis stoked it, but he controlled it. It heated the house and provided any hot water there was. You got scrubbed in the big sink in the kitchen but you had to book a bath and they didn’t happen very often.
And if a bath was deserved, Cis used the poker to flick the lever at the back of the fire so the heat would be diverted to the boiler. At night she would load the fire with dross, or slack – the powder left at the bottom of the coal bunker – to keep it going, and it was her job to revive it first thing in the morning before anyone else was up. There was no other heating, but nobody ever thought there was anything odd about that, it was just the way it was. You came down in the morning, you got dressed in front of the fire. Sometimes Cis would stand, back to the flames, and lift up her skirt behind her to get a heat. A fleeting luxury.
‘Ah, that’s nice!’
Back then Scotland was a thoroughly tough country. It’s hard for us, from the comfort of the twenty-first century, to grasp just how tough it was. The gap between rich and poor was vast. As the Historiographer Royal, T. C. Smout, put it, simply and bluntly,