Gregor Fisher, the little boy with the winning blue eyes, landed lucky. Here, his was to be a stable childhood, in a society marked by thrift, hard work, regular church-going and what today’s children would regard as sensory deprivation, if not neglect: no television, few toys or holidays, even fewer luxuries, old-fashioned rules of discipline. Waste was unheard of, everything old. Wooden furniture. A 1930s brown sofa with a lever that, when pulled, lowered one end, turning it into a daybed. His new mother’s wooden carpet sweeper, circa 1925, with metal wheels, did its best on the old rugs laid on top of the linoleum floor. ‘Wax cloth’, his mother called the lino. There was a single light bulb hanging from a wire in the middle of the living-room ceiling; if you left it on when you went out of the room there was hell to pay. Always there was a dog that his mother was looking after for some old lady or other who was unwell; or somebody had died and left a dog and Cis, out of the goodness of her huge heart, would take the creature on.
She had a soft spot for animals and she loved her hens. There were lashings of fresh eggs; Gregor remembers yolks like Belisha beacons. At certain wintry times of the year the hens were invited in the latch door at the side of the house and took up residence in the kitchen. A hen that was sitting on eggs, or a nest of chicks, would be kept either side of the range in a cage, and when the chickens got bigger and it was still cold outside, they would perch on the top of the kitchen door. Cis would put sheets of newspaper underneath the door to catch their droppings, but woe betide anyone who forgot and came down in the morning with bare feet.
When Gregor arrived, John Kerr Leckie was 56, and Cis about 50. They had a grown-up family – Margaret, 29, who was a schoolteacher, and Una, 23, who was a school secretary. At that time, the daughters were unmarried and still living at home, but out working every day. The little boy slept at first in bed with his mother when John Leckie was away at work; he remembers the bliss of sleeping in the big, warm bed, safe in her arms, and then, in the morning, when she got up, he used to roll into the cosy nest where her body had been. That was the best moment of all. There in the cocoon he knew for sure that everything was right in the world. Before long, though, before he was old enough for school, his new sisters decreed he should have a room of his own. There was a deep walk-in cupboard upstairs, under the coomb of the roof, with an internal window into their bedroom. It was wide enough to fit a single bed in, so the girls papered it with cowboy wallpaper and after a couple of nights of protest – ‘I want to sleep with Mummy!’ – he realised having his own room was actually quite nice.
There was no heating in the bedrooms; horsehair mattresses on the beds too. No insulation in the roof or the walls. When it got really cold, coats were piled on top of layers of blankets. Gregor had so many blankets he was riveted to the bed with the weight, and piled on top of them was a moth-eaten fur coat of his mother’s to keep him even cosier.
We forget how events of the twentieth century shaped lives, altered personalities. Conditioned by decades of consumerism and relative affluence, we are fast losing the ability to grasp how little ordinary people in those days possessed. Cis and her husband had lived through the Great War, the Depression and the Second World War. Prudence and austerity had defined their lives, were set in their bones.
In an era when people aged fast, where no glossy magazines existed to proclaim that 50 was the new 30, Cis and John Leckie looked and dressed like Gregor’s grandparents. It meant nothing to him. In the early days he did not understand that Cis was physically too old to be his birth mother. Why should he? He was too busy surviving on instinct, this child who was as pretty as pie. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, he was quite simply the curly-haired boy in the corner; his life revolved around him. He knew his name was Gregor Fisher and Cis Fisher was his mother, except she was married to John Leckie, so she was called Cis Leckie. She was still his mother, nevertheless. He called her Mum, that’s just how it was. There were some unexplained things when he was growing up, but he didn’t ask any questions, he just accepted that was the way it was. As far as life was concerned, he and his mother were. He knew she was different from his pals’ mothers, but he didn’t care. What mattered was that she adored him. He had what he craved; he was content. Looking back, he realises just how lucky he was to find her – ‘Like so many things in my life, it was meant to be.’
They brought out the joy in each other. He and Cis would constantly set one another off laughing. They laughed when she put him to bed at night, giggling about all kinds of nonsense; they would sing songs and do silly things together. She gave him unconditional love and attention. Maybe she just had a bottomless love for waifs and strays. Whatever the reason, her love saved Gregor Fisher, forged him and still sustains him. He openly acknowledges that he couldn’t live without what he got from her, nor would he have achieved what he has. And today, when he talks about her, it is the closest he comes to tears.
Cis can be described as an ordinary, extraordinary woman, or perhaps an extraordinary, ordinary woman. She was just one of hundreds and thousands of wee West of Scotland ladies who were the cement and the oil and the glue and the lifeblood of their families. Every day she wore a wrap-around pinny and coiled her long hair in a bun under a hairnet. Her red hair was going grey. She had a jam jar with red hair dye in it, and Gregor remembers watching her dip her comb in it and spread it into her hair, then shape it into a bun. Her diminutive size belied her determination and strength of personality.
Cis was a full-time housewife. The only time she sat down, Gregor remembers, was with him on her knee to listen to Listen with Mother on the wireless or when she read The People’s Friend. She carried the coal and went for the food, cooked, washed, cleaned, fetched her husband’s cigarettes. She got up early and set the fire before any of her family came downstairs. No one ever went hungry in Cis’s house, and food is a great way of doling out love. She had a routine of big family suppers late at night: scones, cheese on toast and cups of tea. The family could tell the day of the week by the main meal: one day they had stew, then there was mince, on a Friday there was fish. Every Friday afternoon Cis and Gregor, in the days before he went to school, would catch the bus to Shawlands in Glasgow to get Scotch mutton pies from Short’s in Skirving Street for Saturday and fresh butter in a pat from Henry Healy’s, the City grocer.
Cis’s sister, Aunt Agnes, conveniently lived in Shawlands too, in what the little boy considered rather an exotic, tenement flat. Best of all, she had a piano, which Gregor was mad for, and for him it was the highlight of a Friday afternoon, going thump, thump, thump on the keys, because somehow music was in his blood but he didn’t know it then.
So there was never any choice about what was for supper, nor were those the days of sweet potato with cumin and rocket and a poached egg on top. Plain food, plain lives, few expectations … there was no experimentation whatsoever. It was mince, stew, big pots of really good soup and baking. Gregor enjoyed his food. His mother made rhubarb tarts and apple tarts, she did a top-class fry-up and she also made the best shortbread he could ever hope to taste. Plainly, she and her sisters were a family of bakers, for Aunt Agnes had been at one time industrious enough to start up her own bakery shop.
But this was an extremely male-dominated society. Women like Cis, fathered by and wedded to the stern Presbyterian working men Scotland excelled in, were fantastically strong copers, but they kept their emotions in check. Life taught them not to expect too much. They kept house at a time before bathrooms or washing machines or detergents; they raised children on meals magicked from very small incomes; they toiled from early to late as slaves to men like John Leckie – and he was a saint compared with most men, for he did not drink. Women like Cis were not schooled in any kind of delicate niceties and displays of emotion; kissing and hugging were unheard of. Hers was a loving household but one devoid of displays of physical affection. Until her old age, even a pat on the head was a very unusual thing.
Decades later, when Gregor