Victorian by inclination, John Leckie had no apparent affection for, or interest in, Gregor – and the feeling was mutual. In this, there was nothing exceptional. Mr Leckie was typical of his era, his class and his locality. Scotland bred dogged working men who built an empire, but it was at a cost to their humanity. Such men were strict, intolerant, negative fathers, domestic tyrants light years from modern parenting ideals, because that was how their fathers, in turn, had raised them. Permanently tired and prematurely aged by the burdens of their role, they knew no other way. Being nice to children was women’s work. Mr Leckie was not physically abusive but when roused he shouted and swore at the little boy and said some harsh things. On the plus side, his daughters adored their daddy. Growing up, they had seen a softer side of him. Plus, quite simply, they were his flesh and blood.
Gregor learnt to avoid him and to keep interaction to a minimum, but at mealtimes it was impossible to do so. There would be stupid arguments. If the boy did not finish his soup, Mr Leckie would lean forward and tap his plate with a spoon then say with heavy sarcasm, ‘Same price as the rest.’ Or Gregor would play with the sugar, or take the wrong half of a slice of bread, and that would enrage him. One of John Leckie’s peculiar droits du seigneurs was over the top part of the slices of pan loaf. He only liked the top half, the well-fired rounded bit. No one else could touch those bits; everyone else had to have the bottom half, with the square corners.
‘You’ll be good for bugger all but digging the roads,’ he would tell Gregor. Other than that, there was little conversation. Gregor does not remember them talking civilly about anything. No guidance, no fatherly, let alone grandfatherly, chat.
Cis was always defensive – ‘Ach, his bark’s worse than his bite. He just says these things.’
Nothing in Leckie’s behaviour gave any indication, as the 1950s drew to a close, that he perceived the younger generation as anything other than profligate. Young people were wasters. Literally. He and Cis would share a banana for lunch. On his days off, he withdrew into self-imposed isolation, staring at the fire. Today, we might diagnose over-work, clinical depression, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a troubled mind, exhaustion, burnout, stress; unresolved post-traumatic stress disorder. Back then, Mr Leckie was simply a man with a hard life who found his rewards in silence and sitting still, doing nothing, his legs hard up against the hearth. He did not read books, the 1930s wireless was rarely on, and there was no working television in the house until later on, when Gregor bought the family a colour set with his early wages.
Nothing must disturb Mr Leckie’s routine. There was calamity when, on one occasion, Cis was unable to prepare his lunchbox. The calamity wasn’t that his wife had broken her leg – she slipped on some hen droppings in the sloping garden and had been hospitalised. It was that his daughter Margaret made up his lunch wrongly. Because he always had cheese, cheese, cheese, she thought she would ring the changes and bought some ham. How incorrect she was. Her father came home angry the next morning. Ham in his sandwiches, indeed! But that was the sort of man he was.
He was not a drinker, unlike the majority of men of his milieu for whom alcohol was a release, an excuse and a way to forget. The families of drinkers suffered cruelly and the problem was endemic. Gregor remembers the only time he ever saw John Leckie with a drink in him, after Aunt Babs’s silver wedding celebrations. The Fisher family was travelling home on the train and Mr Leckie, by this time an old man, was in his cups.
‘Do you still love me?’ he blurted out to his wife as they sat with the family in the railway carriage, rattling past the Glasgow suburbs.
The teenaged Gregor was repulsed. He wanted the ground to swallow him up to escape the embarrassment. Witnessing such a display of emotion from a buttoned-up old man was unbearable. Getting off the train at Neilston, Mr Leckie slipped between train and platform and skinned his shin. The next day his daughter Margaret, returning to the station to go to work, was told by the stationmaster: ‘I see you are keeping better company today.’ Of the many unfairnesses in John Leckie’s hard life, this seems one of the most gratuitous.
The family had no car. John Leckie would take the same train from Neilston to Cathcart for work at Weirs. Only latterly, as he neared retirement after 50 years at the plant, did he have the luxury of a lift in a car, sharing the petrol bill with somebody in the village who worked at the same place.
Gregor, older now than John Leckie was when he as the cuckoo entered the nest, holds real regrets. He would love another chance at the relationship and now thinks he understands the whole story, but by the time he found out the known unknowns, let alone the unknown unknowns, the old man was long dead.
When Gregor got some way into his teens, by which time John Leckie had retired, the boy was sent down to Langholm in Dumfriesshire during the summer holidays. Perhaps it was partly to keep him out of John Leckie’s way. Aunt Agnes had a daughter, Carol, who had married a farmer called Billy Bell, with a place down there. They kept battery hens and she had a young family. A useful pair of hands, Gregor stayed on the farm for the entire holidays, collecting eggs, shovelling chicken manure and doing other chores. He enjoyed the country life; in his bones it suited him and he was perfectly happy there. Always there was a wheeze of some kind, either killing the rats that were nesting under last season’s bales of hay or heading down to the Solway Firth to catch flounder.
Returning to Neilston for school in late August, though, after a summer of work and freedom, there were tensions. John Leckie, now home all day, sat by the fire and ordered his wife around. Cis, a pensioner herself, was a slave to his needs and Gregor, watching, his body filling with testosterone, found it less easy to remain detached. He could cope with the old man’s misanthropic ways in general, he just couldn’t bear to see his mother talked to like that. One day, when Gregor was about 15 – and by which time Mr Leckie would have been nearly 70 – things came to a head.
Memories of family meltdowns are horrible to store – sour, embarrassing, guilt-inducing moments – so we try to forget them. Gregor cannot remember what had been said, just that the old man had shouted something nasty at Cis. Young lion provoked by very old, worn-out lion; fighting over the woman who sustained them both. In a flash of anger the teenager, determined to defend his mother against bullying, picked up a brush and struck him. Mr Leckie fell right to the floor and Gregor shouted at him, ‘Don’t you ever speak to my mother like that again!’
It was brief but nasty. John Leckie didn’t say anything. He got up, walked back to the fire and resumed his position. Even today, nearly half a century on, Gregor squirms at the cruelty of his actions.
Young and stupid, not my proudest moment, I have to say. It’s a relationship in my life that I would dearly like a re-run at. I hate not understanding … You know, I don’t mind if you don’t get on with somebody and you think, well, you’re not my cup of tea and that’s fine and I’m not your cup of tea either and that’s fine too – because we can’t all be lovey-dovey creatures and that’s just the way it is. But I just wish … it’s a regret. Always has been, always will be.
The relationship between Cis and John Leckie still puzzles him. Why did such a warm, vivacious woman, so lovely-looking when she was young, marry such a curmudgeon? They look happy and handsome in their wedding photos. Why did she let him treat her like that? Because you just don’t know what happens in people’s marriages, Gregor muses. He couldn’t possibly have been an old grump for all his life, so what turned him into that? That was the fascination of John Leckie. Of course he’d had a lifetime of drudgery, and so had Cis, but she had remained warm and kind. What made him behave in that way to his wife?
Back at school, Gregor was expertly managing to waste six years of his life learning little but how to amuse his friends. The only subject to engage him in any way was art, so the sum total of his high school career was an O-Level in drawing still life and stitching embroidery. Big embroidery: collages, tapestries. And he was very good at doing paintings of plants. Again, this was down to luck and random connections. The art teacher, Mrs Burkett, saw something in the mixed-up boy and encouraged