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the subject was changed. One of his sisters offered him another scone, his mother chipped in with a change of subject. ‘Uh-oh,’ he thought. Preoccupied with himself, like all 14-year-olds, he picked up on the evasion, the awkwardness in the room. There was a mystery, some secret being withheld from him. Something that pertained to him, which everyone else was party to.

      Nothing more was said and he went to bed as usual. Then came a knock on his door – an unusual occurrence because it was the sort of household where no one locked or knocked on doors. His mother came into the room.

      ‘You’re adopted,’ she said.

      She stood there awkwardly, looking at him, unsure what to do next. It was the classic, blunt-edged West of Scotland way of doing things. In the 1960s no one was schooled in communication and child psychology; no one read manuals on how to discuss sensitive issues with children. Unlike today, there weren’t numerous books and websites on how to deal with an adopted child. There were few social workers, hoops to jump through or guidelines to follow. What followed was a moment of most extraordinary drama. Cis was not given to physical demonstrativeness, but she reached out with her hand and patted her beloved son on the head.

      Not once. Twice.

      A single pat was unheard of. Two was a sign of almost uncontrollably high emotion. Cis was obviously as moved as she was uncomfortable.

      ‘We look after you now, you know. We wanted you, we love you,’ she muttered.

      And she turned and left the room.

       We’re on our first expedition together, Gregor Fisher and me. A most unlikely Johnson and Boswell, more Dastardly and Muttley. It must surely be a comedown for him – usually he’s in a Mercedes. This time he’s in my silver VW Polo; a man both cheery and wary, a passenger I barely know. I wonder what he’s thinking. I know more about his ancestors than him, the living flesh and blood. Some months ago he had approached me out of the blue, through a mutual friend, because he wanted, finally, to pin down the story of his life.

       We’re heading up the hill into the village of Neilston, me driving, him navigating.

       Gregor is telling me about what happened when Cis died, in 1983.

       ‘She left me some money.’

       He is silent for a bit.

       ‘I’ll never forget it – it said in her will, “I leave so much to my daughters and I leave so much to Gregor Fisher, who lived with me.”’

       His voice catches. I suddenly realise he’s crying.

       ‘Why did they have to say that? “To Gregor Fisher, who lived with me”.’

       Tears are running down his cheeks. She was his mum but he wasn’t her son. Even beyond the grave he wasn’t allowed to be her son. The authorities wouldn’t even give him that comfort: a rejection from the woman who never rejected him.

       ‘It’s just legal language,’ I say, desperate to console him. ‘Bloody lawyers, they have to say these things just so. A technicality.’

       He’s wiping his face with a hankie.

       ‘I know that, I just can’t forget it,’ he says. ‘Gets me every time.’

CHAPTER 2

       Fisher, You’re Playing Pooh-Bar

      ‘All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed’

      Sean O’Casey

      Gregor lay in the dark, his mind churning with the unwelcome news. Cis was his mother but if this revelation about his adoption was true – and he knew deep down it was, because he’d grasped, somewhere along the line, that neither of them were really his parents – then vague memories dimly made sense. What he didn’t know, however, was far greater than what he thought he didn’t know. The secret was to get a whole lot more complicated yet.

      When he woke the next morning he decided to play the sympathy card for all it was worth. If this revelation was true, then he was going to make Cis hurt as much as he was hurting. He would punish her for not being his mother.

      ‘I was very nasty. I was a bastard. Much to my shame now, I behaved terribly. I did horrible things like … oh, she would give me cereal in the morning and I remember holding up the cereal bowl disdainfully and saying, “What’s this?” She said, “Well, that’s the cereal you like” and I … I was a bastard.’

      He stopped speaking to her for what seemed a long, long time. Withdrawing his love was the only weapon he had. For those two, maybe three weeks of being sent to Coventry, Cis accepted his sulk and treated him as if nothing were different. She didn’t get cross, or try to encourage him to talk, or command him to sit down and discuss things with her. She simply took the hurt on the chin and carried on, loving, generous and undemonstrative as ever.

      And then Gregor woke up to the realisation, in glorious technicolor, that he was behaving appallingly. Inside that mix of child and young man, beset by hormones, some logic asserted itself. Taking a deep breath, he went downstairs and, as best a 14-year-old boy can, he apologised to her. He told her that as far as he was concerned she was his mother, and he had to put things right and make it better.

      ‘I realised what an absolute shit I had been. I can’t remember what I said. No hugs or kisses, just “I’m sorry, Mum.” I think there was another pat of my head involved, which meant a state of high emotion, you know. But it was a case of her saying, “Ach well, it’ll be fine” and that’s it, passed, finished, you know? That’s it, gone.’

      He laughs.

      ‘It was a loving household, my household, but it wasn’t the thing, it’s just not what you did. It was never discussed again.’

      Everything carried on as normal. We are all good at burying secrets. Gregor wanted his life to have started when he was three, when he met Cissie. Before that, he had only the vaguest of brief, confusing memories, unexplained stuff – the instinctive sense of trouble a child picks up when grown-ups around are acting strangely. There were assumptions he had grown up with, but had chosen not to address. The revelation that he was adopted helped a few things make sense.

      His name, for one: Fisher, Cis’s maiden name. And with that the conscious acceptance, finally, that she was not his real mother, even though deep down he’d always known she wasn’t. He also knew – and he had always known this – that John Leckie was not his father. But Cis had two other brothers, apart from Uncle Wull, called Jim and Archie. Gregor began to accept, from fragments of memory, that Jim Fisher might be his real father. Something had happened to his first mother and he had been sent to live with his father’s sister. So, Cis was really his aunt. That explained everything. Well … nearly. But it explained enough for a big, young lad who preferred eating cake to rocking any boats.

      The 14-year-old Gregor, head deep in the sand, did not want to ask questions. He knew what family tension felt like, and he didn’t relish it. And he sensed, around the adoption issue, there lay trouble, so why go looking for it? He wasn’t sure about details, but people said he looked like Jim Fisher. When he walked, he turned in one foot exactly the same way Jim did. He shrugged, end of story. Much more importantly, what was for tea?

      Nearly 50 years later, Gregor still struggles to articulate how he felt. ‘It was that I wasn’t part of anybody; I felt I didn’t belong, I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t part of this lot, or that lot, or any bloody lot. It wasn’t discussed again because I think like a lot of adopted people the reason I was so keen not to ask was because it seemed like a reflection on my mother. If I’d started digging about and trying to find out stuff, that was like saying I wasn’t happy in my present situation with her. But I was – I adored her.’

      Jim

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