THE early years of Scotland clown prince would raise few laughs, but that hasn stopped Gregor Fisher investigating the secrets and lies that haunted his childhood and led to his happy ending
Gregor Fisher has been left alone in a meeting room at Scotland on Sunday for less than five minutes while I sort out cups of tea. On my return he's up at an easel that's been left out, markers in hand, gleefully drawing a big clown's face on a sheet of A3. polo shirts A curly coil of hair, red crosses for eyes, red nose
"Who me?" he replies, all innocence. He'd probably try "It wisnae me," but he's been caught red marker pen handed. "Well, I was probably a bit lippy," he concedes.
At first glance, Fisher, 61, appears calm and quite serious looking, warm and pleasant, smiley eyed, and if you'd said he was the architect he wished he'd stayed at school to become, you wouldn't be surprised. Blue quilted jacket, smart blue and white striped Ralph Lauren shirt, navy chinos, shiny black shoes, he has an air of comfortable respectability. This begins to slip, however, as the photo shoot gets under way and he messes around on a revolving, propelling stool. Sadly the chair holds firm and we're denied a reprise of his Baldy Man Hamlet cigar advert.
My life a bit like a big jumble of spaghetti and I was trying to untangle it
Then it's off to the interview room along a corridor lined with cartoons by Glaswegian artist Emilio Coia, where the actor ticks off his fellow thespians. "Coias! Amazing. There's Peter Ustinov, Albert Finney, Alastair Sim," and it's then that we pass a glass walled office where a meeting is taking place. Around the table the expressions are serious and intense. No one notices the Rab C Nesbitt star, one of the country's most popular comic actors, mugging and fooling around not six feet away through the glass. Fair enough, he's not in his string vest, pinstriped jacket and dirty bandage bandana combo, but still.
"Look at them. Very serious. Not many laughs in there," he says as if he'd like nothing better than to break in and crack them up. Fisher is a big believer in laughter. "It's good to laugh. Even in the most hellish of circumstances. If you're able to get a laugh, you can defuse situations. I always liked laughing as a child. It makes you feel better."
Fisher's very early life wasn't short on hellish circumstances: he was orphaned, adopted, then passed on, but his sense of fun flourished, thanks not least to Cis, the woman he came to call mother. She scooped him up when he needed it and fed, clothed and loved the little boy with the winning smile. It's the same smile that grins out of his new memoir, The Boy From Nowhere, written with journalist Melanie Reid. Their attempt to track down the truth about Fisher's origins took them on a year long road trip all over Scotland.
"Less Johnson and Boswell, more Dastardly and Muttley," Fisher jokes. He knew he was adopted but it was only when a mutual friend brought him and Reid together that the book became a reality and he decided to find out what happened to his mother. "My birth mother," he clarifies. "There are a lot of mothers in this book. My birth mother, Kit McKenzie, my adopted mother, Ellie Fisher, and then Cis, my mum. I also wanted to find out the story of my father, William Blake Kerr."
In spring 2014, the pair took the scant facts Gregor had gleaned over the years, and ran with them. Or rather drove around Scotland in Reid's silver VW Polo. It was Reid who also did a brilliant job of giving a sense of place and time for a generation who are strangers to a world of shotgun weddings, outside lavvies, no NHS and the stain of illegitimacy.
"My life's a bit like a big jumble of spaghetti and I was trying to untangle it," he says. So what was the story of Kit McKenzie and William Blake Kerr?
"It was alien territory for me to talk about such things because I'm a product of 1950s Scotland and not touchy feely. I'm quite private. Not about my strange beginnings, because I always think if I talk about that some kid who might be in a bit of a funny position might see it and think, 'Ach well, he had a kind of strange start and seems to be all right.' So I feel duty bound to talk about that," he says.
"I think I always wanted to pin it down, but I was too busy enjoying my family, living my life and everything was OK. I was always of the impression that if it ain't broke, why try to fix it?"
He was also reluctant to delve into his past while the woman he calls mum, Cis, was alive. She died in 1984.
"I found no need to even hint that I was malcontent with my position and looking for a birth mother. I wouldn't have done that," he says.
Fisher was born on 22 December, 1953, in the village of Menstrie, near Stirling, one of three illegitimate children to Kit McKenzie. She had a heart complaint, became ill and died at 38, when Gregor was two and a half, and against her wishes, he and his two sisters were split up. After a spell in children's homes, Gregor was adopted by Jim and Ellen Fisher, and when Ellen died shortly after, he was taken by Jim's sister Cis to live with her family in Neilston, near Barrhead.
"Yes, folks, it's a comedy!" says Fisher.
It's testament to Reid and Fisher that the story is in fact full of warmth and laughter, despite the harsh lives and sadness that befalls some of the main characters.
Fisher first got wind that he was adopted when he was 14, after stopping the teatime conversation by asking where he was christened. Later Cis knocked on his bedroom door and told him. "You're adopted. We look after you now, you know. We wanted you. We love you." Then she patted him on the head. Twice. As Fisher writes, "A single pat was unheard of. Two was a sign of almost uncontrollably high emotion."
He assumed he was the child of his uncle, Jim Fisher. People said he looked like him, and nothing more was said.
"I was happy, warm, fed, loved. I didn't want to look into it because I didn't think my mum would care for it very much. She was a West of Scotland private little buddy."
At 18, Fisher got a letter from his sister Maureen, someone he had never known existed, suggesting they meet. "So we did, outside the lost property office at Central Station in Glasgow. Honestly, there are things in this book that people must think, 'Naw, yer makin' that up!' But that's what we did."
Maureen filled in some of the blanks, that his mother had died, they had another sister, and he'd been adopted when he was two and a half. That was it for the moment.
"What makes a brother and sister is time, and one of the sadnesses is that lost time, but we've made up for it since," he says.
In the 1980s they were given their father's name and little else by their mother's estranged sister, Ruby, and in the 1990s they received a picture of him from a distant relative they'd tracked down. William Blake Kerr had a legitimate family too and was married when he had the affair with Kit. Then one rainy day in 2006, Gregor and Maureen filled in a family tree and decided to get in touch with their half brother John.
"I said, 'This guy's getting on. We need to get a move on.' Writing that letter to John Kerr was one of the finest things I have ever done in my life. Because he was a genuinely engaging, polo shirts kind human being. He was a journalist at the BBC and theatre critic so we had a lot in common, and also I found out things I would never have found out, about my father's personality, the way he was brought up. John welcomed us into his family."
But Fisher's birth mother Kit still proved elusive.
"This woman was erased," he says, slamming his hand on the table. "She had overstepped the line, not played by the rules, disobeyed the morals of her time. That was a terrible thing to do in the 1950s and she would have been punished for that. It would have taken quite some doing to push a pram up through an industrial village at the foot of the Ochils, with three children, each of them illegitimate. Bastards! That's quite a strong woman that can do that."
Finally, this summer Fisher and Reid solved the mystery and the hunt is over. The book explains it better than I ever could, so no spoilers here. Does Fisher feel he's got to the end of the story?
