Gregor Fisher tilts back his head, closes his eyes and begins to sing. The song is an old Victorian music hall favourite about a young boy who is pleading with his father.
“Don’t go down in the mine, Dad,
Dreams very often come true.
Daddy, you know it would break my heart
If anything happened to you.
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So go and tell my dream to your mates,
For as sure as the stars that shine,
Something is going to happen today,
Dear Daddy, don’t go down the mine.”
He lets the final, doom-laden note hang in the air a moment — and then roars with laughter.
We are in the bar of an upmarket Glasgow hotel, and Fisher is talking about songs that are real tearjerkers, usually about innocent children on the receiving end of some calamity or other.
The song Nobody’s Child – a 1960s classic by the Alexander Brothers about a blind boy in an orphanage — is mentioned. There is no finer example of that popular combination of misery, tragedy and sentimentality.
“You know, that was what someone at my publishers wanted to call my book,” says Fisher. “Nobody’s Child. I told them: ‘No f***ing way!’ It had to be explained to them. Somebody’s Child would have been better. Everybody’s somebody’s child.”
Fisher should know. His extraordinary childhood, documented in a moving memoir serialised in The Times next week, involved a series of tragedies and kindnesses that led to him passing through the hands of three families before his fourth birthday.
His natural mother, Kit McKenzie, was a young single woman from Menstrie in Clackmannanshire. She was made pregnant by an outwardly respectable married man, William B Kerr, a customs officer and local councillor, who was almost twice her age.
She died of a heart condition when Fisher was still a baby, and he was adopted. But his adoptive mother also died, as the result of a fire. Fisher, aged just three, was taken in by another couple, John and Cis Leckie, who had a small farm at Neilston, in Renfrewshire.
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Fisher, best known for his vivid depiction of string-vested Glaswegian philosopher-drunk Rab C Nesbitt, has gathered together his family story piece by piece over his adult life. At times he was full of curiosity about who he “really” was, and had the deeply rewarding experience of meeting sisters and a brother he never knew he had.
At other times he was desperate to let it lie, fearful of what other dark and unsettling secrets he might uncover.
“There have been moments where my reaction to certain things has rattled me,” he admits, “and I’ve thought, what’s all that about? I thought all this was done and dusted and properly filed away, in the drawer marked ‘Don’t need to look at that again’.”
Now, helped by the stability provided by a wife and grown-up family, he feels secure enough “to get a stick and prod the past”, telling the full story with the help of award-winning Times columnist Melanie Reid.
What makes this more interesting than an episode of TV’s Who Do You Think You Are? is Fisher’s mixed feelings about the whole project.
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His reticence, he thinks, is the product of a self-defence mechanism hard-wired into him when he was a child — an instinct to keep distress at bay.
Fisher has a curious — but perhaps revealing — way of describing the innermost sense of himself that nobody gets to see. It is, he says, “rather like a little gallstone, or a pearl”.
Coupled with a reluctance to show his emotions that is rare in an actor, it means he has approached this project somewhat gingerly.
“I think it’s a west of Scotland thing, that you shouldn’t put your head above the parapet, and you should keep private things to yourself. So I have mixed feelings about it,” he admits.
One of the questions raised by his research is the nature of the relationship between his mother and father.
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“Was it a love affair?” asks Fisher. “Some might like to think so. Was it a case of ‘a wee wumman I keep up the back’? I don’t know.”
Clues were pored over and analysed. Fisher came into possession of a song lyric written on a piece of paper that his father kept in his wallet. A Victorian parlour song made famous by Paul Robeson, it is a sad and tender story of lost love.
The first verse goes:
“All the time I’m feeling blue,
Wishing for you, wond’ring when
You’ll be coming home again.
Restless, don’t know what to do,
Just a-wearying for you.”
But how, asks Fisher, do we know that this was kept in WB Kerr’s wallet as a memento of his mother?
“Short of you looking into the whites of somebody’s eyes and asking that, trying to work out if they’re lying, how are you going to find out? You know the dates, the times, the places, you don’t know the whys.
He was keen the book did not turn into a misery memoir.
“We were very conscious that we didn’t want this to be Angela’s Ashes, because Angela’s Ashes it ain’t. This isn’t a miserable story. There’s something joyous about this story. It’s about ordinary people taking somebody on and making a difference in a very small way. People you would walk past in the street and never think twice to look at. The kind of people who never have a book written about them.”
In person, Fisher comes across as gentle, diffident and resolutely middle-class — about as far from Rab C Nesbitt as it is possible to imagine. It is only when he laughs— an out-of-control cackle — that you glimpse the TV character with the bandage around his head.
After a recent run on stage in the National Theatre of Scotland’s Yer Granny, Fisher is about to do a season of panto. The 61-year-old seems less than driven about what to do in the next phase of his career.
“It’s not my call,” he says simply. “It’s just whether some casting director wants you. It’s a business where the phone rings or the phone doesn’t ring. I’d like to make an obscene amount of money making a whisky advert.”
Again, the Nesbitt cackle. And again, the defensive instinct is to the fore. “I’d like a quieter, easier, calmer life,” he says.