Actor Bill Paterson recalls a Glasgow childhood that includes Hiroshima, a Scottish World Cup and the exotic Old Mr Baird

WHEN Bill Paterson likens his 1950s Glasgow childhood to Jurassic Park, it is not that he considers himself a dinosaur. It is simply that his mem-ories of that period of his life are so vivid, they remind him of the film's story of a mosquito trapped in amber. Inside the amber, the insect is preserved so perfectly that the scientists access DNA from dinosaur blood the mosquito has sucked.

For Paterson – indeed for most people – there are aspects of childhood that are more firmly lodged in the subconscious than any other part of life. It is as if the brand-new shiny computer of a child's brain puts its first memories and experiences on to the hard drive and everything that comes later into temporary and easily deleted files.

"It feels like the memories are sort of locked," says Paterson, "separate from memories that happened later. I've been in London 30 years, and it's all a mixture of work and friends and play and children growing up… just a kind of mélange. So I can't grasp any more what London felt like when I first came. It's gone." Yet if the alchemy is right, childhood experiences can be conjured precisely from a smell… a sound… a word… a half-forgotten phrase that is warmed by the memory into life again.

For many, Paterson's stories, Tales from the Back Green, will be just such a stimulus. Originally designed for radio, they are gentle tales, childhood memoirs that are not so much about events as about recreating a time and a place. After Paterson wrote the first, he sent it to BBC radio under the nom de plume Tulloch Cameron. As an actor, he was used to reading other people's words. How fine it would be, he thought, to write something that someone else would speak. Still, he was used to rejection in his line of work, and had the returned scripts at the back of cupboards to prove it. "If they'd come back and said it was a load of tosh, I'd have said, 'That's fine, you're quite right.'"

But the expected rejection never came. Instead, the BBC wrote to Tulloch Cameron saying they would like to use his story. And they had in mind the actor Bill Paterson to read it.

We're sitting in the cool, neutral comfort of Paterson's north London home, the French doors open to combat the heat of the day, the periodic dull drone of aeroplanes overhead. But the conversation drifts back to other times and other places: the Glasgow tenements of his youth, the island of Millport, where Paterson spent a month every summer. The smell of sea salt carried on the wind, the screech of a gull, stepping down the gangplank of a Clyde steamer – remnants of memories preserved as if in amber, all waiting to be brought back to life, to be made whole again. "The clarity remains," he says.

DENNISTOUN, GLASGOW. The year is 1955. Outside the tenement windows, the trams are shoogling their way past, towards the shipyards at Scotstoun, via Sauchiehall Street and Kelvingrove. A quadrangle of tenements forms a natural back court, 'the back green', the locals call it, though there's precious little green about it save for the straggling blades of grass pushing through concrete round the base of the roan pipes and the air-raid shelters.

This is the children's territory, where they play football in their own World Cup and plan the creation of their very own Hiroshima mushroom cloud out of back-green dust, gathered for days in an old discarded cardboard packing case and released from an upper window of the tenement.

It's a world of shorts and sandals, of salad cream and Spam for tea. For the adults, a world of quaint formality where folk who have been friends for 50 years still refer to each other by their surnames. Nice to see you, Mrs Paterson. And you, Mrs Jones. Young Bill lives in the tenement with his mum and dad and his big brother, John. John is ten years older, so it's a bit like being an only child, but with hand-me-downs. But there's a sense of community here, and sometimes Bill and the other kids go up to Old Mr Baird's, a character who perhaps more than anything else in the book epitomises how times have changed.

Old Mr Baird tells the children he's 103, which is a bit of an exaggeration, but certainly he has shrapnel in his shoulder from the First World War and a Home Guard hat and gas mask from the Second hanging up in his hall.

All the other flats are being 'modernised', a kind of formica-inspired vandalism that includes replacing brass with plastic and Victorian wood panelling with hardboard. Old Mr Baird is having none of it. His house is unchanged, even down to the bells that were to be tugged to summon the now nonexistent domestics. The house smells of coffee and pipe tobacco, and the children go there alone for Irn-Bru and stories.

"You couldn't do that now," agrees Paterson. "Our folks weren't naïve. They didn't live a light-hearted, Oor Wullie and the Broons life in the 1950s. They lived in a big city and had been through a war and knew everything that had gone on. So people monitored things and knew what was safe and sensible – they weren't living in fairyland. But you just couldn't do it again."

To the children, Mr Baird was exotic. He drank an occasional glass of Burgundy, which the children thought was medicine. Most unusual of all, he went to foreign parts on cargo boats and sent them postcards with history lessons from Bordeaux and Naples and Istanbul. When Paterson was putting his book together, he phoned his brother in Lochgilphead and asked him to search through boxes until he found a card that is reprinted in the book, addressed to Master Bill Paterson and sent from the SS Orontes, on its way to Gibraltar.

Children then had less status than now, perhaps, but more emotional autonomy, a kind of freedom to inhabit their own world away from adults. "Parents weren't in the entertainment industry," recalls Paterson. "They weren't there to see the leisure industry was ticking over. They just got on with their lives and you got on with yours. Children seemed to be more independent."

Not that he wasn't close to his own parents. His mother had been a hairdresser, but was, as women were in the 1950s, a full-time housewife and mother. But it was his father he most resembled.

"Physically I was like my dad, like him in every way, and I loved it if I could go away with him. He was a plumber to trade but was working as a commercial traveller for a big plumbers' merchant in the west of Scotland, Thomas Graham and Sons. He covered the whole of the western seaboard from Campbeltown to Mallaig, and a fair bit of Glasgow as well. He didn't have a car but would travel by train and by MacBrayne's bus or steamer."

In fact, when the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh got in touch with well-known Scottish faces to ask them to donate a little thing that summed up the 20th century to them, Paterson knew just what to give. Sean Connery gave a milk bottle because it reminded him of his days as a milkman in Edinburgh. Paterson gave Murray's timetable, a little travel bible with train and ferry times, which his father had carried in his waistcoat pocket. He was, says Paterson, "a gregarious, very mannerly, old-fashioned gentleman, a fine man."

There was not, as a general rule, much room in 1950s Scotland for showing off and acting out, for self-expression of the kind liable to make you an actor. But as a teenager, Paterson had discovered the Citizens Theatre and fell instantly in love with it, returning again and again to the same shows just to experience the heady mix of the exotic and the mundane, the scent of greasepaint and scenery mingling with the smell of hot oil and vinegar from the chippy next door.

But in any case, Paterson's family had been fond of the variety circuit, loved Jack Milroy and Rikki Fulton – indeed, there was a little subdued whiff of show business before Bill came along, though it wasn't exactly Brecht or Ibsen.

From a cupboard in his sitting-room, Paterson brings out a big scrapbook, filled with wonderfully accomplished illust-rations and cartoons, beautifully drawn – but roughly arranged with parcel tape – by Paterson's uncle. Paterson was very fond of Uncle Tilly (short for Tulloch, and perhaps an explanation for that nom de plume to the BBC), and is trying, gradually, to salvage the cartoons beneath the tape and mount them properly.

Uncle Tilly worked in the Post Office but used to sell his cartoons for a guinea to the Glasgow evening papers, the Times and the Citizen. "He was a guy who in a later generation would have gone to art school and become a graphic designer," says Paterson. But the 1950s was a more austere period than now, a period in which people had 'proper' jobs. They read physics at university, not art and media studies.

But Tilly also ran Grier's Marionettes – Grier being his wife's maiden name. "He performed at church halls and charities and things," says Paterson, "but he spent his holidays in Rothesay and did a show in the morning at the Pavilion, maybe two shows a day, and it paid for him and my Aunt Meg's summer holidays."

Paterson would play the gramophone for the puppet show, and Tilly left the puppets and scrapbook to his nephew after he died. "I inherited the show but had nowhere to keep it. He had stored it in a church hall somewhere. I was in a flat, a two-room and kitchen. So I gave the show to the drama college, but sadly I think it has gone now. It's the kind of thing you wish you'd had a house like I have now and could have kept it and treasured it."

Paterson had a short stint as a trainee quantity surveyor when he left school, but before long headed to drama school. He qualified as a teacher, never intending to become an actor, but then got the opportunity to join the Citizens Theatre for Youth group. In fact, when Paterson's mother spoke about her actor son, she would snatch back a little respectability for him, saying, "Of course, he's a qualified teacher, you know." But Paterson hasn't regretted his choice. "No, damn good life, my boy," he says. "Lots of travel. Lots of days off. Days and days off. Years off…"

His period in Theatre for Youth coincided with the start of director Giles Havergal's controversial run. "It was an unbelievable period, with the Citizens at its most outrageous and us going round schools trying to explain to head teachers why we were doing Antony and Cleopatra as Watusi warriors with leather thongs on."

But the Citizens became more than just a theatre. It was a symbol for artistic expression in a changing Glasgow. "It was a beacon during the dark days when everything else was knocked down around it. Had the Citizens not had a very active reason for being alive, created by Giles and his team, the building would have gone.

"The southern flank of the ring road, which they never built – I think the ramp is still there – is aimed straight at the dress circle of the Citizens half a mile away. It would have gone right through, so the Citizens kept that beacon going in the dark days of the 1970s."

After working in Theatre for Youth, Paterson became a founding member of the influential 7:84 theatre company, bringing socialist-inspired drama to the communities of Scotland. It wasn't just a job; the politics was important to him. "That was the company. The notion that it was egalitarian times; that the socialist perspective on the world was important and right.

"The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil was such a success, not just theatrically but politically, and it had a big impact on Scotland. It's only when you see something like the Black Watch now that you see the equivalent. The Black Watch is a wonderful show, fantastic."

For an actor who has become as successful as Paterson, playing in everything from Comfort and Joy and The Killing Fields to Truly, Madly, Deeply and Miss Potter on the big screen, and Foyle's War, The Crow Road, The Singing Detective, Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Sea of Souls on the small screen, he has kept a remarkably low profile.

Cuttings on him are noticeably thinner than on most actors of his stature. But previously he has tended to avoid autobiographical instincts because he thought his life wasn't interesting enough. (Conservatively for an actor, he's only had one wife – German theatre designer Hildegard Bechtler.) Even in Tales from the Back Green, Paterson tried to curb the personal approach in favour of a more general evocation of the times. "I wasn't brought up in the middle of a war-torn ghetto. I didn't join the resistance and then become Charles Wheeler and go round the world. It was a pretty dull exist-ence, but what came out was a connection with the time, and my response seemed clearer than it had some years ago."

His children, now 18 and 23, have naturally had a different life to his 1950s upbringing in a Glasgow tenement. But what he does notice is that they have a love of continuity, a desire to repeat the patterns of their own childhood. This summer Paterson will repeat the pattern of his. When he finishes filming Little Dorrit, the BBC's latest big costume drama, which is to be screened in autumn and winter this year, he will take his daughter on a visit to Millport. Back in childhood days, when the family went off for a month, his mother would send the family trunk down in advance, home-made jars of jam wrapped precariously inside their holiday clothes. The memory of it is still locked inside the amber of his subconscious, waiting to be brought alive again.

For others who were not around then, that world is available only in books. Photographs of Wemyss Bay pier, the trucks standing by, loaded with the battered old trunks of Glasgow families heading down the Clyde. "There's a whole chunk of life people thought would last forever, and it has just gone," says Paterson. "It's as if it never happened…"

EVEN ON THE interview tape, the sound of planes passing over north London is audible. Back to the 21st century. The word 'nostalgia' is made up of two Greek words, one meaning returning home, the other meaning pain. For many, looking back is bittersweet because inevitably it brings recognition of loss. But it also brings recognition of progress, and Paterson says nostalgia was not his impulse for writing the stories. "One thing that does worry me is that they appear to be some old-man view of 'things were wonderful in those days'."

Things have changed, both socially and politically, in the Scotland Paterson writes about. The empire-loving Old Mr Baird might be shocked to see his Scotland with its own parliament. Despite the 7:84 connection, Paterson says he is no longer very active politically. "I still vote Labour in the way I have done since those old days, but I don't take much active part… apart from paying my 40% income tax, which I think is a fairly political statement."

Even as an exile, he welcomes Scotland's parliament. "I think it's a wonderful thing, fantastic, but I don't have any day to day, hands-on experience of it. I've never even been in the building. I've never been invited. So I'd love to go. I think it's fantastic, essential. You get the feeling London is kind of separate anyway, separate from England, never mind Scotland. It's a city state. It's almost like the ships are beginning to break up, to drift away. The moorings are loosening. I'm not active enough to say that's right or that's wrong, but it's definitely happening."

But he does understand why the English might be unhappy with the current situation. He likes London, has always found it welcoming, and he believes the West Lothian question must be resolved. "Otherwise there will be a danger. I don't think anybody's that concerned about the break-up of the Union if it feels like it's going that way. I don't think they think, 'We need the oil' or 'We need the whisky.' But there is unfinished business."

He could imagine himself back in Scotland if it was a straightforward, personal choice. But inevitably your life goes in directions that you can't always control, particularly when you have a family. Home is not where you spent your childhood, but where your own children are now. "Their life becomes your life," he says.

But there is still a connection to his home city. "You get a sense in Glasgow that there is an interest in the continuity of its history, because it has changed so much. People are fascinated by their home town. Perhaps that's true of anywhere, but it's quite strong in Glasgow."

Which is why this 63-year-old man, the urbane, successful London actor, will always carry a little of the dust of the Dennistoun tenements on his fancy shoes, and hear the shoogling trams above the drone of Heathrow-bound aircraft. r

Tales from the Back Green (£12.99, Hodder & Stoughton) by Bill Paterson is out now