‘Where’s your dad?’
In unison: ‘Cleaning the garage.’
Fifteen minutes later, my dad emerged from the house after having double-checked for the fourth and fifth time that every light was out, every plug unplugged, every switch in the off position. The house was sealed so tight we’d be lucky if there was oxygen left inside when we returned.
Of course, we were heading to one of the busiest airports in the world, so there was a lot of traffic. When we were about two miles from the terminal and no longer moving, my dad realized we might not make our flight. The driver pulled over and called the airline and got assurance that if we could get there in the next fifteen minutes, the plane would wait for us. Keep in mind this is the late seventies. Airlines actually had live people answer their phones back in the day and international flights often waited for their late passengers.
With eight minutes left in our fifteen, the limo squealed up to the kerb at the terminal. We all scrambled out. Carole and Andrew helped Murn into a wheelchair. I piled bags on her lap and my mum distributed the other cases among the rest of us.
My mum looked at my dad, and nodded ever so slightly. The look that passed between them in that instant was one that kids often see parents exchange in moments of crisis, when children know instinctively not to argue – just to do what they’re told. My mum grabbed my hand. Carole and Andrew watched my dad’s face for the sign. We were poised like runners from Chariots of Fire.
Then my dad yelled, ‘Go!’ And like bats out of hell we went.
Dad led the way, propelling Murn forward like a battering ram, followed by Carole and Andrew, with Mum and me bringing up the rear. The crowds parted before us as if my dad was Moses. Murn was shouting in broad Glaswegian, ‘Oh dear God! Oh dear God! Oh dear God!’ and my mum was yelling after my dad, ‘John! John! For goodness’ sake, slow down!’
With seconds to spare, my dad, who by this time was a few lengths ahead of the rest of us, spotted the flight attendant closing the gate. He made a deep lunge and let go of the wheelchair. Murn – still screaming, mind you – went rolling forward and just missed the ankles of the flight attendant.3 The near miss bought the needed extra time for the rest of us to catch up. However, it was at that moment that my dad realized he’d left all our passports in his briefcase in the hired car.4
When my parents first met, my dad knocked my mum off her feet – literally. He stuck his size-eleven shoe out and tripped her as she walked past him on her way to the cloakroom at a dance at Wellshot Hall in Tollcross. She was with her girlfriends and my dad and his friends were trying to make slouching against a wall look cool. My dad admits the bit with the foot was not his best move, but it was one he was sure would get my mum’s attention. And, of course, it did.
My mum picked herself up from the floor, brushed off the dress Murn had made from a picture they’d seen in a fashion magazine, and the words just tripped from her tongue: ‘My God, what a smooth move that was. I want to have your children some day.’ Well, maybe not exactly those words. According to my mum, she already thought my dad was a bit of a nutcase, so this latest move didn’t really surprise her.
Humiliated and angry, my mum ignored my dad for the rest of the evening. In fact, when my mum tells the story, she reminds us of how she dismissed the entire event as just more ‘carry-on’ from those Barrowman boys, and she kept her dance card filled with dances from other young men.
My mum never lacked dance partners. Even today, aged seventy-five, she still has some good moves – as she proved onstage during my recent concert tour.5
This talent is not the only reason I love to have my mum perform with me onstage, though. When she was first married, she had an opportunity to audition for a television show. She chose not to go because she had just found out she was pregnant with Carole, and she decided to follow that particular path instead. When she sings ‘Amazing Grace’, or our other family favourite, ‘The Wedding’, onstage with me, I like to think I’m giving her a taste from her road not taken.
Although my parents didn’t officially meet until this auspicious moment, they grew up in fairly close proximity to each other. My mum spent most of her childhood in Shettleston, a village nestled near Tollcross, where my dad grew up. I remember a neighbour in Mount Vernon (where I spent my childhood) telling me that one of her earliest memories as a young girl in Tollcross was of my dad and his brothers getting chased out of the fruit shop for stealing apples. My father, of course, denies this, especially when his grandchildren are within earshot.
My mum finally agreed to go out with my dad after he delivered extra bags of coal to her house for a week; my Papa Butler ‘felt sorry for the boy’. For the longest time after my mum and dad started dating, my mum’s girlfriends thought she was actually going out with my Uncle Charlie, my dad’s older brother, because Charlie did not wear glasses and when my dad was with my mum, he refused to wear his.6
Growing up during the Second World War, my mum lived in a much toffier neighbourhood than my dad’s family. The Butler house had its own back garden, complete with an Anderson bomb shelter; a necessity during the war, given the proximity to the Clyde shipyards and docks. This shelter survived well into the seventies, when my gran still lived at that address. I can remember playing hide-and-seek in it with Carole and Andrew when we’d visit Murn. It made a great fort.
Although my mum was an only child, the Butler household was always bustling and full of people. My Papa Butler was the Match Secretary of Shettleston Junior Football Club, so a number of the players – who were also relatives of my dad’s – would hang out at the Butler house. They all knew Andy Butler’s ‘bonnie lass’, Marion.
Mum was one of the children evacuated from Glasgow during the air raids. When she’d tell Carole, Andrew and me stories about what it was like for her growing up during the war, I always imagined her as one of the children in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, doing her part for the war effort with a broom.7
Like many children of her generation, she never tasted a banana until after the war was over. Toys were scarce. My mum remembers the first doll she was ever given as a present – it was made of china and had real hair. One day, a neighbour’s dog got hold of the doll and tore out all its lovely locks. A family friend tried to paint them back on, hoping my mum wouldn’t notice.8 I think one of the reasons Carole and my niece, Clare, had so many dolls when they were growing up was because my mum only ever had one. She bought her daughter and granddaughter all the dolls she would have loved to have played with when she was wee.
During the war, my Papa Butler was the team leader for his local Air Raid Patrol. This meant that when the sirens sounded, he would don his dark overcoat and cap and head out into the night to make sure no slivers of light could be seen at any of his neighbours’ windows. One night, he was nearly blown up when he discovered a house on Amulree Street, Sandyhills, with an unexploded bomb in the front garden. He roused the family and got them to safety before the bomb exploded.
When I was filming the season-two Torchwood episode ‘Captain Jack Harkness’, in which Tosh and Jack are sitting out an air raid in the basement of a Cardiff dance hall, I thought of my papa and what it must have been like for him to live through air raids as a regular occurrence.
Air raids sometimes lasted for nights on end. By far the most famous of them all – in our area, at least – was the three-day bombing attack on the Clyde docks and shipyards. The lights were off at the shipyards, of course, but the river ran parallel to the main road. During those three nights, it was raining heavily, and according to my dad, who was only a child at the time, but who knows his WWII, the reflection of the rain and the lights of the road confused the Luftwaffe.9 They bombed the highway instead.
For his day job, my Papa Butler was a machine-shop foreman in Stewarts & Lloyds Steel Tube Works, where they made artillery gun barrels, and Murn and her sister, my Auntie Jeannie, worked in the munitions at Turner Manufacturing, making aircraft parts and bomb casings.
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sp; Both of my grandpas, like many of our grandparents during that time, worked for the war effort in whatever way they could if they were too old or had other health issues and couldn’t fight.
My Papa Barrowman (John) was a bus conductor and then a ticket collector in the Glasgow underground at St Enoch Station, while my Gran Barrowman (Emily) was an insurance agent during the war, looking after the business for the owner, who was in the RAF. Afterwards, she managed her father’s snooker hall in Parkhead; she was an accomplished snooker player herself.
Interestingly, the fob watch that Captain Jack wears is actually my Papa Barrowman’s watch, given to him upon his retirement, so part of him is with me every day I’m on set.
The Barrowmans and the Butlers all loved to tell stories. I believe it has something to do with our Scottish sensibility. After all, even Rabbie Burns would sit round the cottage fire on a Saturday night and tell a tale or two. Before we emigrated to the States, the Barrowmans would gather for family celebrations and holiday get-togethers, and this Scottish sensibility10 would keep everyone in stitches.
Every Christmas Eve, my dad and his brothers (Neil, Charlie and Alex), their wives (Lottie, Jean and Dorothy), and all my cousins would assemble for an annual family Christmas party. Each brother and his wife would take a turn as host and, without fail, every year my Uncle Charlie would mysteriously disappear directly after dinner. Within an hour of his vanishing, one of my aunts would yell to the kids from the front window that she could see Santa coming down the street. We’d all scramble to see and, sure enough, there he was – can you believe it? – carrying a sack full of presents.
The other annual Barrowman party was steak pie dinner on New Year’s Day at Gran Barrowman’s flat in Springboig. It was required that every child and adult have a party piece to share.
For some families, this requirement11 would seem like a fate worse than death. Not so for the Barrowman clan. We looked forward to planning our party pieces in the days beforehand just as much as we looked forward to performing them. This excited anticipation was so fervent, in fact, that, in order to stop arguments about who would go first, and to ensure that we weren’t all performing at once, my Gran Barrowman invented a family ritual. She would take off one of her rings and thread a long piece of string through it, tie together the end of the string, and then everyone would sit in a circle holding the loop. Her ring would be passed through everyone’s hands as the music played. If you were holding the ring when the melody stopped, you had the stage. You could sing or dance or recite a poem or tell a joke. The Barrowmans were open to anything – including making balloon animals, a party piece we could sometimes talk my Uncle Alex into performing.
As the family grew, a few rules had to be created. For example, you couldn’t perform twice in a row. This should have been called Alex’s Rule because my dad’s youngest brother had the habit of sometimes holding onto the ring when it came round to his fist.
When the Barrowmans got together, the fun often started at the dinner table. When Carole was born, she was the first girl in the Barrowman family in over fifty years, and so this bestowed on her a distinct honour. Carole always had to sit between my Uncle Alex and my Uncle Charlie at family dinners, where she was subjected to merciless teasing, a full array of jokes, silly stories and general food-snorting-out-of-the-nose goofiness throughout the entire meal – until my Gran Emily would charge out of the kitchen, grab a spoon from her place setting, and rap Charlie and Alex’s knuckles until they promised to ‘leave the wean alone and let her eat’.12 I think watching my dad and his brothers tease and laugh with their nieces and nephews at these parties gave me a lot of good examples to draw on when I became ‘Unckie John’.13
Of course, the rest of the cousins loved that Charlie and Alex created such rambunctiousness at the table … because it always meant that nothing we kids could do was ever as bad.
After dinner, while the ring was being passed through all our hands,14 once again my Uncle Charlie would quietly disappear. The fellowship of the ring continued, until suddenly the doorbell sounded. My gran was always made to answer it, usually with one or two of us grandchildren in tow.
Later, when I was old enough to be in on the game, I realized that this was all part of the fun, too. My dad, and the other brothers, Neil and Alex, would stall, holding everyone back so that their mother would have to answer the door. For her part, Emily knew exactly what was going on and I think she secretly enjoyed the whole performance. Even so, she’d ‘hrump’ her way down the hall, muttering under her breath that ‘the totties15 are no gonna peel themselves’ and she’d make it seem as if all this ‘kerry-on’ was one more thing she had to put up with as a mother of these particular four men-boys.
‘Who is it, Emily?’16 her sons would call from the front room.
Emily would open the door and, of course, she’d pretend that she couldn’t see anything or anyone. Then she’d look down … down … down, and see, standing in front of her, my Uncle Charlie, who’d be dressed up as the Glasgow icon, the butt of a million Glaswegian jokes, Glasgow’s genial Everyman: ‘Wee Jimmy’.17
‘Ach, it’s Wee Jimmy,’ she’d call back to the living room, ‘and you’d better come and talk tae him because I don’t want him in my hoose. He smells like he’s been drinking straight since the bells.’
This was the cue for everyone to rush to the door. Of course, the real reason Wee Jimmy couldn’t cross the threshold was that if my Uncle Charlie moved, us kids would see the bottom half of his legs sticking out from behind his oversized jacket – and, yes, in case you’re curious, he actually had shoes strapped to his knees, too, as an added convincer. I loved Wee Jimmy!
After we’d all crowd round the door, he’d take a small tin filled with cigarette butts out of his jacket pocket, and offer one to each of us kids (who were just a bit creeped out by the sight of this strange wee man, but also completely enthralled by the little bit of danger and mischievousness he might represent). Wee Jimmy would then banter with one or two of the grown-ups, flirt with Emily, regale us with a few war stories and – always my favourite – tell a couple of naughty jokes.18
The visit would end with a round of ‘Skinny Malinky’, or some other Glasgow ditty, after which Uncle Alex would pass a pound note to one of the kids to give to Wee Jimmy. He’d take it, then he’d tip his ‘bunnet’ and wish us all a ‘Happy New Year’.19
Let me pause here, and offer a brief defence on the intellectual prowess of my cousins, my siblings and me, for not spotting Wee Jimmy’s true identity much earlier in our childhoods. We were not stupid children, and we have all, as it happens, grown up to do fine, important things with our lives. What we were, readers, were children raised in a family that loved to play jokes, dress up, perform skits, and generally have a good laugh with and at each other, and who among us would want to spoil one of our better family performances?
And, I have to say, I truly believe that this ability to suspend your disbelief and give your imagination free rein is a critical life skill. Look at it this way: we might not be in such a global economic mess if more people in the financial world had been imagining what might go wrong if we kept buying and selling those dicey mortgages …20
This is one of the reasons why I’m committed to supporting arts and music programmes in our schools – because if children are not lucky enough to have the kind of home life where their imaginations are nurtured, then our schools must fill the gaps. In the Barrowman family, the ability to suspend our disbelief was finely tuned, even as we grew old enough to know reality better. I’m especially happy to say that the tradition’s been nurtured in the next generation of my immediate family, too.
Here’s a case in point: in 2002, when I was performing in the Stephen Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, I invited my whole family to fly out and see Company, featuring yours truly as Bobby, the part of a musical lifetime. During the run, I was living in a two-bedroom suite in an extended-stay hotel on the edge of Arlington and G
eorgetown. As this was summer in Washington, when I called to book two more suites in the complex for my visiting relatives, I was met with a distinct snorting on the other end of the line. The best they could manage, they said, was one extra room and two foldaway beds. There were seven adults, three children, a baby, and two dogs in the family group. Of course the dogs were going to get the foldaways.21
Because Yvonne was an infant, my brother Andrew, his wife Dot, and my nephew, young Andrew, got dibs on the room; my parents took the second bedroom in my suite; Carole and Kevin, the bed settee in my rooms; and Clare and Turner got the two foldaways. On the first night, after we’d returned from the theatre, we were all relatively restrained – only one guest called the desk to complain about the baseball game in the hall.
On our second night together, we decided it was time for the party pieces. Unfortunately, there weren’t many props we could use for dress-up. I think what we did next had as much to do with our enclosed space and that distinct lack of props as it did our having a new baby in the family. Because quicker than you can say ‘breathe!’ and ‘push!’, wee Andrew was folded up inside the portable bed.
The bed had a really supple mattress. It was a normal single-bed size when opened up, but when it was folded in half, there was a soft squishy space in between the two parts that made the whole thing look like a giant birthing canal on wheels.22 I grabbed salad tongs to use as forceps, and along with Dr Clare and Dr Turner’s help, we re-enacted Andrew’s birth. The ‘wean’ popped right out.
I Am What I Am Page 2