A neighbour whose name has long since left my memory would don his kilt, haul out his bagpipes, grab his bottle for first-footing,9 and begin his descent down the hill of Dornford Avenue; a literal and figurative descent because very few adults were left standing by morning.
The night started with the ceremonial ringing of the local church bells, and then the aforementioned neighbour would stand at the top of the road, prime his sack, clear his pipe and proceed to wail. In case you’re not aware of it, let me tell you, bagpipes are actually a bitch to play. Many years later, my parents bought me my own set and I attempted to learn. The damn things are impossible and I could never get more out of them than a sound like cats being strangled.10
The telltale wail of the pipes echoed down the street. Kids and adults alike darted out of their houses, falling in line behind him, and at the stroke of midnight he’d march down the road like a tartan Pied Piper, the sounds of ‘Scotland the Brave’ drawing even the crabbiest of our neighbours outside. (I’m not mentioning her name here. Her children will be adults now and likely in charge of processing parking tickets. Believe me, I need to cover my arse in that area.)
When I was allowed to stay up until the bells, the highlight for me was watching everyone crowd into The Extension and then the singing would begin. My mother has a beautiful voice and like the Barrowman party gene, this is a trait I’m glad to have inherited.
At family gatherings as well as parties, it wouldn’t take long for someone to say, ‘Gie us a song, Marion,’ and she, like me, would always oblige. As a kid, I remember being impressed that she knew the words to every song she was asked to sing. If the party were a Barrowman gathering, one of my dad’s brothers would harmonize with her. Each one had particular songs they liked to hear my mum sing. My Uncle Alex would add harmonies to a Sinatra number or something from the Big Band era, while my Uncle Charlie loved the more melodic, wistful numbers like ‘We’re Two Little Lambs’. My Uncle Neil would take off his shoes and hum.11 After a few verses, the whole room would join in. This kind of evening was what I thought adulthood was all about. Family, friends and lots of singing. Okay, let me rephrase that. Family, friends, a wee bevvy and lots of singing.
My mum sang at other times too, including Carole and Andrew’s respective weddings, and in 2006 she performed at my civil union with Scott. Although age has diminished the range of her voice a little, it’s still a big beautiful one, which is ironic given how quietly she entered the world.
My mum weighed only three pounds when she was born and at that time, in 1938, her chances of survival were slim and none, and none jumped on to the Glasgow bus and fled. My Papa Butler, whom, sadly, I never knew because I was only a year old when he died in 1968, refused to accept the prognosis that she was too tiny to survive. He and Murn brought her home to their corporation house in Shettleston, warmed up the cooker and – wait for it – placed her in the oven. She slept in the warmth of the stove until her weight rose above six pounds. She’s still hot today.
All my grandparents were characters and throughout my childhood they were a significant part of my life. As a result of these relationships, issues of elderly abuse or just plain rudeness to an old person are the surest ways to rile me.
On Sunday afternoons, Carole, Andrew and I would leave on our ‘itchy clothes’, our name for our church clothes (sackcloth and woolly jumpers), and visit Emily and John, aka Gran and Papa Barrowman, for lunch. Gran Barrowman was an incredible baker and her sponge cakes were fluffy, airy masterpieces. I believe it’s from her that I inherited my sweet tooth. Gran Barrowman’s house was always freezing, but if you shivered and complained enough, she’d eventually – like Catherine Tate’s hilarious character – say, ‘Put another bar on, son.’
Murn was fierce and funny, and she loved to dance. When she and her sister Jeannie would take care of us on Saturday nights, Carole, Andrew and I would squeal with delight when their dancing would get wild, and Murn and Jeannie would hike up their skirts, birl like madwomen, and we’d get a gander at their bloomers. Murn also made the best fritters in south-east Scotland because she kept a jar of manky lard under her sink, reusing it whenever she deep-fried anything. One of her specialities was deep-fried Spam – just writing about it is clogging my arteries. And, man, her chips were the best.
Murn was from the ‘gie them whatever they want’ school of grandparenting. She was the kind of gran who would always have sweeties in her pinny pocket and could smother you in her soft chest with one hug, but she would have terrified the devil himself if he went after one of her kin. Because of a debilitating stroke in the 1970s, Murn lived with us for the last fourteen years of her life.
The year before my family emigrated to the US, I was eight, and my mum accepted a job outside the house. Hard to believe washing, cleaning and tearing around after three children and a husband wasn’t all she wanted from her life. Her good friend Isabel Eusebie and her husband Joe owned a beauty salon on Shettleston Road, and next door to the salon they opened a record shop, which is where my mum worked, serving at the music-store counter.
Top of the Pops with Jimmy Savile was the barometer for hits back then, and although the shop had a wide array of albums from every genre, my strongest visual memory of the store is the walls lined with 45s, which were listed in numerical order according to their weekly chart standings.
After I finished for the day at Mount Vernon Primary School in the afternoons, I’d head straight to the record shop. My mum usually wouldn’t be able to leave, so I’d sit on the counter and she’d let me play any records I wanted. Pretty soon, I was standing on the counter singing and customers were coming in just to request a song for ‘Wee John’ to perform.
This was the era of unforgivable, I mean unforgettable, novelty songs, ditties such as Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ and The Scaffold’s ‘Lily the Pink’, which, believe it or not, is about a real person, Lydia Pinkham, who invented cures for all sorts of female ailments, including ‘flatulence and fertility’.12 My favourite song from this era, though, was Glyn Poole’s ‘Milly, Molly, Mandy’, a song that today can make my fillings ache.
It soon became clear to all customers in the record shop that watching ‘Wee John’ belt this song out, dimples and all, was worth a stop. Before too long, I was a fixture in the store, a permanent presence on the counter.
Sadly, the record shop no longer stands. During renovations years later, the building collapsed while a customer and Joe Eusebie were still inside, making that one last cut, selling that one last record.
Carole was at Bannerman High School by the time our mum got her job, and Andrew had football practice, so neither was around much to look after their little brother. When my mum couldn’t pick me up after school, I’d ride the bus with Jeannie or Murn down to the record shop. One afternoon, as Murn and I were waiting at the Sandyhills bus stop for our trip to the store, she noticed I’d been crying.
‘What’s the matter, son?’
‘My teacher keeps hitting me on the back of my head for no reason.’
Two points are important to note here. The first is that in 1973 corporal punishment was all the rage in UK schools. Secondly, if you have children or even know a child just a little, you’ll appreciate that the likelihood was high that there was a reason. In retrospect, I’d have slapped the hell out of me too if I was singing that fucking ‘Milly, Molly, Mandy’ all the time.
Murn was quiet for most of the bus ride and eventually I forgot that I’d told her anything about the teacher’s slapping. Until two days later, when someone knocked timidly on the door of my Mount Vernon Primary School classroom. My teacher, She-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless, was a bit startled by the knock, but asked the person to come in. In marched Murn.
With her hat pinned on her grey hair – the front curl of which was tinged with the telltale yellow from smoking – her handbag caught in the bend of her arm and her wool coat pulled tight across her ample chest, except for the nicotine curl she looked a lot like the Queen afte
r a bad day with her corgis. Without so much as a ‘How are you?’ or ‘I’m John Barrowman’s gran,’ she walked right up to the teacher and hit her across the back of her head several times, punctuating each slap with a word: ‘Don’t. You. Ever. Lift a hand. To a wean. Again. Ye auld bitch.’
The moment remains one of my most compelling memories. How could it not? The class was instantly silent; the teacher too stunned to move. The whole classroom became a blur to me. After Murn marched from the room, a few of my classmates started to giggle, and then their laughter became all-out babbling excitement at what had just happened. I was completely embarrassed for about ten minutes, while the teacher tried to settle us down. What I remember most about the incident is that, once I got over the initial shock, I was terrified that the teacher would call the police and Murn would get arrested. Fortunately, though, like Roxie Hart in Chicago, Murn escaped the law.
For some, childhood memories may be the result of wishful thinking or perhaps, tragically, the uncovering of repressed experiences that have suddenly been exposed. Neither of these things shape my memories of my childhood and I’d like to believe that for more rather than less of us this is true. When I think about what it meant to grow from a ‘wean’ into a ‘wee boy’ in Scotland, the meaning I draw from my memories as a man are defined by my family’s lessons about love and laughter, and singing, lots and lots of singing.
‘Defying Gravity’
Our house in Mount Vernon, where I lived until I was nine, had a fenced yard for privacy and for restraining Pagan, our family dog, a mournful-looking beagle who liked to wander. When I was four years old, I figured out how to jimmy the lock on the fence’s back gate, and one afternoon I decided to visit Murn at her flat in Sandyhills, about four miles away. Of course, I walked in the wrong direction and ended up in the middle of the Hamilton Road, a busy street that eventually becomes one of the main roads connecting Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The traffic whizzed past on either side of me – horns blaring, tyres screeching – until a man about my dad’s age at the time realized that the obstruction the cars were swerving to avoid was actually a wean trying to cross the road. He skidded to a stop, darted from his car, and yanked me to safety. I didn’t know my address, but I was able to tell the stranger my name, which he recognized. Mount Vernon in the early 1970s was still a relatively small community of middle-class homes and had not yet morphed into the sprawling Glasgow suburb that it has since become. Families who’d lived in the area for generations – as both my mum’s and dad’s had – knew of each other.
Leaving his car in the parking lot of The Woodend, our local pub, the stranger gripped my hand and walked me back home, where my parents and most of our neighbours were combing the streets and nearby park in a frantic search for ‘Wee John’. I learned later from my mum that the stranger then proceeded to ‘gie them laldy’, which is to say he tore into them for not paying closer attention to a curious toddler, fenced yard or no fenced yard. To my parents’ credit, they stood under their carport in front of many of their neighbours and accepted the dressing-down because they knew he was right.
I suppose it would be easy to see this experience as having some kind of symbolic significance in my life. I could’ve been roadkill that day, turned into mince by a Corporation bus, or, just as terrible, abducted, but since neither of those outcomes occurred, I could imply that from this incident I learned early in my life that there’s a fine line (in this case a double white one) between life and death. But that’d be a load of bollocks. The experience has remained one of my most vivid early childhood memories not because of its possible figurative connotations, but because it was my first manifestation of the Barrowman risk-taking gene.1 Over the years, that gene has shaped many of my personal and professional choices.
Anyone who grew up in Tollcross or Shettleston in the 1940s knew Emily Barrowman’s boys: my dad John, and his three brothers, Neil, Charlie and Alex. Emily herself was a formidable woman and in another era she might have found herself in a position of corporate power or even practising medicine, but instead Emily was forced to leave school at fifteen to help run her family’s billiard hall at Parkhead Cross, which may explain another genetic cord – to this day, whether it’s pocket, nine or shooter, your balls are not safe on my table.
I’m sure raising four sons often put Emily’s intelligence and organizational skills to the test, especially since her husband was a meek man. My Papa Barrowman was a good father, but he was happiest with a pint in his hand and a pound in his pocket for the bookies. Like many working-class women who came of age between the world wars, Emily was essentially a single parent, and so it wasn’t surprising that the exploits of her sons sometimes escaped her.
My dad and his brothers had reputations for being ‘wee rascals’ who grew up to be ‘big toerags’, and although each of them eventually became a successful professional in his own right, even as adults they never outgrew their mischievous natures or their willingness to take chances. With the exception of a mysterious fire in a Tollcross warehouse – that may still be an open case, so I’ll write no more about it because I’d like to keep my dad out of Barlinnie Prison – the Barrowman boys’ antics were generally harmless, but nonetheless legendary. Years later, during Barrowman family dinners, usually when we all gathered at Gran Barrowman’s house in Springboig for New Year’s Day dinner, my poor gran would often get a taste of her boys’ adventures with her steak pie. She had never known the half of it.
I think as a result of this strand of my heritage, I have an addiction to adrenalin-fuelled activities. Over the years I’ve skied in the Alps, snowboarded in the Rockies, driven fast cars in Monte Carlo, sailed the Aegean, dived in the Caribbean, flown on Concorde multiple times and kite-surfed across the Straits of Gibraltar. I’ve gone scuba diving during a solar eclipse in Turkey, canoed inside a volcanic crater near Santorini, and I’ve even chanced a few Friday nights with Jonathan Ross, which can be a terrifying experience.
I’ve been in great shows, good shows and a few so-so shows, and even in the failed endeavours, I’ve never regretted my decision to accept the role because I’ve always gained something from chancing the experience. Once, during the short-lived London production of the musical Matador, in which I starred with Stefanie Powers and which ran for only three months in 1991, I learned a valuable lesson about what it meant to close a company with dignity.
One afternoon, Stefanie and I were called to a meeting with the producers to hear officially that we were closing and the financial implications of that decision. I was an emotional wreck, close to tears and feeling very sorry for myself. On our way into the room, Stefanie pulled me aside.
‘Don’t you say a word,’ she said, her face so close to mine I could feel her breath on my cheek. ‘Stop being so pathetic, John. This is not about you. Do you understand? It’s about the show. Let me do the talking.’
I did as I was told and the meeting’s outcome was far better than it might have been if I’d charged in with crumpled tissues in my hands. Our contracts were honoured, and she and I made it clear we were not happy with the way things were winding down.
I also took some professional grief for agreeing to participate in Dancing on Ice – the ITV programme on which celebrities learn to ice dance – for choosing to put myself out there in the public eye in such a physical manner and in a reality show, no less. In the acting profession, reality shows can be seen as the gigs you do only if your career is in a slump and your visibility needs a boost; it’s generally thought you would never choose to do them when your career is ascending, which mine was at the time, as I was fresh from appearing in the first series of Doctor Who. While that perception may be true for some, I chose to be involved with Dancing on Ice, and later How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? and Any Dream Will Do,2 because they had high entertainment values and I’m an entertainer. These shows were far removed from the kind of ‘car crash’ voyeurism that can be the attraction of too many programmes; programmes that I’ll
admit I’m not above watching.
Agreeing to be a judge on Maria and Joseph also appealed to one of my professional values: those of us who’ve made it up the ladder of success should reach down when we can and offer a hand to others. Dancing on Ice, meanwhile, had broad audience appeal – and I wanted to show that audience, some of whom had probably not seen me in anything else I’d done, that I could entertain them.
As it turned out, poor Papa Barrowman would have lost his pound if he’d bet on me, because although the bookies had me as the favourite after the first round, I was voted off mid contest. I was crushed. When I got home that night, I ignored the messages on my answering machine from family and friends, and instead felt sorry for myself for a while. Then I got over it – because this is showbiz and a thick skin is a necessary accessory.
Despite being voted off part-way through the series, I don’t regret the decision to perform at all. I learned how to skate from the masters, Torvill and Dean, made a good friend in my ice-dance partner Olga Sharutenko, and I left the show with the hardest bum I’d had in years.
Despite the risk-taking in my genes and the bravado in my actions, I’m not above worrying about death or on occasion being gripped by fear. Oscar Wilde is reported to have gasped on his deathbed that, ‘Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.’ From what I’ve read about him, Wilde’s death wasn’t the least bit funny, yet he never lost the ability to laugh at himself or the world around him. Now, whether or not I can be so glib when actually facing death remains to be seen in the very far-off future – everyone, on the count of three, touch wood, spin, spit and throw salt over your shoulder3 – but in June 2007, when I was asked to participate in the launch of the Royal Air Force Tattoo, the thought that I might die in a ball of blazing jet fuel crossed my mind more than once.
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