I Am What I Am, John Barrowman [smart ebook reader .txt] 📗

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