I Am What I Am (3 page)

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 sensibility
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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 requirement
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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’.
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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’.
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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,
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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 totties
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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?’
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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’.
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‘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.
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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’.
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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 …
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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 Georgetown. 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.
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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.
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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.

Hurrah! It’s a boy!

Well, that was all it took. Pretty soon, all the children in the family had to be reborn
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– including me, naturally.

I have to admit, mine was not an easy birth – and there were complications. For a second, I thought I might have to be born breech as my nephews and niece tried to deliver me. My ‘birth’ resulted in the bed breaking and most everyone in the room wetting themselves.
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Usually, these family high jinks are of the moment: a flare of laughter and silliness that fades to a memory, but one of my dad’s – um, let’s call them ‘tall tales’ – came back to haunt him in a big way. This happened back in Scotland, during my early childhood. It’s a story that still makes all of us laugh.

For as long as we were old enough to believe him, my dad claimed he was a spy during the Second World War
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and he took a bullet in his big toe
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while he was fleeing from the Nazis. Like the von Trapps,
he managed to climb – or, in his case, hobble – across the border into Switzerland, where he was hidden from the SS by all the lovely women in a local brothel.

Of course, being kids – not to mention kids who fell for Wee Jimmy’s ‘disguise’ year after year – all the convincing we needed was for my dad to remove his sock and show us the painful deformity
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on his foot.

One evening, after dinner but before we’d started our homework, a neighbour from up the street (who had a son who played with my brother) came to our door, with Andrew in hand. He must have been about seven at the time.

‘What’s he done?’ my mum asked, preparing for the worst.

‘I had to bring him home, Marion. You’re gonna want tae talk tae him. He’s telling everyone at my knitting bee that his dad met his mum at a brothel in Switzerland where she worked during the war.’
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I’m pretty sure my dad had to sleep in the garage that night. Thank God he kept it so clean.

‘I feel a tremor in the Force,’ I said, slowly lifting my umbrella and facing the gathering Stormtroopers in the main street of Oxford. ‘Help me, Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope.’

‘We’re in so much trouble,’ Carole said.

When my sister and I were on the signing tour for my autobiography,
Anything Goes
, in the spring of 2008, we arrived in Oxford with, unexpectedly, a little time to waste. This stop in our book tour was about midway through a tightly packed schedule, which meant that we’d been confined to a car, and a multitude of store rooms and offices at the rear of bookstores, for three or four days straight by the time we arrived in Oxford.

(The exception to the bookstore routine was a signing at the Costco in Bristol, where the book tables were set up directly in front of a freezer of food. At one point, I had to shift my seat so a customer could manoeuvre in behind me and get his three-year supply of fish sticks and tartar sauce.)

I’d been to Oxford once or twice, but not for any extended amount of time. One of our nieces, Martha, on Scott’s side of the family, went to Oxford University, and we’d experienced just a brief visit with her. I asked our publicists, Sarah Sandland and Ana Sampson, if we could wander around Oxford for an hour or so. I promised that I wouldn’t call attention to myself,
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and that I wouldn’t loiter anywhere near the long queue that was already forming around the store in preparation
for the signing session. I grabbed an umbrella big enough to cover both of us
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since rain was threatening, and we headed out into the historic streets.

We decided to walk into the older parts of the city, especially the courtyards and buildings of Oxford University, given Carole’s profession.
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Honestly, I didn’t put up much of an argument, good brother that I am, because I was just happy to be outside in the fresh air for an hour or two. After shopping in a few used bookstores, and stopping under the Bridge of Sighs – where, to be different, I laughed loudly – we then meandered aimlessly for a while, until we found ourselves deep in the heart of the medieval part of the city. I couldn’t help myself. I ducked into a private courtyard at Exeter College, where I dashed onto the pristine lawn, threw my arms into the air and burst into song.