I Am What I Am Read Free

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, agedseventy-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