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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, noveltysongs, 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 after 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 aboutwhat it meant to grow from a ‘wean’ into a ‘wee boy’ in