How A Boy With A Lisp Became A Dirty Old Man and Other Stories
In memorium: A celebration of life.
Hello, This is Tina from Adulting Sucks. This week, I have prepared a special audio addition, an "In Memoriam" for my late father. This is a long read. You might enjoy listening to it or viewing it on the Substack app. I was not ready to address my life with Dad at his memorial. If I had, it may have been something like this:
On 14th April 2024 at 11:15 pm, my dad released his last breath. It did not feel like a good death. He was in a great deal of pain, physically and mentally.
His curtain call was long. We started saying our goodbyes, on and off, in 2021. This was the first time, I received a call to come up and see him because he was not doing well and “didn’t have long”.
So, we pulled our son out of high school for the day and travelled up the coast to his home. He came out of the house to greet us and then leaned on his walking stick and went inside to put the kettle on.
“Don’t be a gonna person. I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that.”
~ Thomas Andrew Wells, sometime, repeatedly between 1979 and 1987.
This is a story about my dad. It is his story that I couldn’t tell at his memorial. Even now, I find it difficult to accept he is dead. He talks to me in the silence.
Humble beginnings
Thomas Andrew Wells was born on 22nd June 1930 in Tenterfield, New South Wales. His father was a shipwright from Liverpool in the United Kingdom and his mother was born in New South Wales. Her mother was the offspring of two Irish convicts.
He grew up in a house in Tenterfield which is now heritage listed.
When I was a knee high to a grasshopper, Dad would sit on the edge of my bed and share a few stories from his childhood. These are bedtime stories, I came to cherish.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy who wanted more than anything to have a sail boat. His birthday was fast approaching, so when his parents asked him what he wanted most, he said, “I’d love to have a little sail boat to play with.”
His birthday arrived and it was raining so heavy he thought his birthday might get cancelled.
“Come on, Thomas, come and open your birthday present,” said his mother.
It was the most beautiful sail boat you can imagine. He couldn’t wait to play with it and after his birthday lunch, he snuck outside to the ditch in front of their house.
The storm water rushed past his feet, flowing over the gutter to drench his only shoes. The cold rain pelted down, drenching his clothes and causing him to shiver.
“Tom,” said his mum, “Come back inside you’ll catch a cold.”
He ignored his mum as he wanted to see his little boat sail. So he bent down and released it to the rushing water. And off it went.
Tom’s eyes bulged with excitement as he watched his little birthday boat bobbing up and down in the torrent water. He had to run after it. Off he went chasing his little boat down the street. Each time he neared it, the water would snatch it up and swish it away.
“Come back, little boat,” said Thomas. But the sail boat didn’t hear him for the water gurgled too loudly. Up ahead, Thomas could see a big concrete drain.
“Stop little boat, come back.” He tried to run faster, but the boat and the water disappeared into it.
And that was the end of Thomas’ birthday sail boat. His parents were not very happy that he had lost it. They had spent many a penny on it and could not afford another.
The End.
Again, Daddy!
Dad’s stories would make me so sad. It did not stop me from begging to hear him tell them all over again.
Life in Kempsy
As Dad grew older, his family moved around a little. Around the age of 7 or 8, he went to a school in Kempsy.
There was another child attending the same school, called David. Dad and the other children at the school would tease David about his singing and music tastes.
David liked singing country and western songs and would often be found sitting on a fence strumming his guitar. Dad on the other hand, was interested in classical music and would join a boys’ church choir.
The children weren’t nice to David. David, who was a few years older than Dad, left school at the age of 12. You might know him as Slim Dusty, a famous Australian country music singer and composer.
Dad would always look a little sheepish when he told the story of how the children made fun of Slim Dusty’s music.
Home remedy
Dad, of course, had his own singing talent. When he was very young, he had a pretty bad lisp. He discovered whistling and singing helped him to control it and through his interest in singing, he was selected to join a boy’s choir at a Sydney Anglican Church.
Singing in the choir inspired Dad to dream about becoming an opera singer. Dad was a boy soprano. One of his favourite songs can be found at the bottom of this celebration of his life.
Later, when I was around 10-years-old, Dad took an interest in amatuer theatre muscial comedies.
He successfuly auditioned for a tenor role in A Music Man’s Barbershop Quartet for the 1981 Mackay Musical Comedy Players production. He also went on to play the Dirty Old Man in Sweet Charity.
While Dad’s amatuer acting career doesn’t have many accolades, the list of shows he worked on as back stage manager, or helped out with lighting at the Mackay Theatre Royal are long. He was even the President of the Mackay Eisteddfod for one year in the 1980s.
“Close your eyes, girls, I’m coming through.”
~ Thomas Andrew Wells, Circa 1982, While navigating the change rooms to access the fly above the stage area for a dance recital at the Theatre Royal.
Dad never went to high school. Like a lot of children, WWII would herald a signifcant life change and Dad left primary school to find work and support his family.
Dad’s army
Another one of Dad’s childhood stories centred around the ice boxes that would be delivered once or twice a week to homes. There was very little in the way of electricty in Dad’s childhood, no gas or electric stove and no refrigerator.
As a boy, Dad carried the ice blocks and cut them up to fit in their ice box.
This may have lead to his army apprenticeship where he learnt to fix refrigerators as his trade. He also had the enviable position of working with explosives and setting up charges for training exercises.
Dad spent four years in the army. He was lucky that he never went to war but he was involved in building bridges.
There is one story that sticks out about his time in the army.
“I was coming back from leave and was in a rush to get back to the barracks. I had left the place I was staying at in my civillian clothes,” says Dad. “Talk about bad luck. While I’m standing at the train station, one of the higher ranking officers caught me out of uniform.”
“Back at the barracks they metted out my punishment. I had to take a spoon and move a pile of dirt from one spot to another. Then, just when I thought I was finished, they made me shovel it back again.”
“I never got caught in my civies again.”
Love spurned
Many years after Dad told me that story, I would learn about Dad’s first unrequited love. Dad was seeing a young woman in Sydney who became pregnant with his first child. He asked her to marry him and she politely said, “No.”
Dad told me that the young lady didn’t want anything to do with him. From what Dad knows, she still went on to have his child. So, somewhere out there, he may have an older daughter in her 60s or 70s.
Dad was working for a refrigeration company in Brisbane when he was sent to Rockhampton for a job. Barbara Joy Warwick-Day, my mum, was the next woman in his life.
They met at the hotel Dad was booked into at Rockhampton. Mum was one of the maids, tasked with cleaning his room.
Dad married Mum not long after they met. I can’t speak for their marriage, as I was born towards the end of it. However, they brought four children into the world together and none of us have done any serious gaol time, yet.
When Mum and Dad seperated, I stayed with Dad in Walkerston until I was 18. I was the last one to leave home and officially moved out to attend college in Brisbane.
Unrequited love
Dad was lonely while I was growing up. He longed for a life partner. Let’s see, what ladies do I recall?
There was this one young lady who Dad met while square dancing.
Doh-Si-Doh your partner!
She loved ABBA. We went on a road trip together and I got to listen to all her cool ABBA music.
Dancing Queen, dancing Queen oh oh…
That relationship didn’t work out. No more ABBA.
I told Dad not to worry. I would marry him.
The next lady Dad met already had at least two children who were about my age. We got on fabulously. I loved spending time with them jumping on our trampoline and camping in their back yard in Mackay for a birthday party.
That one ended too.
After that, our dad didn’t date for a while. I was heading toward puberty when he started courting the Black Widow of Walkerston. She had already buried three husbands. I didn’t want my dad to be the next.
I don’t think she was that keen on my dad because there was this one date he was looking forward to but she got cold feet and didn’t turn up.
Then came, Mrs S. Mrs S had a daughter my age. We competed against each other in singing at the Mackay Eisteddfod. I didn’t mind them dating. I got to go roller skating with her daughter on Saturday nights. We generally lost each other at the front door.
That one didn’t work out either.
Single, white male: Divorced, father to four
Dad wasn’t perfect but he wanted what he thought was the best for his children. Sometimes, that wasn’t what we, the children, thought was best for us.
Being a single father in the 1970s and 1980s was challenging and it came with preconceived judgements.
Imagine, a single divorced man with a young female child who pushed around a pram with a doll in it when they went shopping. The looks he would get.
But he would give everything to spend more time with his kids. He gave up full-time employment at Michelmores to run a one-man refrigeration business. This meant he could manage his time better and participate in extracurricular activities with his children.
I know he was much tougher on my siblings, than he was with me.
When I was born, he made a decision to be more active in my life than he was with the other children. He made this decision because he regretted not doing it with my older brother and sisters.
As his youngest child, I spent a great amount of time with Dad while he worked.
I was his apprentice. I would fetch tools out of the car, hold and pass them to him as he repaired a customer’s fridge.
Following Dad around wasn’t boring. One customer, a couple of older sisters, lived out west toward Moranbah. We travelled to their cattle ranch that was a few hours out to fix their refrigeration. They paid Dad with half a cow’s carcus.
On the drive home, we stopped at a running creek to get a fresh drink of water. I still remember how cool and delicous that water tasted, fresh from the creek.
When we finally arrived home, he hung the half-a-cow up in the laundry and salted it.
Dad also did boat calls at Mackay’s river wharfs down near the ice factory. He was often called there to repair the refrigeration on some of the fishing trawlers.
So many tales
During the 1970s, Dad had a gas tank explode on him in David Jones in Mackay. It started a small fire. Fortunately, only his eyebrows were singed.
There was this one time, when he was working for a second-hand refrigeration shop, that he found a sizeable amount of marijuana hidden inside a fridge. He told me they flushed it.
But moments with Dad weren’t all about hanging around waiting for him to do his work.
I learnt how to replace the seal on a fridge, how not to defrost a freezer with a knife and how to make a multimetre with a Tandy electronic project kit.
We went rock fishing almost every other weekend. We would have a competition to see who could catch the most fish. I once caught a sea snake while standing in water on Redacliffe Island near Seaforth.
On the same fishing trip, we were sleeping under the stars when a giant white-tailed rat snuck into our gear and stole a fish. Dad was a softy for animals, although he rarely let on. When the rat got startled and dropped its prize, he reached into the esky and threw it some more of the catch.
On another fishing trip, Dad ate some bad oysters. That one wasn’t so fun. We were also on Redacliffe Island which has a natural causeway leading to the mainland. We had to race the tide back across to the car while Dad kept praying to God.
Then, there was the time we went mollusk hunting in the mangroves at Finlayson Point and we came back with a large bucket full of these delicious shellfish. Dad cooked them on the camp fire and then we had to go hunting for them again, because I ate the whole bucket.
Sunday nights were often reserved for BBQs at the back of our house where we would sit under the stars next to a roaring fire. Sometimes, we would talk and talk for hours. Other times, we sat in silence and watched the stars. We would count and wave at the satellites as they flew over and spoke about our dreams and the meaning of life.
In 1986, we watched Halley’s Comet fly past earth while having those backyard BBQs. I told Dad, that when he died, I’d blast his ashes into space.
Dad had a lot of friends. People he would meet, some were parents of extra-curricular things I did, but also people whose fridges or airconditioners he’d repaired. He was in some respects a social butterfly with regular party and dinner invites.
Love found
When I left home to go to university, Dad grew fat on the vegetables from his magnificent garden at Walkerston. That first Christmas, I did not go home as I’d found weekend work in Brisbane.
Around this time, my sister, Tammy and my nephew, Matthew visited Dad in Mackay. When they returned to the United States, Dad grew lonely. So, he found a job in Brisbane and we moved back in together.
After several months, we ended up living with my Uncle Dick in Indooroopilly, where Dad took a shine to one of the neighbours across the road.
In his sixties and very close to retirement, Dad fell in love. Finally, it was returned! My dad wasn’t alone anymore and would go on to make many more happy memories with Shirley and be there for her grown up children too.
Dad, who went by different names over the years such as Tom, Thomas, Andy, Andrew, Desert Head, Chrome Dome and Sydney Herbert Bridge, wore his heart on his sleeves, and deeply cared for his children and the people who came into and touched his life.
I have found it difficult to say goodbye to him. I chose not to speak at his memorial. You see, Dad made me a promise that he could never keep.
When I was much younger, he promised to live to see me reach 100.
Dad, seriously, you expected me to see you reach 140?
In the silence that has followed his death, I hear him talking.
I love you, Daddy.
Vale, Thomas Andrew Wells.
The following song by Mendelsohn is one of Dad’s favourites: “O For the Wings of a Dove” sung by Andrew Hopkins in 1981.