Thomas William Smith

The Lathes at Leicester

Thomas William Smith was born on 9 March 1928 in a narrow terraced house off Belgrave Road, in the part of Leicester where the morning was measured out by factory hooters and the wind carried the smell of hot oil and dyed wool from the hosiery works. He was the second of four children born to Albert Smith, who spent his working life in the finishing room of a boot-and-shoe factory, and to Edith, who took in piecework and kept the house on what Albert did not drink. It was a household that valued usefulness above almost everything. A boy who could mend a thing earned his place; a boy who only talked about it did not.

Thomas learned early which kind of boy to be. He was not quick at his letters and never pretended to be, but he could take apart the parlour clock and put it back so that it kept better time than before, and that counted for more in Belgrave than any school prize. He left school at fourteen, in the second year of the war, and was taken on as an apprentice fitter and turner at an engineering works that had turned its lathes over to munitions. There, in the noise and the swarf, he found the thing that would steady the rest of his life. A machine made sense. It did what its tolerances said it would do. People were harder; people wanted things from you that could not be measured with a micrometer, and Thomas was never sure he had those things to give.

He turned eighteen in the spring of 1946, with the war just over, and did his National Service in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, keeping lorries and generators running in draughty depots across the Midlands and the north. He came back to Leicester after two years harder, leaner, and no more talkative, and walked straight back to the lathe he had left, as though the world had simply paused and waited for him.

Mary Hargreaves

He met Mary Hargreaves in 1955, at a dance in a church hall he had been dragged to by his younger sister, who despaired of him. Mary was two years older than Thomas and seemed older still, in the way of women who have been made responsible too soon. She was the eldest of a large and noisy Hargreaves brood, and she had spent the whole of her twenties holding that family upright while her mother took to her bed for months at a stretch, undone by what the doctors of the day called nervous exhaustion and what the neighbours called something less kind. Mary had cooked, scrubbed, nursed, and shepherded younger siblings to school, and she had done it without complaint and without obvious reward, and it had left her brisk, capable, and entirely self-contained.

Thomas, who could never find the words, had found a woman who did not seem to need many. He liked that she was practical. He liked that she did not expect him to be charming. Their courtship was careful and unhurried and conducted largely in silences that both of them found restful rather than awkward. They were married on 12 April 1958, in a Leicester parish church, by habit rather than conviction, neither of them yet anything in particular before God. Noah James was born on 12 June 1961, and David Thomas on 4 February 1963. By the time the second boy arrived they had a rented house, a pram in the narrow hall, and Thomas's wage from the lathe, and Leicester was already beginning to feel to Thomas like a coat that had stopped fitting.

Family Tree

Ten Pounds and a Quarter-Acre

The idea of Australia came in a letter. A man Thomas had served his apprenticeship beside had gone out to Adelaide under the assisted-passage scheme, and he wrote back about steady work and a brick house with a yard big enough for a vegetable patch and a sky that was not the colour of a wet roof. Thomas read the letter several times. He was thirty-six. Leicester offered him another forty years on the same machines, the same damp terrace, the same hooters, and then a pension and a chapel funeral. For a man who measured things, the arithmetic was not difficult.

Mary did not want to go. Leaving meant leaving her siblings and her difficult, fragile mother, and she knew with the certainty of the eldest daughter that the family would list to one side without her. But she also knew what she had married, and she believed, in the end, that a man should be allowed to choose the ground his sons grew up on. They sailed from Southampton on 17 September 1964, aboard the Castel Felice, with the boys underfoot — Noah three and brimming with questions, David barely walking — and spent six weeks crossing the world through the Suez heat, Mary doing washing in a steel basin and Thomas standing at the rail saying nothing, which was how he prayed. They docked at Port Adelaide on 21 October 1964 into a light so hard and white it made Mary's eyes water, and were taken to a migrant hostel of corrugated huts and communal messes, where the family slept four to a room and Thomas lay awake doing sums.

The Knock at the Door

What translated whole across the world was the lathe. Thomas found work at the Islington Railway Workshops, turning steel to thousandths of an inch exactly as he had in Leicester, and the familiarity of it held him steady while everything else was strange. Within two years he had moved the family out of the hostel, first to a rented place at Rosewater within smell of the docks, and then into a modest double-fronted house in Enfield, in Adelaide's inner north, with the yard the letter had promised. He planted vegetables. He built a workbench in the shed before he had finished unpacking the kitchen.

The faith came to the Enfield house in 1967, in the shape of two young American missionaries in white shirts who knocked on a Tuesday evening. Mary let them in. She would say later that she had been waiting for that knock without knowing it — that after the wrench of migration she had been hungry for order, for certainty, for a community that would close around the family like a hand. Thomas was harder to win. He sat at the back during the lessons with his arms folded and asked blunt questions about money. But he came round, and he came round for reasons that were entirely his own: he liked the self-reliance the Church preached, the working bees and the welfare stores, the way it kept a man's week in good order and his sons out of trouble. He was baptised on 14 May 1967, and if it was never rapture for him, it was something he respected, which in Thomas amounted to nearly the same thing. The new faith asked one thing of him that he never honestly surrendered. It forbade tobacco, and Thomas had smoked roll-ups since the army; in his baptismal interview he affirmed that he kept the Word of Wisdom, gave the habit up in front of the ward, and then quietly carried his tin out to the shed, where it stayed for the rest of his life. Mary knew. She said nothing, in the particular disapproving way she had of saying nothing, and the small dishonesty settled into the marriage like grit neither of them would name. Two daughters were born into the new faith: Susan Margaret on 19 September 1967, and Karen Louise on 6 May 1969.

What the Shed Taught

Thomas was a good father in every way that could be done with the hands and almost none that required the mouth. He never told his children he loved them; the words were simply not in his kit. What he had instead was the shed behind the Enfield house, and into that shed he poured everything he could not say. A boy who came to him with a buckled bicycle wheel or a dead lawnmower engine left with it mended and with something else besides — an hour of his father's whole attention, which was as close to tenderness as Thomas knew how to come. The shed kept one secret besides the tools and the half-mended machines: the tin of roll-ups he was no longer meant to own, smoked alone with the door pulled to — the one indulgence in a life otherwise spent entirely on other people.

Noah was the one who stayed longest at his elbow. On Saturdays the eldest boy learned to feel for a thread by hand, to listen to a motor and know from the note of it what was wrong, to respect a tool enough to put it back clean. Thomas never praised him. When Noah did a thing well, his father simply handed him the next, harder job, and both of them understood that this was the praise. It was a real inheritance and a costly one. The children grew up fluent in machinery and halting in feeling, and Noah most of all took on the shape of his father's silence, fluent in everything that could be fixed and clumsy with everything that could only be felt. Thomas was not a cruel man, nor a drunkard, nor an absent one. He was simply closed, and a closed man at the centre of a house teaches everyone in it to keep their own counsel. Mary held the front of the house — the faith, the meals, the discipline, the appearances — and Thomas held the shed and the wage, and between the two of them the family ran like a well-kept machine in which no one quite said what they were feeling.

Fifty-Three

The roll-ups he had never truly given up caught up with him in the end. The cough had been part of him since the army; in his early fifties the breathlessness came too, the grey tiredness climbing the back steps, the ache he would not take to a doctor because there was no part he could point to and name. Mary nagged him about the cough — which was really the old, unnamed argument about the shed and the tin — and he ignored her, as he always had. On 22 May 1981 Thomas collapsed in the back garden, between the bean rows and the shed, and was dead of a heart attack before the ambulance reached Enfield. He was fifty-three.

Noah, nineteen and nearly a tradesman himself, was the one who reached him first across the grass, and the apprenticeship between father and son ended there, mid-sentence, every unsaid thing now permanently unsayable. Mary was widowed at fifty-five with two daughters still at school. The funeral was held at the ward chapel, brisk and full and short on words, much as the man had been. Thomas Smith left behind a tidy house, a shed full of tools each in its proper place, four children, a capable and grieving wife, and the particular silence he had taught them all to keep — a silence that would go on shaping the family long after the hands that made it were still.