How many people have dreams and ambitions that will never be realized? I believe countless millions. I ask myself how many did I have? Maybe just two or three? Not very important to anyone else but the direction you take can shape the rest of your life.
Maybe I was not strong enough and didn’t have what it took to make dreams come true. Now I will never know. At the age of seventy, other things are more important. I guess a lot depends on your background and family situations.
Many do make the breakthrough regardless of all the obstacles and setbacks. When you come from a working class background with poor parents in a poor suburb, even with lots of love, it’s not easy.
I will continue on about my dreams at a later time because a more important person than me never had a chance to fulfil his dreams - my very much loved father, David Norman D_____.
He could sing from the heart with a voice so natural and rich that he could leave many famous singers floundering. But what chance did he have? The third youngest of four boys and a sister, struggling through the great depression like all the other families at that time.
When you are the only one working in a family of six at the age of fourteen, with a very sick father and not much education past the age of twelve, working three jobs - one before school selling papers, one after school working for the milkman and weekends working as a cockatoo for the SP bookies helping, to keep a family together.
Did he have a chance?
I am his daughter, Joan. I have heard him sing since I can remember him - which is a long time, because he was only seventeen when he married my mother, Doris, and I was born.
He never had a lesson but he worked at the old Tivoli Theatre which was located in the railway area of Sydney. He, with his three brothers, were selling Peter’s ice cream at Interval.
Maybe he listened and learnt from the many artists that appeared there. Artists like Gladys Moncrief, George Wallis Sr, George Formby, Tommy Trinder and too many others to name. He used to tell me about them all.
Mum used to take me there to see the shows and pantomimes. I used to wave to dad over the balcony.
We always sat in the gods at the Tivoli because it was the cheapest. To get up there, there must have been at least 100 steps. I used to say to mum, “we are going to heaven!” We only went at Christmas to the pantomime. I would have liked to have sat down the front as they used to throw out lollies and we never got any because they wouldn’t reach us way up there.
As I think about the Tivoli it has come back to me that my mother told me that her grandmother was the flower-seller outside of a nighttime and she was run over by a horse and cart and killed. I must try and find out more but I can’t ask mum as she is not with me any more.