The Kids of Welles Bend: The Kids of Welles Bend

By Jessi Hammond

Five kids. Five disabilities.

Tamsin has been bounced from foster home to foster home. Now she's living on the remote coast of Tasmania, wondering if she's ever going to fit in anywhere.

Lara has cerebral palsy. The doctors said she'd never walk. She proved them wrong. Now Lara's got another goal, but can she and Tamsin pull off their daring plan?

Dean's father works at the wildlife park, and Dean, who is deaf, is allowed to help with the squirrel monkeys. But he is keeping an incredible secret, a secret that happened by accident…

Brad's life is far from great, but his secret visits each day to see Beauty, the white pony he's befriended, make life bearable. But when Beauty goes missing after a storm, will his past behaviour put the pony's safety – and her life – in danger?

Damien might be almost blind, but he's got a dream he's kept to himself for years. And the only one who can help him is Brad. But does he trust Brad enough to put his safety in the former bully's hands?

This book contains the complete series - Second Chances, One Step at a Time, Monkey Signs, Breaking Fences, and Running Blind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Jul 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393096122

Book preview

Introduction

Like the kids in these stories, I too have a disability.

I am nearly blind. To me, the world beyond the length of my arm looks like a mess of splodgy paint. Even inside what I call my ‘sight zone’, I can’t see a lot of small details. I can’t read the words on coins. I have no depth perception – I actually learned how depth perception works in Year Eight art class.

I grew up in a small town where kids with disabilities went to normal schools. My primary and high schools didn’t have any special classes or special ed teachers, so I learned how to do things like everyone else.

Just like the kids of Welles Bend do.

Tamsin, Lara, Dean, Brad and Damien are learning how to live with their own disabilities and how other people see them. They’re also helping each other to be the best they can be. Sometimes it’s not easy. Often they have obstacles able kids don’t.

If you have a disability, know this: You can do almost anything if you put your mind to it. You just have to find a safe way around the obstacles. Think outside the box. Start small and build up. It might take a long time, so don’t give up.

If your sibling has a disability: Please be patient. It’s not that we want more attention than you. Believe me, we’d much rather be like you and not need the attention and/or help. the best thing you can do for your sibling is treat them like you do everyone else. And go smash rocks together, or some other non-violent bashy-crashy activity, when you feel frustrated with them or your parents – or yourself. It helps.

If you are a parent reading this and you have a child with a disability: I hear you. Two of my three kids are vision impaired. My one piece of advice for all disabilities? Let them do stuff. Don’t smother them. I know it’s hard – my mum told me she chewed her fingernails to the elbow when I was a kid. I sprained joints, broke my collarbone, broke my finger, broke a small motorbike (not kidding). But I learned to live in the normal world, which all disabled kids need to do.

Life doesn’t give us a break when we leave school.

I hope you enjoy the stories, and that they give you the determination to reach your own goals. Good luck!

Jessi Hammond

Second Chances

Tamsin has been bounced from foster home to foster home. Now she’s living on the remote coast of Tasmania, wondering if she’s ever going to fit in anywhere.

Then she finds a fur seal on the beach, its body tangled in fishing line.

Can Tamsin help the seal? And can the seal help Tamsin break free of the past?

One

Tamsin sat cross-legged on the veranda of the old beach house that her latest foster family lived in, staring through the wooden rails and out over the dark heave of the sea. Farther out it was black, the horizon invisible between the water and the star-filled bowl of the sky above. But here the white strip of the beach was only thirty metres away, and the waves twisted over themselves with a moonlight-whitened flick of foam. The wind blew in across them, cold and biting, bringing the sound of the waves to her. Soft, rhythmic. Always the same.

Not like Tamsin’s life, bounced from one foster family to another as each set of parents found out about her… obsession.

But this time maybe someone in the system had actually read her file. Mr and Mrs Graham lived on a remote stretch of Tasmanian coastline, half an hour from the nearest town of Welles Bend. Their twins had finished school last year and were now studying at the Institute for Marine and Arctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, and their last foster kid had left to attend TAFE in Hobart. The Grahams’ house was filled with shells and bits of flotsam the family had rescued from the sea, including what looked to Tamsin like a narwhal horn.

Tamsin had been speechless with awe the first time she’d set foot in their house.

She still was.

She wished she could ask Mr and Mrs Graham – ‘Call us Rob and Sammi,’ they’d said, but she couldn’t, not yet – if it really was a narwhal horn.

But she was still too shy to let down her guard yet.

Even with all the evidence around her that they too loved the sea.

Somewhere out there, where the sea met the sky, was a rocky island where the Australian fur seals lived during breeding season during the months leading up to Christmas. Now it was July, and the wind howled freezing from the Arctic and froze exposed skin into a red, chapped mess. No pups would be there now. Last year’s were on their own, and this year’s weren’t yet born.

Tamsin wished she could see the little baby fur seals, but they very rarely came close to the Tasmanian mainland. They stayed out on their rocky islands where it was safe, or out in the sea.

She pushed the longing feeling away. She probably wouldn’t be here in six months’ time. She’d never spent six months in one foster home before.

She wondered if Mr Graham ever went out to the seal rocks. He had a big speedboat tied