26  Good Weekend January 30,2010 January 30, 2010  Good Weekend  27

It ends up being the story of two handbrakes. first there was

one that didn’t want to release. My wife and I have one of those new-millennium cars that attempts to automate the automotive experience,

which means an old-fashioned handbrake crunch is all too yesterday.Instead we have a button. A button that groans a little when it’s called intoservice and lights up orange. A button that doesn’t intrude on cabin space

being eyed off by expansionist drink-holders. A stupid bloody button thatfailed on the Sunday after the 2009 AFL Grand Final, and set off a chain of events that could have killed our baby.

After 10 minutes battling the uncooperative handbrake, my wife, Tamsin,calls to withdraw from the family catch-up at my parents’ place. I amalready there. Her voice resounds with the leaden weariness that is familiar

to any parent of a four-week-old. “The car brake’s broken. It’s so annoying.I can’t get there.”

Unfortunately, I know the train timetable. “There’s a train at 10.51,” I

offer, feeling as if I’m whipping a beaten thoroughbred over the last twofurlongs. “If you can make it, I’ll meet you at Jolimont with an umbrella(whack, whack). It’d be nice if you could (whack, whack), just because this

is the only day when everyone’s going to be in Melbourne ( whack, whack).”I push. I cajole. Racing Victoria Limited changed the whip rules to counter

 jockeys like me.

It’s an umbrella sort of day. Actually it’s more of an umbrella-flipping-inside-out sort of day. Rain, occasional hail, wind. Wind like you wouldn’tbelieve. A friend later tells me that a freak gust blew his driver-side door

back on its hinges, writing off two panels. Nevertheless, at this point I’m stillthinking umbrellas and some breakneck chivalry for a person who’s en-dured a car breakdown and a dash for a train, after a lengthy morning of 

co-ordinating a colicky newborn with a boundary-testing two-year-old,who, in her own words, “rikes being naughty”. I skol a coffee. If they makethe 10.51, they’ll be at Jolimont right on 11am.

My phone rings at 10.56. The ringtone is the Yip Yip Martians fromSesame Street , a frivolous false dawn for what is to come. The caller ID saysit’s Tamsin. It takes me five seconds of disorienting babble to understand

that it isn’t.“Hello, I’m calling from your wife’s phone. We’re at the station and there’s

been an accident. I don’t want you to panic. Everyone seems to be okay but your wife is very upset. She’s here beside me, I’m going to put her on … ”

It’s only about this point I realise it’s not Tam’s voice. For the longest time

I’ve just blindly believed the caller ID. The screen said it was her. Why 

It made news around the world: images of a distraught mother watching helplessly

as her pram-with-baby toppled off a platform into the path of an oncoming train. Yet

three weeks earlier, at another Melbourne station, a frighteningly similar incident

occurred. Tony Wilson recalls the day that turned into a parent’s worst nightmare.

wouldn’t it be? It’s just as the first bolt of terror is striking that Tam assumesthe phone, bungeeing me back out of the fire. She’s sobbing wildly, incon-solable. “He hit his head on the rail. He’s awake now, but we’re still going to

go to the Children’s Hospital. He’s got swelling at the back of his head. Hehit his head on the rail.”

The rail. She’s said the word twice. What does she mean by the rail ? It’s

while Tam is sobbing out the details of the ambulance’s arrival that I finally work out she’s talking about the railway tracks. Somehow our four-week-old baby has ended up on the tracks.

“What? Harry was on the tracks?”“The wind blew the pram off the platform. I had the brake on, but the

wind must have caught the canopy.”

She’s trying to speak but the sobs are consuming her. “I was trying tocontrol Polly … and then I heard this crash … ”

I charge back into my parents’ house. Within the minute, I’m off the

phone and my sister Sam is behind the wheel. I spend the 10-minute driveto the Royal Children’s Hospital cutting deals with gods and devils and super-natural forces I don’t believe in. Sam tries to calm me, saying that if it were

life and death, the call would’ve come from a very fast-moving ambulance.Sam drops me at Emergency and I sweep into an empty reception area.

I explain the parts of the story that I know. The triage nurse tells me that

they haven’t heard about it yet. “The really serious ones are rung throughin advance,” she says kindly. She points to the spot where the ambulancewill pull up outside. “They’ll park there. We’ll come and get you to take

 you through.”

For the next 35 minutes, my seagull   head swivels as i make  

10-second checks for an arriving ambulance. It’s long enough tocover all sorts of existential ground. How will we cope with the loss

of somebody we never really got to know? Is life to become a series of tragic

gaps, the birthday that would have been, the empty Moses basket that hewas meant to grow out of? I’m sickened by the knowledge that our baby isin pain; four weeks old and in serious pain. And I can’t stop thinking about

Tam. She saw it happen. Jumped onto the tracks to retrieve him. How is shegoing to get over this?

The ambulance finally pulls in at a leisurely pace. I half-walk, half-run tothe ambulance bay. The first person I see is Polly, my darling Polly, who issitting tall and seat-belted in an adult seat, staring at her mother on

a stretcher with Harry in her arms. A friendly paramedic unbuckles Polly 

Life on the line: aninstructional video (opposite) was released last year by Kidsafe and Connexto help prevent accidentssuch as the ones thatbefell the Wilsons andanother Victorian family.

the tracks

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   T   A   K   E   N

    F   R   O   M

    K   I   D   S   A   F   E   &

   C   O   N   N   E   X

     T     R     A     I     N     S     A     F     E   V   I   D   E   O

    (   P   O   S   E   D

    B   Y

   M   O   D   E   L   S   )  ;   G   E   T   T   Y

   I   M   A   G   E   S

Terroron

 

January 30, 2010  Good Weekend  29

Tam scarcelyremembersmoving. Shewas justsuddenlydown thereamong therocks andthe rails. Thepram wasupside down,with Harryface downon the rail.

and she jumps into my arms for a hug. “Baby Harry pram fell on train tracks,” she says,

which is apparently the first thing she’s said for

a while. She then has a go at saying ambulance,which is so cute that it sends me into a flurry 

of tears.

The evidence of Tam’s distress is inked downher face in vertical stripes, the mascara thick and

black near her eyes before trailing into softer

greys closer to her mouth. She is helped from herstretcher, and Harry is placed gently in a hospital

crib. His eyes are closed. The lump on the back of 

his head is enormous.

Tam and I hug that desperate, nerve-janglinghug that the staff of the RCH must see every day.

It’s only at this point that I get the full story.

She’d arrived to find a near-empty stationplatform, assumed that she’d missed the 10.51,

then heard the boom gates at Victoria Street and

realised she could still make it.She applied the pram brake, a couple of clicks

as always, and with Polly hurtling around like a

free-range chook, she reached to control her. Thenext sound she heard, amid the dinging of the

boom gates and the whistling of the wind and the

excited chatter of her daughter was the crash of something hitting the train tracks.

She says she scarcely remembers moving. She

was just suddenly down there among the rocksand the rails. The pram was upside down, with

Harry face down on the rail. There are no re-

straining straps for this type of pram, but thezip-up weather cover had fortunately prevented

him from being flung clear. He was crying. Along

the tracks, Tam could see the approaching lightsof the 10.51.

She then noticed that there were three people

on the platform. Two were middle-aged women,seated in the station’s undercover alcove, but one

was closer by, a 20-something male on a mobile

phone. Tam laid Harry carefully on the concreteof the platform, and then laboured with the

pram, lifting the godforsaken too-light-but-still-

bloody-heavy thing up to head height. She’d had

surgery the day after giving birth to stop somepostnatal hemorrhaging. This wasn’t in the re-

covery manual.

“Can you help me, please?!” she shrieked. The

 young man looked at her, registered the strange-

ness of seeing somebody on the tracks, but madeno move to abridge his call, let alone assist. The

two women rushed over and did their best, espe-

cially with Harry and Polly. With one eye on thekids, and one on the approaching train, Tam

somehow jumped and pushed and levered her

way back to safety. “Mummy so brave,” is how Polly tells it, with theatrical relish. “Train coming,

whoooosh!”

Fortunately for us, the distance between ourstation, Dennis, and the stop before it, Fairfield, is

short, and non-express trains do not achieve

huge speeds coming in. There’s also good visibil-ity, and the driver of the 10.51 saw Tam on the

tracks and managed to pull up before the station

platform. She was also the one who calmed Tam,called the ambulance, and identified that Harry 

had some swelling on the back of his head.

Needless to say, the gratitude and goodwillwe have for that Connex employee is inversely 

proportional to the feelings we have for the

20-something on the mobile phone. He disap-

peared in the next big gust.

At the hospital, we settle in the resuscitation room, watching Harry as

his head metamorphoses into the shape

of ET’s. Nonetheless, the mood is relatively buoy-ant. His observations are good. He isn’t listless.

He seems to be hungry. The doctors give him

some oxygen, but don’t ventilate him. His behav-iour seems to be typical for a baby his age.

The doctors stress, however, that the CT scan

will tell the story. He’s wheeled upstairs andplaced on a football field of a table that reminds

us how absolutely tiny he is. I’m asked to leave the

room, but Tam is allowed to stay. Harry cries as

he’s wedged into position. What else can he do?“Don’t panic if we take a while,” the operator

tells us on the way out. “It’ll be at least half an

hour before we’re back with results.”We start to get worried when it’s more than

half an hour. By now it’s nearly 3.30pm, 4½

hours since the accident, and we’re both just ex-hausted. Sam has taken Polly home for a sleep,

but beforehand has delivered me a burger and

fries – enough to establish a fatty base-camp formy nausea. It ticks up to an hour. Still no news. I

ask at the desk whether there’s any explanation

for the delay. The nurse points to our young fe-male doctor. “She’s on the phone to them right

now. She’ll be in in a sec.”

She takes an age. By now it’s not just the trans

fats in the burger. The air is too hot. The cubicle

is too small. Tam and I take turns cuddling Harry and worry that he isn’t crying enough for a baby 

who hasn’t fed in more than five hours. Finally 

the curtain opens and the young doctor arrives.Then another doctor. Then a social worker. Then

a pastoral-care person. As soon as I see the size

and nature of the entourage I don’t want the doc-tor to say a word. She looks at her notes and

crouches down, establishing herself at our level.

Don’t say it, I think, over and over. Please don’tsay a word.

Then she says it. She tells us that the scan re-

vealed bad news. She says that there is a large cra-nial fracture on the top left-hand side of the skull.

She says that there is bleeding on the brain. She

looks at our precious baby’s head and with quiet,professional sadness states that “there is plenty 

going on in there”. We find out that the neuro-

surgeons have been called, and that they will bein soon to tell us more. Tam and I both burst into

tears. The doctor gestures towards the social

worker. “You might like to talk,” she suggests.

“I’m really, really sorry.”

There follows a dismal couple of minutes sit-ting in the company of a well-intentioned social

worker who, in this case, was unfortunate with

her timing. Tam and I have not yet had a momentalone together. “It’s a lot to take in,” the social

worker keeps saying, and given it could be any-

thing on the spectrum from full recovery to deathdepending on what the neurosurgeons say, she’s

right on the money. Unfortunately, her being

with us is not helping with the taking in, and weeventually find some blithering words with which

to ask her to leave.

We then wait for the neurosurgeon. It’s the

worst hour of my life and I spend it alternately crying, embracing Tam, soothing Harry and tex-

ting siblings and parents. At some point, the

emergency consultant, a specialist called Sandy,stops by to console and consolidate what has

been said so far. Except he makes things sound

better. “It’s a tiny amount of bleeding inside thelining of the brain,” he says of the scan. “I didn’t

even see it at first.”

“Is he going to … live?” I ask fearfully, wantingto be free from the worst of our nightmares.

“From my experience,” the specialist says care-

fully, “this is not the sort of situation that islife threatening.” He’s calm and reassuring. He

oozes competence. He’s like a knight in mood-

improving purple pyjamas.

Suddenly, it’s like the ill wind has finally blown

itself out. The neurosurgeons arrive and they agree with Sandy. It’s not a big bleed. “We were

expecting bigger, given how it was described on

the phone,” the younger one admits.The more senior neurosurgeon is the brother-

in-law of a writer who is one of my best friends. He

was best man to one of my former housemates.His mum is in a book club with my mum. I know 

him to say hello to, and actually call him “Stinger”

as I shake his hand. He apologises for the circum-stance of our catching up. I fall into small talk in

the same way as I would at a party, which con-

vinces me that I would small talk on the scaffold.Stinger examines Harry, examines the scan. He

confirms that it’s a small bleed. He tells us that

there is no real build-up of pressure on Harry’sbrain, because the cavities in a newborn’s skull

allow for fluid to be released. He informs us that

Harry won’t need immediate surgery. He thensays the greatest sentence I’ve heard in my almost

37 years. “Really, given how things look at the

moment, I’d imagine he will make a full recovery 

from this injury.”

Back on track: (below)Tony and Tamsin Wilsontoday, with their nowthree-year-old daughter,Polly, and baby son, Harry.

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Harry spends two nights in hospital, laid out

on the vast acreage of a child’s bed, with Tam and

I alternating between Polly at home and the seatbeside him. At some point I ask a nurse how to

turn the seat into a fold-out bed and she laughs.

“We’re all very much looking forward to the new Children’s Hospital,” she says. Harry is rarely out

of my arms, and when he dirties his suit I receive

some donated clothes from the nurse. “Whoneeds Santa when I have Grandma,” his suit says.

I’m still so overcome by the whole experience that

I find myself telling him about Santa, and how much fun it’s going to be, and how I’m going to

be incredibly good at sneaking into his room, and

how he’ll be in his mid-teens before he knows it’sbeen me all along. And so I spoil Santa for him –

or if not for him, then for any other kids who are

eavesdropping at the door.

And that was it. the end of our baby-

on-train-tracks ordeal. Or at least we

thought it was. Three weeks later, I turnedon my computer, opened my web browser and

saw the lead story was “Baby survives hit by train”.

I rocked back in my chair, unsure whether toventure into such maudlin terrain. Eventually I

did, as I suppose I was always going to. The pram

toppling over. The mother flailing to catch it. Then

the nightmare that had replayed for me every time

I’d heard the Hurstbridge train go by in the past 20days. The train really going “whoooosh”. The sick-

ening contact. The woman making her awful split-

second decision to step backwards and save herown life. The terrible, contorting agony that de-

scends on her. The certainty of what she must

know she is about to confront.Except it was a happy ending there, too. The

baby somehow rode the impact, the pram pushed

along by the train with its occupant grippedtightly by the restraint. And this time the hero

was a teenager, climbing under the carriage, fac-

ing up to God knows what, providing the good-news horror story that would nourish the tabloid

media for weeks.

My brother texted me the follow-up news thenext day. “Other train lady being chased by Oprah 

producers!” Except, of course, she isn’t the other

train lady. We are the other train lady. Now, when

occasion comes to tell friends or family aboutHarry’s ordeal, eyes fly wide and they start jab-

bering even before the first sentence is out –

“What, the one on the news?” To which we haveto offer quick reassurance that ours was a differ-

ent train incident, one where the train was com-

It’s now astory forHarry to hearand re-hear ashe grows intothe childhoodthat was sonearly takenfrom us all.

Small miracles: (aboveright) Tony Wilson cuddleshis son, Harry, now fivemonths old and none the

 worse after his fall ontothe rails.   E

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ing but didn’t actually strike the pram, one

where the baby did suffer a head injury but

Oprah didn’t find out about it.I hope that doesn’t sound like some sort of 

sick competitiveness. We’re very happy to be the

other train lady, and are deeply thankful bothbabies are okay. The fact that I can smile, almost

laugh and say mock-jealous “What are we,

chopped liver?” jokes says I’ve almost recovered.It’s now a story for Harry to hear and re-hear as

he grows into the childhood that was so nearly 

taken from us all. And if he hears it from his sis-ter, this is how it goes:

Polly: Daddy, baby Harry’s pram fell on train

tracks.Dad: Yes, poor baby Harry. But Mummy was

very brave.

Polly: Mummy jump on train tracks. (Imitates jump) So big!

Dad: Yes, she did do a big jump.

Polly: Baby Harry’s hat fell on train tracks.

Dad: That’s right. Harry’s hat’s still out thereon the train tracks.

Polly: (Pause) Daddy, Polly’s corn chips fell on

train tracks, too.And when I hear that, I know that we’re all

okay.