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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
I M A G E S
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.
E A M O N
G A L L A G H E R
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
A M O N
G A L L A G H E R ; G E T T Y
I M A G E S
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.