Sighs and puffs and a swirling fog of steam, the smell of fireworks, a billow of charcoal smoke as perfect as a child’s drawing then the pitch black barrel of an engine. Up front a driver in a slouch hat with the top half of his body hanging out at a dangerous angle, the pull of a rope and a breathy toot-toot, the wave of a friendly hand. A man in soot covered overalls shovelling coal into a firebox, two men in grey lab coats wearing goggles stoking a fire. At the end a conductor checking the time on his fob watch dressed in a double breasted uniform with shiny buttons and a black cap. 
No it’s not Thomas the Tank Engine or his pal Henry but a glimpse from my past. It’s a steam train in 1956 hauling ten red varnished carriages up the steep gradients and sharp curves of a line measured in chains to the station of Warrimoo. This is why I became bewitched by trains – especially steam trains. There was an ‘up’ service and a ‘down’ service which ran to a strict timetable. We rarely missed either the morning or the afternoon ritual – my mother and I on the grassy verge of Railway Parade waving with frantic energy. 
I with my doll in a pram and Mum with the white sheets in a cane washing basket. The washing, you must understand, could not be hung out until the ‘up’ train had passed and the carbon and charcoal had shaken itself out of the fresh Blue Mountains air.
Our laundry – a windowless brick enclosure under the house held a copper boiler and a wringer suspended over double concrete sinks. While I played with the dolly pegs and my new baby sister slept upstairs in her bassinet Mum attended to this laborious task. Together we hung the washing out on a line built by Dad of wooden cross pieces and ropes which could be raised and lowered as needed. Those white sheets had until precisely 3:00pm to dry before the screech of metal on metal and the black smoke came billowing back down the mountain to cover us again in soot and ash.
There’s an unshakeable curiosity in me when it comes to trains
After 1958 when the line became electrified and red rattlers replaced steam, we still left our chores, our games and our babies to run out the front and wave to the driver or a cheerful passenger. Counting the carriages on the long, long goods trains was a game saved for the afternoon when Dad arrived home from school. The Fish and The Chips – regular commuter trains so named because the original driver was a big man with the surname of Heron (affectionately known as The Big Fish) took their own place in history. But the sleek silver carriages and diesel power of the those later years lost some of the magic of the steam era.
Warrimoo girls had girl toys – our dolls and our tea sets, our knitting and our dress-ups. 
But we also built with Dad an impressive train set on a board the size of a double bed that we lowered on pulleys from the ceiling of the garage. Hornby engines and metal carriages, yards of track and papier-mâché tunnels and bridges, plastic stations, sheds, miniature people and farm animals. No rigid definition as to how girls should behave defined us then or now and like Thomas we were fiercely proud of our side line.
Do you have a childhood memory so bizarre it makes the truth of it stranger than fiction? Any time I hear one very recognisable waltz by Johann Strauss I involuntarily start The Tennis Dance!
One way or another that station, those tracks that ran from Central to Bathurst up over the Blue Mountains shaped my life. It was to a varnished weatherboard log cabin named The Ridges, at 128 Railway Parade, Warrimoo with the phone number 256 that I was taken on my discharge at seven days of age from The Royal North Shore Hospital. My father had accepted a teaching position at Penrith Public School and my mother accepted the fact that her dream of married life in a cottage by the sea in Manly was over. Instead of falling asleep to the lulling roll of waves we fell asleep to the rolling grate of metal on metal as the steel monsters carrying sheep and wheat from the western plains snaked their way down the mountain.
However it is with some affection that I look back on that address and those train tracks that pulsed with life and purpose. Our house built by my father and my maternal grandfather sat to one side of three large elevated blocks of bushland which provided my sisters and me with unbridled freedom. A sanctuary of giant Angophoras, Bloodwoods and Casuarinas, kookaburras, magpies and a rare bowerbird with shiny black plumage and electric blue eyes. A chook pen, orchid house, aviary, cubby made from chicken wire and a wooden swing dangling from a towering iron bark. Bright orange and mauve sunsets over the railway line, the Saturday twilight smell of smoke from the burning of mounds of damp gum leaves and old Mrs Higgins in her knitted bonnet with the pixie ears staggering up our block from her one room cabin below carrying chocolate blancmange set in egg cups for our dessert.
Directly opposite our house was a well-trod gravel path up a steep embankment swaying with bright yellow Calliopsis and bees. It was a shortcut across the railway tracks beside a sign that read
The line as we called it in its own way protected and nurtured and provided a measure of security. Like Miss O’Brien the tracks and the trains and the characters who used them became over the years a theatre of performance – both comic and tragic.
IN the course of writing the first daft for my novel which has thus far taken approximately six years I have made a subtle but significant shift from memoir to historical fiction. My problem stems from the fact that it is a multi-generational, multi family saga involving scandals and deceptions, forbidden love and some downright outlandish behaviour that is so entertaining I can’t leave anything out. It’s a blend of fiction and fact that is as much accurate as not. Some of it however happened to members of other families who have been referenced in Australian history. I have met face to face with some of the characters and been in written contact with others. I have historical records and documents from local history libraries, copies of letters and transcripts of stories told by surviving relatives and books written by one of them. But getting it accurate, assembling some sort of order and sticking to the facts is crippling the creative flow.
It’s been a busy few days at the 
I’ve made myself a little shrine in the attic – my studio in the rafters. When doubt sets in and the words dry up I look into that sheet music with the coloured illustrations still vivid after seventy years. There’s the initials GKW, Wiseman written in old fashioned cursive with the date 1947. This was his music, his hands have smoothed the creases as I do and played the melody as I wish I could. There’s his writing in the petty cash book from the chemist I know he owned in Wollongong with a female Pharmacist named Joan. I found these lost possessions through serendipity – possibly my favourite word – in another attic in another house from another era.
