Some autobiographies are like novels, some resemble suites of lyric poems, some would seem to be educative tracts and others shade into history. From time to time one is published which reads as though a life of talk had somehow made itself over into book form. Patsy Adam-Smith’s Hear the Train Blow is certainly such a narrative, giving the impression again and again that we are not reading but sitting around enjoying a long, bright evening’s yams.

In this book everything seems brisk, lively and casual. From the beginning of chapter one, which tells us that ‘My parents were railway people and we lived beside the tracks all our life’, to the point where seventeen-year-old Patricia Jean is about to leave as a VAD on a troop train we are taken through the plain events of a working-class girl’s growing up. It all sounds perfectly fair dinkum. As the author writes in her prologue, ‘Hear the Train Blow is a true story.’ And country railways made up a world remarkably rich in stories.

Of course there is always a paradox in our saying that something is true and that it is a story. Stories resemble other stories. The plain, brute facts of life begin to take the traditional shapes of stories as soon as somebody makes them into stories. Life keeps on imitating some kind of art or other.