It was down by the waterfront a couple of kilometres from our house. It's gone now. A pre-school with water views was never going to survive city rejuvenation plans.

The pre-school had a swimming pool and a bright change area/cloak room, with little pictures - of animals, maybe - above the hooks where you could hang a bag or jacket.

I have lovely memories of that place. I was three years old when I started, which was unusual for the time, 1963.

My mother tells the story of how she begged the lovely woman who ran the pre-school to take me on. My mother was pregnant with her fourth baby and I wasn't dealing at all well with the fact my best friend - next door neighbour Jeannie, 4 - was at the pre-school, and I wasn't.

The begging pregnant woman appeal must have worked. That and the likelihood Mum walked from our house to the pre-school because she didn't drive, probably with children in tow. How could a nice pre-school owner say no?

So I went to pre-school regularly for a couple of years and stayed tight with my bestie.

There are photos of the two of us together. She was a cheeky blonde and I was a ratty brunette. She lived as an only child with her grandparents next door but spent a lot of time on our side of the fence. Or out on the street with other kids or over in the park. It was the early 1960s. Things were quieter then.

When Jeannie got a pushbike that I lusted after - large families on a bricklayer's pay didn't stretch to pushbikes - she was generous.

When we came up with a plan for staying in touch after dark - making a tin can and twine phone line between our two facing bedrooms - we shared the blame for the great idea of cutting big chunks out of the flyscreens to push the cans through.

We stayed friends after Jeannie went to state primary and high schools and I headed for Catholic schools, but spent a year together when I switched to a state high for my senior years.

By that stage Jeannie was very, very cool and artistic. I was just the girl people knew because I worked at the local newsagent after school.

Jeannie's first cousins - two boys and a girl - were regular visitors next door for years when we were children. They lived fairly close by. The younger boy and I shared most classes in my final senior school years.

The other night, at a school reunion, I met up with Jeannie again. We were a lot older, not necessarily wiser, and settled in for a long chat as if we were still plonked down in my backyard, somewhere near the willow trees.

We were even a touch resentful - well, I was - when people came up to say hello. True besties can be like that.

I last had contact with her extended family in 2001 after the September 11 terror attacks.

Jeannie's niece, Amanda, the daughter of her eldest boy cousin, was killed in a domestic terror incident in Istanbul on September 11, 2001, when a woman walked into a temporary police station in a city square and activated explosives in her backpack. Amanda had been walking across the square after Turkish lessons.

She was kept alive until her father was able to get there. He brought her body home.

In the same two senior high years I shared with Jeannie's cousin there was another teenager, a quiet type who sat near the back and always looked studious in his glasses.

He had a younger sister, Lesley. By September 11, 2001, Lesley was living in New York and working on the 105th floor of the World Trade Centre's north tower.

She died that day when a terrorist's plane hit the tower below the 105^th floor and no trace of her body was ever found.

The houses where Jeannie and I grew up side by side faced a park and a waterfront. As you looked out from our front verandas you could roughly make out, through the trees, where the water carved out a bay with two points at either end.

On one point after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in Istanbul and New York a bench seat was built with a plaque for Amanda. On the other point there is a bench seat with a plaque for Lesley.

Years ago after those benches were built - each in a sunny, leafy position with a beautiful view - I wrote about that time and our shared histories.

We were families growing up in a small pocket of regional NSW. Three of us sitting in a classroom together back in the 1970s would be linked by tragedy years later - the brother of a New York terror attack victim, the uncle of an Istanbul terror attack victim, and a journalist who put personal feelings in a mental box for just long enough to do her job.

Every so often I walk from point to point along the waterfront - past my family's old home which we left in 1976 and the site of Jeannie's old home which was knocked down for units.

The walk between those two benches several kilometres apart marks the boundaries of my childhood. Within those boundaries there was joy and love but also grief and tragedy.

Jeannie and I traded stories the other night. She left her graphic design job and house in Sydney to move down to a beautiful part of the southern highlands. She tried hard to recite my 10 brothers' and sisters' names, in chronological order, and did pretty well. She missed our fifth child completely and has no memory of the two little ones born not long before I left home.

She talked about Amanda and that dark time when the world seemed on the precipice of an even deeper darkness. And I left quietly later without seeking her out, because besties don't say goodbye.