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companion worried my parents too. Again, the sacrifices they made so that my brother and I could go to the Brothers, whose record with university scholarships stood so high, seemed imperilled. My father went without drink. My mother, who was by everyone’s account a beautiful woman, had to line her holed shoes with newspaper. They gave up fashion and exuberance and social events, entertaining and being entertained, in the hope my brother and I would become doctors or lawyers. And I was close to being their first success. A minor academic star.
    They were concerned about all the extraneous work I would have to do with the admired Matt. For example, he did Ancient History and I didn’t. Yet I would need to read the Ancient History texts to him by the hour.
    They were also probably more aware than I was that Matt was no neutral quantity, but a robust soul in his own right. That disease which turned Matt milk-white in his mother’s womb and left him without any of the mechanisms of sight, would all his life threaten to make him appear less of a person, and like most blind people he would fight that belittling impulse in others, and only in the end come to a sort of truce with it.
    Matt, who could have been anything if not for that untoward case of measles! In coming to St Pat’s and studying amongst the sighted, he may have been a pioneer, but the sentimentality and ignorance of the age cast him as a curiosity and a freak. The Daily Mirror came and took a picture of Matt amongst the sighted boys, sitting at his desk, punching away at the Braille typewriter, a machine in which he rolled heavy pages of brown-grey paper. He punched keys with Braille characters on them, and indentations matching the keys appeared on the pages, so he could read what Brothers Adams or Harding or Markwell had said.
    Few observers mentioned the armies of blind children for whom Matt stood. Few asked what was being done for them. They were safe in their institutions. They were securely enclosed at St Lucy’s, named after a blind saint who’d found the light.
    I was of course too young, too crass, too innocent not to be part of the general view that Matt was in part a hero and in part a freak. But if you were his friend, he proved to you daily that he was no more or no less than another boy. I slowly came to perceive too his parents’ courage in letting him go forth amongst us ordinary Western Suburbs boys.
    But they had family traditions of bravery. They came from South Coast farming families. Mr Tierney was an older man and had served in World War I. One of the fixtures in his living room was Bean’s History of Australia in the War of 1914–18 . He would sometimes point out the picture of the Cathedral of Albert in Flanders. Either the Germans or the British – I forget which – had put a charge in the spire and set it off, so that the Virgin who stood on top should no longer act as an aiming marker. The Virgin, therefore, leaned down at a crazy angle, reaching her infant towards the passing troops, perhaps inviting their mercy. I supposed that’s what the Tierneys were doing. Lowering their child in the direction of the rough soldiery of St Pat’s.
    Mr Tierney told me one day while I was waiting for Matt and filling in time by looking at the photographs in Bean, about how he’d been wounded in the side near Amiens in the spring of 1918, and the wound had turned septicaemic in the military hospital. The army surgeons had tried everything, and in the end they had used boiling mercury, pouring it into the wound to cauterize it. Gentle Mr Tierney shook his head and smiled and said how much it had hurt – he had, in fact, fainted. He recounted this as if it were a story against himself, as if there were tougher blokes who wouldn’t have passed out.
    Subsequently, he’d worked on the Harbour Bridge during the Depression, and one day at the northern end had fallen off and survived, landing in