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what is now parkland near Milson’s Point. Mr Tierney had – to use a term common amongst Civil War veterans in America – seen the elephant more than once. And now he lived in quiet Shortland Avenue where the brick villas were hunched down behind their dusty roses, and he went to a job somewhat like Mr Frawley’s and showed none of the hubris I would have if my wounds had been cleaned out with boiling mercury on a great battlefield.
    The Tierneys were brave when I turned up with a cemented cowlick and my unreliable smile and said, ‘Gidday, Mrs Tierney, I’m Mick Keneally, and Alex asked if I’d see Matt to school and study with him.’
    What did such a neat woman think of my deliberately bashed and battered felt hat, my suit distorted by the copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the breast pocket? And Matt came up the hallway with his long, white hands held out before him, and his questing smile.
    â€˜Gidday, Mick. Just hang on a sec. I’ll get my bag.’
    Like any teenager, he’d sometimes be abrupt with his mother.
    â€˜Where’s my Breasted’s Ancient History ? Well, why didn’t you put it back?’
    These reproofs would usually be muttered. The smile would turn faintly testy if she fussed over his appearance. He’d brushed his own hair and tied his own tie, and didn’t like it if she tried to straighten anything.
    When his tussle with his mother ended, we were off up Shortland and into Francis Street. The corner of the oval in sight, where later in the year we would show our style with the Nugget tins full of braille type.
    This was an age of the hugest innocence, and therefore, of casual malice. Italians had begun to arrive in numbers, and Baits of every stripe – Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian – and Poles and Greeks, but they had not yet changed the Australian equation. They were bundles of strange clothing on the edge of our vision. Britishness prevailed, and even the Irish-Australian working class were part of that Britishness. We stood for God Save the Queen in the cinemas. The part of Britain we most resembled might have been Belfast or Liverpool or Glasgow, a sun-struck version of any of those, of their demographics, their assumptions, their fervours and their clannish rivalries. The world had not quite yet opened our window, though there were some remarkable-looking strangers beginning to appear in the frame.
    And in that sealed, antipodean room, to go along with all the other odd opinions, were some odd opinions about the blind. Mrs Tierney, who was tall – Matt had her face and her lankiness – was offended that some people looked upon the blindness of the child as a punishment of the mother. Since emigration to Australia was often from the poorer parts of the British Isles, folk superstitions arrived and sometimes pooled here. But then there were those who considered Matt too awesome a phenomenon to talk to directly. Outside St Dominic’s Flemington on Sunday morning, women who had just addressed the unutterable Deity would say to Mrs Tierney, ‘His shoe laces are undone.’
    She would say, ‘You can tell him yourself, if you like. He’s quite intelligent. He’s doing the Leaving Certificate.’
    But people would scutter away. Mrs Tierney’s lifetime mission was to educate the rest of us. To vanquish in all of us that primitive voice that said somehow that Matt was cursed and that the curse was contagious.
    The school Matt and Mangan (on some mornings) and I approached through those quiet streets planted with box trees stood on a low hill either side of Edgar Street, Strathfield. Its buildings were topped by stumpy concrete Celtic crosses to indicate the origins of the Order. I would later find that buildings like the older of the school’s two structures, the part where I’d begun as a third grader, attending the Christian Brothers on soldier’s pay in the third last year of the war, were