I stood by helplessly, hating the instinct that told me to leave what happened in someone else’s town to the someone else who lived there, hating still more my ignorance, at my age, of how best to come to the aid of an injured person, and thinking what particularly bad luck it was for this one to have got himself knocked down, and found by me.

Of its own accord the situation changed. As more people gathered round, the taxi driver slipped away. A glamorous blonde in a cocktail dress, claiming to be a nurse, took his place. An ambulance rolled up. Followed, in farcical succession, by the police – first two in a car, then two more on foot, then three on motorbikes, then another one in a car, and then another two, for all I knew in a helicopter. There seemed to be no hurry to get the boy in the ambulance. We all stood about in random social groupings, not doing anything. A passer-by might have thought we were a street party still waiting for the ice to break. Only the nurse was in any communication with the person who had brought us together. She knelt by him, her cocktail dress hitched up and sparkling like a ballroom dancer’s in the flashing blue lights. ‘You been on the grog, mate?’ she was asking him. ‘Or have you been shooting up?’

Eventually the ambulance men decided that they might as well lift the body onto a stretcher. The nurse hopped back into her convertible. We wondered, since we’d been the first on the scene, whether a statement was required of us. ‘Nah, no need,’ the police told us. Our address? Nah. Our names? Nah. I had the distinct impression that much more of this and we would have got ourselves arrested for harassing the police or for injecting a quite inappropriate degree of urgency into an ordinarily leisurely Perth emergency.

Earlier that day Argentina had defeated Australia 9–6 in an Easter Sunday polo match at Sydney. Major Ronnie Ferguson, father of Sarah, had umpired. ‘Australians have got to learn to play under pressure,’ he had commented afterwards. ‘Somehow they have got to learn speed.’ Trust an Englishman to get the priorities wrong. An Australian journalist reporting the same match noted that the defeat ‘might have been enough to turn a crowd quite nasty but they all had their mouths full of lavish food, so civilized behaviour reigned’. And Perth, as few of its residents will hesitate to tell you, knows far more about what constitutes civilized behaviour than Sydney does.