As well as being unusual (by all but Perth standards) for never having left their native city, Ros’s friends were also remarkable for never having left their husbands. The nuns might have been proud of them. Vivacious, assured, well-turned out, without exception beautiful, they none the less gave off that small-town expectancy which I’d first observed on the faces of grown women in Sydney in 1965. ‘You’ve just come from where people are bad,’ they seemed to say then. ‘Be bad for us. Bring a little far-away wickedness into our quiet lives.’ I used to find this appeal intoxicating in 1965. I got drunk on my own untried diabolism. And here today, in the dense swooning garden of Bloom’s restaurant, I experienced the same sensation. I was a young-husband, a toy boy, a mere one year older than my wife, and I had supped only recently with sinners. There wasn’t anything that those convent-educated Perth girls could not make a man from overseas feel capable of. But of course I didn’t mention this, later on, to Geoff Gibbs, since his wife was one of them.

Before I left – this was only a fleeting audience I’d been granted – I got Rosalin and Gillian Martin (née Garratt) to remember the little chant with which the kids from state schools had been wont to bait them.

Condi dogs

Sitting on logs

Eating maggots out of frogs

And the little chant with which they were wont to bait them back.

State school brats

Sitting on mats

Pulling whiskers out of rats.

It wasn’t difficult, even at this distance, imagining how low those infidel state brats would have felt, listening to that. ‘I certainly wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of you girls,’ I said, as Geoff dragged me away.

We left just as Margaret and Ros were recalling the day Sister Gertrude had spotted them strolling across the playground arm in arm. ‘Separate, girls. Separate!’ Sister Gertrude had called out to either one or both of them. ‘Separate at once!’ Varied and ingenious had been the forms of unnaturalness the nuns had noticed amongst the girls, and various and ingenious had been their methods of stamping them out.

While Geoff drove me around Perth and its environs, showing me de Bernales’ folly in Cottesloe, and Bondy’s monstrous Observation City (for Observation of you-know-what) in Scarborough, I mused aloud upon the phenomenon we’d just been privileged to witness. It didn’t seem to me that the nuns had done their charges any lasting harm. And would modern children, I wondered, who enjoyed the careful conscientiousness of liberal-minded teachers, possess such a rich and comic store of ludicrous memories? I didn’t want to argue for the return of bigoted religious education but didn’t it feed and stimulate the imagination, all that mad dogmatism and lewd suspiciousness and eccentricty?