For most of my childhood doctors tried to fix my ‘wandering’ eye. Finally I said stop

Stay inside the fence. Don’t play on the road. Don’t get into cars with strange men. The world was a dangerous, fearsome place, full of dangerous, fearsome people.

And now look what was happening – my mother was not only taking me into the world but leaving me there. Instead of abandoning me in a forest, like Hansel and Gretel’s parents, I was to be left at a hospital – St Vincent’s in Darlinghurst, a notorious part of Sydney back then. I needed an operation to correct my wandering eye. It wouldn’t hurt, Mum assured me. I wouldn’t even feel it because the doctors would put me to sleep.

Put me to sleep? That’s what the vet did to the cat next door. We never saw Smoky again. Mum made a gargled sound, like a cry dressed in a laugh. “I’ll visit you every day.” She gave me one more big hug and kiss before handing me over. “Be a brave girl,” she said. It did not occur to me that a mother leaving her three-year-old daughter might be the one who needed to be brave.

The hospital was as grand as a fairytale palace. I stood on the balustrade – something Mum would never have allowed – two storeys up, one hand on the cool, solid majesty of a Roman column, the other doing a regal, windscreen-wiper wave, like a young Queen Elizabeth. No doubt I was in the protective custody of a nurse but it was so exhilarating up there that I barely registered her presence. The world was wondrous, not dangerous or fearsome at all.

Mum stood waving from the other side of a road busy with cars driven by strange men. There were men in the park, too, propped up against trees, drinking from bottles in brown-paper bags – and some women, though not dressed in “best” clothes like Mum.

Mum walked away, still waving. As she grew smaller and smaller, then disappeared into the shadowy trees on the far side of the park, it felt like I was the one leaving. Sailing away on a big ocean liner. Then came the carbolic stench of the operating theatre, the black mask of oblivion with its cargo of choking chloroform, waking into the perpetual darkness of eyes blinded by bandages. This, too, was the world outside the fence.

In the darkness that followed the operation, I became bigger, finding new parts to myself, and new skills. Deprived of sight, I re-imagined the world through other senses. I came to recognise the distinctive footfall of different nurses, the swish of nuns’ habits along the floor. I saw the world through my fingers – traced the outline of the kangaroo on the one-penny coin, felt the rough or smooth texture of skin as hands held mine, and the fluffy ears of my toy koala, the reassuring oval pad of its nose. I smelled the swampiness of barely warm gravy at dinnertime; the soft blur of face powder that signalled my mother’s daily visit; the sharp Brylcreem sweetness of Dad making one of his rare public appearances.

I was brave. The nurses said so. One morning a new patient came to the ward – a five-year-old boy who had stuck scissors in his eye. “Marele, sit up and show him what a brave girl you are.” Did they think I was an exhibit? “I’ll sit up at lunchtime.”