Alister and I first met when we were 4 years old.
We had both been sentenced by our parents, for the offence of being little boys, to an indeterminate term of strict discipline and intimidation.
This was imposed by Miss Heffernan, a choleric, artificially-auburn-haired, misopaedic spinster who had discovered earlier in her life that she could legally indulge her penchant for inflicting pain on little boys by masquerading as a piano teacher.
If her motivation for the ruler-across-the-back-of-the-hands technique of piano teaching was to minimize musical mistakes, it was ineffective.
Rather than instilling an aversion to mistakes, it unsurprisingly led to an aversion to piano lessons. Neither Al nor I have touched a piano since.
Each of us, however, had a big sister whose lessons from Miss Heffernan were punishment-free, and both these lovely girls eventually went on to have relatively stellar musical careers.
The highlight of piano-playing for Al and I was appearing on stage to play a piano duet at a church hall musical festival in a small riverside village an hour or so south of the town were we lived.
Two chubby-faced, freckly 5 year-olds, one with red hair and one with brown, torturing a simple tune by Papa Haydn.
Must have been as cute as a puppy under a Christmas tree.
But all this piano-playing was merely the prelude for the onset of the drama of real life, for the seismic break with the secure, carefree, Elysian existence of infancy - starting school.
Al and I found ourselves in the kindergarten class of Miss Maher, surrounded by the red, weeping faces of the other little kids as they faced the stark reality of life without mummy.
(Maybe the school should have sent prospective kindergarten pupils to a boot camp run by Miss Heffernan in the weeks leading up to the start of school to toughen them up.)
As the year progressed, the pecking order amongst the children was slowly established.
Befitting the lack of social sophistication of 5 year olds, this was based on the atavistic imperative of physical size.
And the Feeney boys had this in spades. Together with the less physically imposing but equally aggressive Millards, they terrorized the Infants School.
Probably on the basis of some deep hereditary impulse, the Feeney gang found me particularly offensive, and without preamble took me by the throat to the darkest corner of the school playground, where they took turns in inflicting as much punching-pain as a 5 year old can inflict.
Which is probably not a lot, really, but after a while frequency starts to make up a bit for lack of efficiency.
I'm still proud to say that I didn't let on that I was shit-scared and getting a bit tender.
But then, like Han Solo saving the day in Starwars, Al came across the playground in a long curving run and put the Feeney gang to flight.
My friend and my hero? You bloody bet.
And 68 years later, he still is.