IN 1978 I launched a tactical raid of sorts in my parents’ walk-in wardrobe. This was out of character for me – until this moment the idea that they had secrets I wished to plumb or, as I might later describe it, a private life, was not just a matter of total indifference, it was inconceivable. I was surreptitiously trying on my father’s leather jacket while he was at work and noticed that the louvred cabinet standing between the open racks of rayon sundresses and wide-lapelled suits was secured by a small brass padlock. As it happened, the cabinet proved laughably insecure; the tiny key was in a glass pin dish poking out from beneath the shoe stand. On opening the lock, I found precisely what a fourteen-year-old would wish most to find behind a moderately defended door.

Perhaps a day or two after this my father confronted me, removed at least a dozen magazines wedged under my mattress and made it clear that I was to leave the cabinet alone. In time, the force of this prohibition waned and I went searching for the key – again with the pin dish? Surprisingly, the proper, hot-cheeked shame I felt at that first confrontation had really settled into a groove of synthetic contrition by the fourth, much less the ninth. The routine circuit traced from his cabinet to my mattress and back again revealed, among other things, just how useless our home was at keeping stuff cloistered. Also – and this much was clear to me even then – as the cat was well and truly out of the bag, my dad was asking me to supply and honour his completely abstract right to privacy in the wake of the cabinet’s patent failure: I had to become the better, more secure padlock. (I declined.)