PEEPING TOM worked dutifully and regularly in his North London Leaseholds office. In his loose fragments of time, before social relationships began to complicate things, he would more or less consciously obey the urge of Nature to be up and doing about It. He wandered, and almost always he wandered towards the parts of London where there were pictures in windows, where there were undraped statues, where strange women walked about in a provocative way and even said “Ducky” to you. But Dr Scaber had put him wise about them. You can get those awful diseases from a kiss, from a split lip.

Until his legacy he could not afford to go to the movies very much and they were mostly heroic and adventurous then, there was kissing, almost too much of it, you joined with other lads of spirit to echo the sounds on the back of your hand, but you never got to anything — anything really instructive.

Gradually he discovered the National Gallery, the South Kensington Museum. They were open on Sunday afternoons. You could wander about whistling softly. You could look sideways. You could be bolder and look straight. Lots of people looked straight without a blush. It was remarkable how nude and yet how coldly uninformative a statue or a picture could be.

Then there was window peeping. His bedroom commanded the windows of the attics of a row of houses giving on Euston Road. There every night people went to bed, and particularly a young woman who, with a certain disregard of her possible visibility, undressed completely in front of a small mirror. By putting out his own light and s............