‘You have a mirror, a small one?’ he asked. I fetched a compact from my mother’s handbag. ‘Come to my room,’ he ordered.

We tiptoed needlessly down the upstairs corridor, our footsteps covered by a clanking of pipes and a rush of bathwater as Florrie ran her weekly bath before going out with her steady boyfriend.

‘Close the door,’ said Dovidl, opening his bedroom window. ‘This should not be difficult.’ He took a wooden coat-hanger from his wardrobe, and taped the vanity mirror on to its edge with blackout sticking-paper. ‘Now hold this mirror out of the window at forty-five degrees,’ said Dovidl. ‘The bathroom window is half open. When the angle is right you will be able to see a reflection of the bathroom mirror.’

He was right, as usual. After a bit of twisting and turning, I saw the bathroom cabinet in my little mirror and, through shifting clouds of steam, the upper half of Florrie as she briskly removed apron, white blouse, her slip and a wired undergarment whose French name I had heard whispered in the playground corner where Johnny Isaacs clustered with his churlish chums. Momentarily, Florrie stood before me in the mirror, her full Hampshire breasts heaving in the smoggy air before she bent, bouncily, to fiddle with garments below my eye-line and lower herself into the tub.

A breath stuck in my throat, like a fishbone. Thrilling as the sight must have been, I was acutely aware of crossing a barrier from innocence to pubescence, a transition complicated by knowing that the object of my immature desire was a mother-surrogate who tucked me into bed at night. Breaking this incest taboo was bad enough, but transgressing it with the help of Dovidl, my heaven-sent house-brother, was confusing beyond the limits of my modest intelligence. I began to tremble with anxiety and the stutter returned as I handed the hanger-cum-mirror to my accomplice, just as Florrie rose from the bath and wrapped herself in a towel.

‘Next show, next Thursday,’ grinned Dovidl, breaking the tension. ‘Or Tuesday, if you want to see fat old Martha.’

I gagged and giggled at the thought of our bad-tempered cook in the flabby altogether. ‘You see?’ said Dovidl. ‘This is what a little strategy can achieve, without risk or pain.’

‘Such a know-all,’ I sneered, throwing a cushion at his head. He retaliated with a bed-quilt and we fell about wrestling on the floor until our thumps and yells drew a sharp protest from Mother, who was holding a committee meeting downstairs. We were ordered to straighten our ties, brush our hair and, if David wouldn’t mind, come and play something nice for the ladies. Our complicity was complete in its exclusion of the adult world.