Don't throw away the key

When I was about 10, we had a broom cupboard in a dark hallway of our house which was the servant's passage between the kitchen and the residents. It had small holes drilled into the top panel, and the warm aroma of furniture, floor and shoe polish would catch your nostrils as you walked past. Inside the cupboard the smell was very powerful and somehow comforting.

I think I have already mentioned that I used to enjoy waiting for my parents to go shopping in town before I shut myself in it for the hour or two it took them to return. You could only open it from the outside. This odd behaviour used to make my father furious, but many things he didn't understand made him furious. I didn't understand it either, but I think I do now.

This coincided with a brief episode of sleep-walking. One night my parents heard me go past their room and down the wide oak staircase, so they got up to see what I was doing. I was completely unaware of their presence as I let myself into the kitchen, drank a glass of water then went back up again, pausing for a while to examine a spider on one of the stairs with them two steps behind me.

My mother became convinced that I would throw myself out of a window during one of these episodes, so she had my father put up bars on them. Three windows with two bars each. They were made of black steel tubes, flattened on the ends and drilled to take screws. I could have pulled them off with one hand.

At first I reacted badly to the bars, but then I thought of a way to make myself feel better about them, since they were not going to come down for a year or so while they monitored my somnambulism.

I asked for my room to be redecorated. My mother approved but my father mumbled. It was a large room and it was him who was going to have to do it. Newly developed manufacturing techniques meant that you could buy wallpaper which simulated a rough stone wall and I chose that. It went well with the black bars on the window.

"The place will look like a prison", my mother said.

"I know. That's what I want if those bars are staying". I got my way.

After the wallpaper went up I would lie in bed imagining that I was locked up in a spacious and well-appointed dungeon for some romantic crime against the State that did not involve the harming of any fellow humans.

I got the same delicious pleasure from this game as I did from locking myself in the broom cupboard, and now I am getting it during the Covid lockdown.

I have finally realised that I enjoy being put into a position where there is nothing I can do but accept the limitations of the situation and the only decisions I have to make are what to have for dinner and when to go to bed.

I would like to go back to some semblance of normality at some not too distant point, though. We all need our civil liberties to be restored in the long run.