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Harriet the Spy called to me. The fictional child-heroine, a nerdy girl like me, liked to eavesdrop on her neighbours and write everything suspicious in her notebook. I spent my days snooping for secrets by looking through the bay windows and into the basements of Victorian houses on my block. I hid under my uncle's bed with a tape recorder, only to be forced to reveal myself when the situation became uncomfortable.

I had found my vocation. I asked my dad how I could pursue it.

“Well baby face,” he advised. “You could be an FBI agent.”

Nothing unusual about any of this, except that I grew up in the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco. Love spent a summer here in 1967 and the neighbourhood has never got over it. I grew up there in the Eighties and the hangover was still ringing. My hippie parents joked they needed a sign that read “US out of - ” so that they could fill in the blank with the names of a series of different countries.

I was a member of Children against the Killing of Children in Nicaragua. Some days after school we'd sit cross-legged and write letters to the then president, Ronald Reagan. I was certain Ronnie read mine. I told him about terrible things that happened to children, younger than me, in places where they spoke Spanish. In the shaky hand of an eight-year- old, I described babies crying after being ripped from their mothers by the bad, bad people. My indignation grew. How would you feel, Mr Reagan, if that were your child? I couldn't understand.

One afternoon the adults announced that the youth group would join a protest to stop traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. My union rep father had pushed my buggy on strike picket lines. I'd been a radical baby. I'd marched in protests through the neighbourhood singing and holding candles (fun!)

But this was different. “You understand, we might get arrested,” an old hippie told us with a gleam in his eyes. I looked around the room with its cracking paint and raised my hand.

“Would that affect my chances of being an FBI agent?” I inquired.

Suspicious eyes surrounded me. “Why do you want to be an FBI agent, little girl?”

“Is your daddy an FBI agent?”

“No, um ... ” I sat frozen.

I was escorted from the meeting and invited never to return.

Months later, a letter arrived from Washington DC. I ripped it open. A form letter explained that the President could not respond to everyone, but the enclosed pamphlet answered frequently asked questions - such as how to visit the White House. I flipped through all the pictures, disappointed there was nothing about the child victims of a government-backed civil war. I never wrote to the White House again.