The war revolutionized people’s lives. The villagers took up the yo-yo and drank wine instead of cider when they went to the café. The girls who went dancing grew less and less keen on country boys because of the smell that clung to them.

My father discovered the world through the army: Paris, the Métro, a town in Lorraine, the uniform that made them all equal, companions from all over France and the military barracks, larger than a real castle. They let him exchange his own teeth – ruined by cider – for dentures. He frequently had his photograph taken.

When he returned home, he decided to give up 26culture. That’s what he always called farming. The other meaning of the word, and its spiritual implications, held no interest for him.

Naturally, the only alternative was factory work. At the end of the war, Y— was just starting to become industrialized. My father got a job at a rope factory which took on boys and girls from the age of thirteen. It was clean work, indoors. There were set working hours, and separate lavatories and cloakrooms for men and women. After the siren was sounded in the evening, he was free and he no longer smelt of the dairy. He was out of the first circle. There were better-paid jobs in Rouen and Le Havre but they would have meant leaving the family, the poor, forlorn mother, and braving the smart town boys. Eight years of cattle and country plains had dulled his nerve.

He was considered respectable, which for a worker meant that he wasn’t lazy and didn’t drink or live it up. He was keen on the cinema and the Charleston but kept away from bars. Well-regarded by his superiors, neither unionized nor politically minded. He had managed to buy himself a bicycle and would put aside some money every week.

My mother must have been impressed by all this when she met him at the rope factory. Before that she had worked in a margarine plant. A tall, dark man with grey eyes, he held himself upright and was a trifle conceited. ‘My husband never looked working-class.’

She had lost her father. My grandmother was a cottage 27weaver who took in people’s laundry and ironing to finish bringing up the last of her six children. On Sundays my mother and her sisters went to the cake shop, where they bought a paper cornet filled with pastry crumbs. At first my parents weren’t allowed to go out together. My grandmother didn’t want her girls to be taken away from her too soon: each time one left, it meant parting with three-quarters of her pay.

My father’s sisters, who worked as housemaids for middle-class families, looked down on my mother. Factory girls were accused of not knowing how to make their beds and of running after the boys. The village people disapproved of her. She wanted to copy the fashion she read about in magazines: she wore short dresses, made up her eyes, painted her fingernails and was among the first to have her hair cut short. She had a loud, booming laugh. Despite what they said, she never let herself be touched up in the lavatories, but went to mass every Sunday and had made the effort to embroider her trousseau and hemstitch her sheets herself. She was a lively worker, outspoken. One of her favourite remarks: ‘I’m just as good as them.’