In her wedding photograph, her knees are visible. Under the half-veil hugging her forehead, she is staring hard at the camera. She looks like Sarah Bernhardt. My father is standing at her side, with his small moustache and starched white collar. Neither of them is smiling.

She was always ashamed of sex. They never showed their affection or touched each other. In front of me he would give her a quick peck on the cheek, almost, it seemed, out of obligation. Quite often he would say 28ordinary things to her, staring straight into her eyes, while she lowered her gaze and tried not to smile. As I grew up, I realized he was alluding to sexual matters. He liked to hum Parlez-moi d’amour; she gave a poignant rendering of Voici mon corps pour vous aimer at family gatherings.

He had learnt that the only way to escape your parents’ poverty was not to forget yourself in a woman.

They rented accommodation in Y—, in a group of houses on a busy street with a back courtyard shared by the other tenants. Two rooms on the ground floor and two on the floor above. It was the dream of the ‘upstairs bedroom’ come true and it meant a lot to my mother. Thanks to my father’s savings, they managed to get everything they needed: a set of dining-room furniture and a wardrobe with a mirror for the bedroom. A little girl was born and so my mother stayed at home. She was bored. My father left the rope factory for a better-paid job with a roofer.

Originally it had been her idea, the day they brought my father home, voiceless and badly shaken, after falling from a rafter he had been mending. Why not take over a shop? They started saving again. They ate lots of bread and cold meats. Among those available, they had to choose a shop which required a small amount of capital and no particular skills, just buying and reselling goods. It had to be inexpensive because it would bring in little money. On Sundays they would go out on their bikes and visit small cafés and village stores. They asked around to see whether there was any competition in the neighbourhood. They were afraid of being hoodwinked, afraid they would lose everything and lapse back into working-class poverty.29

L—, thirty kilometres from Le Havre. The town was steeped in fog all day during the winter months, especially in the narrow part which followed the river banks, known as the Valley. It was an industrial estate built around a cotton mill, one of the most important in the area until the fifties, once the property of the Desgenetais family and subsequently bought out by Boussac. When they left school, the girls were taken on at the mill. Later they would leave their children at the crèche, open from six o’clock in the morning. Three-quarters of the male population were employed in the weaving industry. The only grocery store in the area lay at the bottom of the Valley. The ceiling was so low you could touch it with your hand. It had dark rooms which needed electricity in broad daylight and a tiny courtyard with a lavatory which emptied directly into the river. It wasn’t that they liked the setting but, after all, they had to live.