One day the little girl came home from school with a sore throat. Her temperature remained high, it was diphtheria. Like the other children in the Valley, she hadn’t been vaccinated. My father was at the oil refinery when she died. When he got back home, his wailing could be heard from the far end of the street. He entered a state 34of shock which lasted for weeks, then went through a period of depression when he would just sit at the table and stare out of the window, refusing to speak. He would beat himself for the slightest thing. Drying her eyes with a cloth she produced from her apron pocket, my mother would tell people, ‘She died when she was seven, just like a saint.’

A photograph taken in the back yard, near the edge of the river. A white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, a pair of trousers, flannels most likely, sloping shoulders and slightly rounded arms. An expression of discontent on his face, maybe he wasn’t quite ready for the photograph. He is forty years old. Nothing in the picture to account for the past suffering, or his hopes for the future. Just the obvious signs of age – a slight paunch, the black hair beginning to recede – and those, more discreet, of his social condition: his arms hanging stiffly at his sides; the washhouse and lavatory in the background, which a petit-bourgeois gaze would not have chosen as a backdrop for a photo.

He wasn’t called up in 1939, he was already too old. The oil refinery was burnt down by the Germans and so he took to the roads on his bicycle. She was six months’ pregnant and had been offered a lift in someone’s car. In Pont-Audemer he caught some shrapnel in the face and was treated at the only pharmacy that was open. The bombing continued. On the steps outside the basilica in Lisieux, he met up with his mother-in-law, accompanied by her daughters and their children. They had brought bags stuffed with their belongings. The steps and the esplanade were swarming with refugees. They thought 35they would be safe there. When the Germans entered the town, he returned to L—. The grocery store had been ransacked from top to bottom by those who had stayed behind. My mother came back and I was born the following month. In school, when we couldn’t understand sums, they called us the ‘war children’.

Up to the mid-fifties, this epic narrative would be recited in unison at Christmas dinners and confirmation receptions, with the chorus endlessly describing the fear, the hunger, the cold during the winter of 1942. Despite everything one had to go on living. Every week my father cycled to a warehouse, thirty kilometres from L—, and brought goods wholesalers no longer delivered home on a cart hitched up to his bicycle. During the heavy bombing which hit that part of Normandy in 1944, he continued to go for fresh supplies, begging for extras for the elderly, large families and all those who couldn’t afford to buy on the black market. In the Valley he was seen as a hero. He acted this way because he had to, not because he chose to. Looking back, he felt sure he had played a role, lived the war years to the full.