Compared to his youth, the shift work at the oil 40refinery and the rats in the Valley, there were signs of a happy life.

We had everything that was necessary, meaning we didn’t go hungry (proof: the purchase of meat from the butcher’s four times a week), and the two rooms where we lived, the café and the kitchen, were properly heated. I had two sets of clothes, one for school days and one for Sundays. (When the former was worn out, the Sunday clothes would be extended to weekdays.) I had two pinafores for class. The kid has everything she needs. Nobody at the convent school could say I was worse off than the other girls. I had just as much as the pharmacist’s or the farmer’s daughters: dolls, rubbers, pencil sharpeners, fur-lined winter shoes, not to mention my rosary and my Roman Catholic missal.

They were able to smarten up the place, getting rid of everything that looked old-fashioned, the beams, the fireplace, the wooden tables and the straight-backed chairs with their straw seats. With its floral wallpaper, its shiny, newly painted bar and its table tops in fake marble, the café looked bright and clean. The wooden flooring in the bedrooms was covered with large, alternating squares of brown and yellow linoleum. For a long time, their only source of frustration was the half-timbered façade and its black and white stripes, which they couldn’t afford to restore in roughcast. One of my schoolmistresses walked by one day and said what a pretty house it was, a true Normandy cottage. My father thought she was saying that just to be polite. Those who admired the old things we had, the water pump in the yard and the rustic half-timbering, only wanted to prevent us from acquiring the new things they already possessed, like running water and clean, whitewashed walls.41

He took out a loan to buy the premises and the land. No one in the family had ever owned property before.

Although he was happy, he resented having to struggle for his livelihood. I’ve only got one pair of hands. Too busy even to take a leak. Walking, that’s how I get rid of my flu. Etc. The daily chorus.

How can I describe a world in which everything is costly. There was the smell of freshly laundered linen on an October morning, and the latest tune heard on the radio running around in my head. Suddenly my dress gets caught on the handlebars of my bike and the fabric tears. It’s the end of the world, shouting, the day is ruined. ‘The child just doesn’t think!’

Through necessity our possessions became sacred. My parents saw greed and envy in everything they heard, even when it came from their own daughter. When I told them: ‘One of the girls went to see the châteaux of the Loire,’ they would snap angrily, ‘You can go later on in life. Be happy with what you’ve got.’ A continual wanting, never satisfied.