He was a cheerful man.

He would often joke with the customers who enjoyed a good laugh. Veiled references to sex. Scatological allusions. Irony was not his forte. On the radio he listened to quiz shows and the chansonniers. He was always ready to take me to the circus, to see silly films, to the fireworks. At the funfair we would go on the ghost train and the big dipper, and visited the tent to see the fattest woman in the world and the Lilliputian.

He never set foot in a museum. He would pause to admire a pretty garden, a cluster of trees in blossom or a beehive, and had an eye for fleshy girls. He liked towering buildings and huge, modern constructions (the Tancarville bridge). He enjoyed circus music and going for drives in the country. In other words, if he could 46gaze at the fields and beech groves while listening to the Bouglione orchestra, he seemed happy. The emotion you feel on hearing a popular tune or admiring a pretty landscape was hardly a subject of conversation. When I first started going out with my middle-class school friends in Y—, they always wanted to know what I liked – jazz or classical music, Jacques Tati or René Clair. I soon realized that I had entered a new world.

One summer he took me to stay with the family for three days, down by the seaside. Out walking, he wore sandals over his bare feet, stopped to have a look at the German blockhouses and sat at pavement cafés, ordering beer for himself and orangeade for me. He killed a chicken for my aunt, holding it between his legs and plunging a pair of scissors down its throat. The thick, greasy blood dripped on to the mud floor of the cellar. They didn’t get up from lunch until the middle of the afternoon, reminiscing about the war, the family, and passing round photographs over the empty coffee cups. ‘Ah, the hell with it, let’s enjoy life while we can!’

Maybe his true nature was just to take things easy after all. He invented things to do which kept him out of the café. Raising rabbits and chickens, building new outhouses, a garage. The appearance of the courtyard would alter according to his whims; the lavatory and henhouse changed places three times. He felt a compulsive urge to demolish and rebuild.

My mother would say: ‘Well, what do you expect, he’s a countryman.’47

He knew all the birds by their song and every evening he inspected the sky to see what the weather would be like: cold and dry if the horizon was red, windy and rainy if the moon was ‘water-deep’, meaning wreathed in clouds. Every afternoon he would run off to his vegetable patch, which was always neat and tidy. Having an unkempt garden and neglecting vegetables was a sure sign of slovenliness, like drinking too much or being careless about your appearance. It meant losing the notion of time, of when certain varieties needed to be planted, and no longer worrying about what people thought. Occasionally notorious drunks would redeem themselves by cultivating a pretty garden between binges. When my father failed to produce perfect leeks or whatever else, he despaired. At the end of the day he would empty the night bucket into the last row he had dug up, furious if he discovered a pair of old stockings or some used biros I had chucked in during the day, because I couldn’t be bothered to go downstairs to the bin.