When he ate, he insisted on using his Opinel clasp-knife. He cut up the bread into cubes which he stacked next to his plate; he skewered these with pieces of cheese and cold meats and dipped them into the sauce. It grieved him to see me leave food on my plate. His own was so clean it could have been put straight back into the cupboard. When the meal was over, he wiped the knife on his overalls. If he had been eating herrings, he stuck it into the ground to get rid of the smell. Up to the late 48fifties, he ate soup in the morning. Later he switched to café au lait, reluctantly, as if he were giving in to some feminine delicacy. He drank it with a spoon, sipping it as if it were soup. At five o’clock he made his own snack – eggs, radishes, stewed apples – and was happy with a bowl of soup in the evening. Mayonnaise, cakes and heavy sauces made him feel sick.

He always slept in his shirt and his vest. He shaved three times a week in the mirror above the kitchen sink. He would undo the top buttons of his shirt and I could see the pale, white skin below his neck. Private bathrooms, seen as a sign of prosperity, were becoming more widespread after the war. My mother had a small washroom installed on the landing but he never used it and continued to use the kitchen.

Out in the courtyard, in winter, he spat and sneezed with relish.

Had it been considered acceptable, I could have given this description of him back at school, in an essay. One day, one of the girls, in her last year at primary school, gave a magnificent ‘atishoo’ which sent her exercise book flying across the desk. The schoolmistress, writing on the blackboard, turned round and exclaimed: ‘Charming!’

None of the middle-class people in Y— (white-collar workers, shopkeepers from the town centre) want to look as if they have ‘come up from the country’. Being taken for a farm labourer means that you are not educated and that your general appearance, along with the way 49you speak and dress, is outdated. A popular anecdote at the time: a farm labourer, who had gone into town to see his son, sits down opposite the washing machine in the kitchen. He stares thoughtfully at the soapy water and the laundry going round and round. After a while he gets up, turns to his daughter-in-law and says with a shake of the head: ‘I don’t know, it seems to me that television has still got a long way to go.’

In Y—, however, people grew less envious of the wealthy farmers who would turn up at the market in their brand new Simca Vedette, soon to be replaced by a Citroën DS, and later by a Citroën CX. There was nothing worse than looking and behaving like a farmhand when you weren’t one.