It was the only book he remembered. ‘Somehow it seemed real to us.’

He started milking the cows at five o’clock in the morning, cleaning out the stables, grooming the horses, and milking the cows again in the evening. In exchange, room and board, a bit of money. He slept above the stables on a straw mattress with no sheets. All night long 24the horses would dream, beating against the ground with their hooves. He thought about his parents’ house, which had now become forbidden territory. Every so often one of his sisters, a maid-of-all-work, appeared at the fence with her bundle of belongings, staring silently. The grandfather would curse. She could never say why she had run away from her employers yet again. That evening he would take her back to her service, shaming her along the way.

My father had a lively, playful personality, always ready to tell stories, play tricks. There was nobody his age on the farm. On Sundays he served mass with his brother, who also worked as a cowherd. He joined in the ‘village fêtes’, danced with the girls and met up with his old schoolmates. We were happy in spite of everything. We had to be.

He continued to work as a farmhand until he was called up. No-one counted the working hours. The farmers used to scrimp and save. One day the slice of meat served to an old cowherd stirred: underneath, it was crawling with worms. The situation had become intolerable. The old man stood up and demanded that they no longer be treated as dogs. He was given another piece of meat. It wasn’t The Battleship Potemkin.

Milking the cows at dawn and at dusk, October drizzle, baskets of apples tipped into the cider press, chicken droppings shovelled into buckets, being hot and thirsty. But also the galette des rois3, jokes in the Vermot almanac, 25roasted chestnuts, Shrove Tuesday, ‘Tippety, tippety, toe, give me a pancake and I will go,’ homemade cider and frogs blown to bits with a straw. It would be easy to write something along those lines. The relentless passing of the seasons, the simple joys and quiet of the countryside. The land my father worked belonged to others. He saw no beauty in it, the magnificence of Mother Earth and other such myths were lost on him.

During the First World War the only people left behind on the farms were the young, like my father, and the old. They were treated with consideration. He followed the advance of the troops on a map pinned up on the kitchen wall, took to reading naughty magazines and went to the cinema in Y—. Everyone read the subtitles out loud, but most didn’t have time to reach the end of the line. He used the slang he had picked up from his brother when he came home on leave. Every month, the washing of the housewives whose husbands had been sent to the battleground was subjected to close scrutiny by the other women in the village, to make sure none of the linen was missing.