We wandered through the thronging alleys of merchandise, struck dumb by the sight of desperate crowds surging about chucking everything from packaged children’s underwear, garden umbrellas and mixed toolkits to deep-frozen tripes à la mode de Caen, as M’sieur Simon had said, to dead bleached chickens and plastic bottles of milk into their massive trolleys.

You could obviously buy everything in the world here from fishing-rods to Harpic, but Giles, made uneasy by the crowds and the unfamiliar language on every sign, hurried to the lavish bookstalls to see if he could find anything interesting, which, when he did, turned out to be comics as dull as his own at home, but harder to read. So they were left. Instead I bought four big reproduction posters of Monte Carlo, Cannes, Antibes and Menton in 1889 and we made our way to the mammoth parking.

Jericho, when we eventually arrived there, pleased him much more. As we turned into the track by the mossy pillar he stuck his head out of the window.

‘Oh! It looks brilliant! Look at the cliffs up there. Is it all yours?’

‘Not the cliffs. Up to the beginning of them. There’s a stream.’

‘She told me. Florence did.’

The house filled him with silent pleasure. He didn’t say much about it, looked at the room I had chosen for him as his own, pushed the shutters wide and took a look at the view, and then sprinted down to the garden where, generally mucking about and looking, he spent the next hour or so until lunch at La Source.

I liked having him about. While he was damming the stream somewhere, I was tacking up the posters in the long room. They instantly gave the place colour, but I was vaguely thinking that, later on, if one ever did manage to settle into a way of life in Jericho (settle to write, for example), it was going to be difficult with a young boy banging about waiting to be fed. He couldn’t be left on his own. There was no school which could occupy his time, not at present anyway; and the man Florence had found to help tutor him in early French, Mr Theobald, or Théo, was not within walking distance. It was going to be a problem. But, on the other hand, he might grow bored with the idea of France as a permanent place to live. Bored with me, might very likely miss his mother, however cavalier her behaviour, and he’d certainly miss companions of his own age – and language.