I can still see myself as if it were yesterday. I’m standing next to the Christmas tree, wearing a little navy-blue velvet dress with my patent leather Froment-Leroyer shoes, surrounded by scarred types clutching pretty little coloured parcels in their stranglers’ hands. The administrative staff of Mondiale were all of similar ilk. They consisted exclusively of pieds-noirs, my father’s French colonial compatriots, men as dishonest as they were ugly. Only Jacqueline, his personal assistant, added a dash of glamour to the tableau. With her large, teased-up chignon, into which she would coquettishly pin a diadem, this daughter of a man condemned to death for wartime collaboration had a flashy look about her that stemmed from her Vichy childhood.

This cheerful, unsavoury team, over which my father presided with a romantic paternalism, allowed him to engage in the covert transportation of so-called extras. So, in the years leading up to the ’80s, Mondiale and its royally remunerated employees got rich, first bringing over morphine base in league with my father’s Corsican pied-noir mates, then branching out into weapons and ammunition. Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan . . . I’m not ashamed to say, my very own dad was the Marco Polo of the thirty glorious post-war years, reopening the trade routes between Europe and the East.

Any criticism whatever of The Estate was seen by my parents as a symbolic attack, to the point where even amongst ourselves we never so much as alluded to the slightest negative aspect of its position: not the deafening noise of the road which meant we had to shout to make ourselves heard; not the black, sticky dust which seeped into everything; not the house-rattling vibrations, nor the extreme peril of those six lanes which made the simple act of getting home without causing a pile-up a minor miracle.

My mother would start to slow down 300 metres before the gate, reaching the driveway in first gear, hazard lights on, amidst an angry hail of horns. My father, on the rare occasions he was there, practised a form of vehicular terrorism in his Porsche as he braked, his V8 screaming as he decelerated from two hundred to ten in a matter of metres, forcing whoever had the misfortune of following him to swerve terrifyingly. As for me, I never had any visitors, for obvious reasons. Whenever a friend asked where I lived, I lied. Nobody would have believed me anyway.

In my child’s mind, we were somehow different. We were the People of the Road.