There’s one in every generation in a closed-off community, the one who’s a pain in the neck. The sort of ratbag who’s always involved in the latest scandal. Whenever a holiday house is broken into or a car set alight . . . Whenever lobsters disappear from the traps or the jetty walls are tagged in high season with filthy comments attacking tourists . . . To put it bluntly, for the generation of those born in the ’80s, that historical pain in the arse was me: Blanche de Rigny.

There was the time I ran away, of course, when after yet another fight with my father he wanted to stick me in a boarding school on the mainland before I’d finished middle school. Three days of searching. National rescue helicopters circling the coastline of the island. Every vessel out in the water, right down to the smallest dinghy, carrying out a meticulous search for my body at the foot of the cliffs when, at age thirten, I had left to try to make a living on the streets of Paris. Already.

Better still, even before all of that, there was my birth.

It happened in the middle of a gale, like every other time there’s a drama on this fucking island. My father was at sea off the coast of Africa when my mother started haemorrhaging, and seeing as it’s impossible to fly a helicopter in a 50-knot wind, the lifeguards had to ferry her to the mainland by boat. Obviously I had not been born yet, but I’ve been told the story so many times I can see myself standing between the legs of the sailors’ wives, watching the orange and green lifeboat that would take her to hospital slip down its rails and into the water. Not one of the guys from the national lifeguards hesitated, so the story goes; their wives were weeping because there were walls of water and they feared they’d never see their husbands alive again. During the crossing my mother bled out in front of the powerless men. She was dead on arrival, but me, seriously premmie at only six months, I survived. One of the lifeguards registered my birth at the Brest town hall, and, keen not to make a faux pas, gave me my mother’s first name: Blanche. They also say that when, some days later, my father returned for the funeral, the lifeguards all went to greet him as he came off the boat, looking as devastated as if it were their fault. They were the ones who carried the coffin in their orange uniform. The church was so full the priest had to leave the front door open. The latest instalment in this drama on the high seas saw the island banding together around the widower, the father of the tiny little girl battling in an incubator all alone on the mainland.

Thinking back on it, perhaps that’s the reason I get seasick.