To see her trotting about the village in her beige raincoat and little concrete-lacquered grey curls, you’d peg her as being between seventy-five and eighty-five years old. When this story started she was ninety-three. I’d just like to say that here on our island, where its residents enjoy both a healthy lifestyle and strong community ties – you eat what you grow in your own vegetable garden and everybody has their nose in their neighbour’s business – there’s a national record number of centenarians. With her ramrod posture, she dresses to the nines even just to go out for bread; her principal motto has always been maximum dignity at all times. You’ll see her at 9.30 am at the bakery, 9.45 at the minimart, 9.50 at the newsagency to pick up her copy of the Ouest-France paper and at 10 o’clock at the cemetery to give her best to the family.

They say she had one great love, the sort of love that only comes along once in a lifetime, but that he went to sea and never returned.

The day has been long

Her eyes are weary

Of looking out to the ocean ...

Well, that’s what people say, or at least, it’s what she always would have people believe, but I suspect her of sharing the local women’s general opinion of the males of the species, a view both realistic and resigned: drones whose only purpose is that of making babies.

From the point of view of temperament, she’s not one to be coy in her opinions to anybody who cares to listen, as she tends to think most people have tickets on themselves and completely lack modesty. With age and the mathematical absence of future which that implies, her lack of filter makes her borderline unmanageable.

They say that I take after her in this respect. No doubt that’s the reason I have no boyfriend, not just the fact I’m a handicapped single parent. I’m not what you’d call a stunner, that much is true, but nor am I that ugly: I’m of average height and well-toned because of my crutches, I’ve got a good head of hair that I wear in a chignon, an open face and my mother’s pretty blue eyes. And when I walk, a sailor once told me I reminded him of the lazy pitching and rolling of a yacht on a shimmering sunlit sea – which, you’d have to admit, is a pretty cool description.

Physically, it seems, I take after Rose, my real grandmother, Mamie Soize’s half-sister and my father’s mother, who died well before I was born.