I was barely seventeen. I could look older – and frequently did – or younger, if I needed to. People rarely see what they think they see. They see only what we want them to see – beauty, age, youth, wit, even forgettability, when the need arises – and I’d practised the art almost to perfection.

I took the hovercraft to France. They hardly glanced at my stolen passport. I’d planned it that way. A dab of make-up; a change of hairstyle and a coat belonging to my mother completed the illusion. The rest was all in the mind, as they say.

Of course in those days, security was lax. I crossed over with nothing of my own but a coffin and a pair of shoes – the first two charms on my bracelet – and found myself on the other side, speaking hardly any French, with no money but the six thousand pounds I’d managed to remove from my mother’s account.

I approached it as a challenge. I found myself a job in a small textiles factory on the outskirts of Paris. I shared a room with a co-worker: Martine Matthieu, from Ghana, aged twenty-four and awaiting her six-months’ work permit. I told her I was twenty-two; that I was Portuguese. She believed me – or I thought she did. She was friendly; I was alone. I trusted her. I dropped my guard. That was the one mistake I made. Martine was curious; went through my things and discovered my mother’s documents, hidden in my bottom drawer. I don’t know why I’d kept them at all. Carelessness, perhaps; or laziness or some misplaced sense of nostalgia. I certainly hadn’t meant to use that identity again. It was too closely linked to St Michael’s-on-the-Green – and it was my bad luck that Martine remembered it from some newspaper she’d read, and linked the photograph with me.

I was young, you understand. The very threat of the police was enough to send me into a panic. Martine knew it – and exploited the fact, to the tune of half my salary per week. It was extortion, pure and simple. I endured it – what else could I have done?

Well, I could have run away, I suppose. But even then I was stubborn. And most of all, I wanted revenge. So I paid Martine her weekly dues; was docile and cowed; bore her tempers; made her bed, cooked her dinner and generally bided my time. Then when her papers came through at last, I called in sick to work, and, in her absence, cleared the flat of everything that might be of use to me (including money, passport and ID), before reporting her, the sweatshop (and my other co-workers) to the Immigration Services.