My mother was very beautiful. Her job was to attract miners to the bar she worked in, and to get them to buy drinks. She also used to drink with them, and this resulted in three pregnancies, each one year apart, all with the same man – my dad, a French engineer in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. When I was 3, he returned to France, and we were left alone with our mum, whose family rejected us, as they considered us to be ‘little whities’.
My father did send us money but my mother would use it . . .