Christopher was not quite three when Tom and Juani left him and Patrick with us in Paris, in the spring of 1981, for a few weeks whilst they went down to Nigeria. Tom worked in the oil business – for Texaco I think – and business had him down in Africa with some regularity. I was eight (and a half, mind you! Very important at that age) and I remember Tom having flown through Paris a few times and dropping in on us although I’m no longer certain whether those solo trips of his came before the time I am talking about, after, or they bridged this family trip of theirs.

Tom was much loved in our family and my parents have priceless, amusing anecdotes to tell concerning him but I’ll leave it to them to expand on those stories. My memories of him are vague and no doubt have become confused with the passage of time but I remember a tall, lanky, soft-spoken American with wavy hair and wire-framed glasses set firmly against his face. He sat down with me once to look at the atlas that my grandmother had sent me and we turned to the pages that pictured North America. He showed me where they lived and where his family was from. I think I kept on asking him if any of that was close to the desert. “No it wasn’t”; so he flipped west a page or two to show me where all of that was.

Just up and across the road from where we lived on Rue de la Pompe was a toy shop – Colin Mallard, I’m pretty certain it was called – and someone, perhaps my Mother, had gone there with me at some point and bought me a pack of two plastic boomerangs. One of those ended up on the roof of a barn, never to be seen again, during a family holiday to the country. The other one I entrusted to Tom, one time he was over, to give to Patrick. He thanked me and then quipped quietly with my parents about the suitability of such a gift.

I no longer recall how long the Dunleavy-Molinas were in Paris with us that spring of 1981 but I would hazard it was the best part of three weeks if not a month between one thing and another. I do remember that I wasn’t at my best at the time and that I behaved like an obnoxious brat with regards my cousins. I was going through something of a rough patch at school that year, inexplicably and confusingly finding myself the object of my teacher’s resentment towards me, with constant public humiliations, reprimands and nit-picking in front of my class-mates, to the point where it started to affect my behavior in other aspects of my life. I started to lie to my parents and became a serial kleptomaniac for the duration of that year. I remember one morning, at home, I was throwing my weight around, in my infantile attempts to assert my dominance over both Patrick and Christopher, Juani heard me from her bedroom which was next to mine, summoned me to her and – quite rightly – took me to task for my behavior, warning me “never to attempt to discipline her boys again” (I still remember her angry words to me). I suspect that her tongue-lashing had a positive effect on me for the duration of their visit and I probably behaved, more or less, with regards my cousins and the remaining duration of their stay but it wasn’t really until that school year was over that I drifted back to being my usual self and abandoned my proto-criminal ways. I have never really understood why this woman – my teacher –  Mrs Legrand, took a dislike to me, but dislike me she did and the experience destabilized me for a while.

Juani and Tom must have left Patrick and Christopher with my parents for the best part of a week whilst they went down to Nigeria; we became a family of six. Even at the tender age of not quite three, Christopher had a lot of character and was incredibly amusing; there are many anecdotes regarding him that I will not allude to here but which deserve to be told. The one that I want to tell, in all honesty, I no longer remembered but it came up in conversation (chat) with Juani last night and I then verified it with my Mother earlier on this evening.

Sacha was at her kindergarten (maternele, in French), which was just down the road and needing picking up. My Mother, obviously, was running late (as always) and in no mood to be castigated, once again, in French, by the tut-tutting ladies who ran the school. Christopher, in the meantime, had sort of squeezed himself into one of Sacha’s dresses and was running around the house blissfully unselfconscious and, quite literally, having a ball. There was no time for my Mother to get him out of his disguise; she just grabbed him and left the flat in a bit of a flap, racing down the street with Christopher in her arms dressed in semi drag to the great amusement of the concierge of the building who warned her that “that is how they all start”.