145 Bis Rue de la Pompe was our home in Paris. The “Bis” refers to the fact that our flat didn’t overlook the street but was tucked inside behind the facade, peering over an inner courtyard; a triangular concrete beach with chamfers at each corner dominated by a raised concrete dome that in turn was perforated by glass bricks that allowed light into the circular car park bellow ground level. I remember a single anorexic tree in one corner. Had the owners of the building had the slightest bit of soul in them, they would have blessed the place with plants and bushes and flowers. Instead they opted for that knee-scraping grittiness to the place; the sort of plan that gives Brutalist architecture a bad name. From the foundations up, the building was a typical elegant neo-classical affair in the French metropolitan style. This was a plush part of town.

I retain the courtyard’s propensity to echo, particularly when us little children were let out to play with our shrieks and laughter. The stuffy pensioners would always complain; those same miserable ones who huffed and puffed and waved us out of their way with their warm baguettes as they strolled their lap dogs in the surrounding streets. They must also have been the ones who threw their shutters open in the evening to shush that musician playing silky tunes on his trumpet, to then bang them closed with Gallic disapproval. That one time that some young lark threw a rather large “pétard” (a fire cracker) out of the window in the middle of the night and woke us all up with the window pains still shaking. The following morning there were strips of red and white paper all over the courtyard. I told my friends at school the following day and they all confirmed that it can only have been a “so-and so” and if you put four of them together the explosion matched that of a single stick of dynamite. I believed it.

We lived on the second floor of I think five or six floors in our building. I remember a fair amount of the characters on our stairwell but particularly the following. Directly above us on the third floor lived a childless couple – in their late thirties I would hazard –  who argued a lot and loudly in typically very fast and passionate French to the accompaniment of the occasional pots and pans being thrown about. My parents have since gone on to tell me that when all that was over they often went on to have equally loud and passionate make-up sex in the room above their bedroom. Below us on the first floor lived an English lady, a widow of a Frenchman and a decorated Hero of the Resistance in her own right for her service during the Nazi occupation. She was a lovely old lady and a sort of Barbara Cartland; the interior of her flat being an explosion of pink and pastel. She had been in France so long that her English was a little fractured at times. Occasionally she would have my sister and I down for some cake and play us a tune on her grand piano. Bellow her, on the ground floor, a miserable, dusty old lady who complained to my parents every time she heard our little voices in the courtyard. Right next to her door was the glass-paned door of our concierge.

None of us can remember her name but I’ll call her Paloma. She was Spanish and the mother of a  son slightly older than me and a daughter slightly younger. I don’t remember the presence of a man in their house. I remember her as kind but quite highly strung and somewhat gaunt; a woman under a lot of pressure I would think as I cast my eye back. As a little boy I had no notion of the implications of inequality but I do remember being struck by the visible squalor of where they lived, as I played with her children and I was often asked in. She kept the place spotless and tidy but it was a one room affair with what I imagine was a tiny kitchen and a basic bathroom. Her bed and the kid’s bunkbeds were set against one of the walls and what privacy was to be had was provided by curtains hung along some wires screwed into the peeling paintwork. I remember once challenging her son to play with our respective toy soldiers on that barren courtyard, to which he agreed. Despite the barren setting, I was ready for an imaginative campaign across the Sahara…but that’s not how he played. Instead we lined up our soldiers as a line, one facing the other, and the game involved taking turns to flick a marble at the enemy lines and knock the soldiers out of play. We played it to the end but I didn’t really understand what was fun about that.

I think this must have occurred on a Saturday as Paloma worked six days out of seven and I wasn’t at school. I woke up at the crack of dawn that morning and decided I’d play at selling some drawings. I remember there being a marine theme to my inspiration as I can picture a drawing of a crab and another one of a lobster. In any case, I knocked off a dozen of these things – in as many minutes – in pencil on some of my mother’s Canson A4 drawing paper, signed them and then arbitrarily went and wrote their value in Francs inside of a circle on each one; two Francs, five Francs, seven Francs and so on before gathering up the lot, taking them downstairs and outside to Rue de la Pompe and setting myself up on the kerb with my “artwork”. I no longer remember how long I was there but at some point Paloma rocked up and asked me what I was doing. Would she like to buy one of my drawings I asked her. She gave me ten Francs for one of them, told me to pick up my things and go back upstairs to my parents. Perhaps I embarrassed her.