From the early spring of 1944 until the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Flt/Lt Christopher Greaves and I were joined at the hip as air photographic interpreters attached to 39 Wing of the Canadian Royal Air Force. I really don’t remember where we were ‘paired off’, probably at Odiham airfield, but there we were, an unlikely couple in many ways, but as immutable as Laurel and Hardy, Huntley and Palmer, or Rolls and Royce.

Chris was senior to me by some years, had already had distinguished service in the RA F in Malta, survived the siege, contracted polio, and constantly fell in love with his nurses: he was, later, to marry one and raise a large family. But after Malta, and convalescence, he was stuck with me.

We had a truck which served as our ‘office’, with a couple of desks and lamps and not much else. In this, plus a jeep, we drove across Europe in the wake of our Forward Reece Squadron who took the photographs. Being determined young men with great ambitions…

My chunk of France lay almost dead-centre of a triangle of villages. Well, one proper village, Saint-Cyprien, up behind my land, Le Pré to the west, and Saint-Sulpice to the east. Le Pré straggled along the main road: a bar, some shops, two garages – an Elf and a Shell – a café with a jukebox, and a modest restaurant which served all right-ish food. Occasionally. Saint-Sulpice was not much more than a crossroads, a monument to its liberation by the Americans on August the 21st, 1944, a row of ageing mulberry trees, a wide place where the annual fair and circus was held and, along the road up towards Saint-Cyprien, the olive mill with its enormous wheel. Above the crossroads, on a modest hillock, stood the church with its Provençal flat roof, surrounded by olive trees and cypresses. There were some scattered houses, a churchyard sliding down the hill, the monuments and marble angels looking like a tilting chess set, and at the bottom of all this, neat and trim, the bureau de poste. The bureau de poste was to play a vastly important part in my life, although I was unaware of that fact in my early weeks – as unaware as I was that, just up the road beyond it, glittering in chrome and plate glass, the Mini-Market, opened in the week I took up my residency, would almost become my pivot.

The mayor of Saint-Sulpice, Etienne Ranchett, a fierce…