This growing-up story depicts through a hundred small sequences the happenings n a modest family of Pas-de-Calais during the forties, fifties, and sixties. Paul, the main character, at five, thirteen and eighteen, is the thread of this broken narrative that operates through a mess of memories. The encounters, the joys, the apprehensions, the first loves, the friendships, the disappointments, the fraternal relations, the relations with the parents, the discovery of a vocation of actor and author, the whole forming an irreplaceable frame of a common destiny whose peculiarities send the spectator back to his history.