My Mother's House

"I love Colette’s work. In fact, Colette has been my comfort reading ever since I was about fourteen. I return to her work over and over, and I just don’t think there is any writer for me who not so much describes but invokes nature and nurture in a more surprising and thrilling way. So, if we are to believe her, Colette has a perfect childhood in a flowering garden in Burgundy. Nature and nurture, insects and animals do all the talking, and her mother, Sido, is as abundant as a fruit tree in the way that she lavishes care on young Colette. She has four children, who scatter across the house and garden. They are doing their own thing, but they always return to the mother. Doris Lessing refers to a scene where Sido makes herself a cup of hot chocolate at night. Above her bed, there’s a spider in a web, and the mother would wait for the spider to let herself down and sip from the hot chocolate, and then, heavy with its nectar, it would go up again. I love that image so much. It doesn’t really matter if it is imagined or true. We know that Sido never cut her daughter’s hair – there are pictures of Colette with long braids past her knees. So when Colette marries her first husband, a scoundrel who gets her to write and then puts his own name to her Claudine books, Colette still has these braids, and she cuts them off. That is the separation, I think, from her mother. I’m also interested in the way that Colette’s father is portrayed. He seems to have one leg from a war injury, he is more intellectual than his wife, he’s wilder, and Colette writes about him fondly, but, somehow, he seems to be a peripheral player in this abundant rural childhood. Having read this book and most of Colette’s books, I feel I have participated in her fictional childhood. Colette writes, although I don’t think this is in My Mother’s House , ‘What a wonderful life I’ve had. I only wish I realised it sooner.’ I think that’s a wise quote. Also, there is another, very Colette, quote: ‘Never touch a butterfly’s wing with your finger.’ It’s as if her mother told her that, and she’s remembered it. I think these are all incredible things."