Translated by Enid Mcleod and Una Troubridge
I bought this volume just last weekend at Second Shelf books while paying a quick visit to London to see friends. This American first edition from 1953 contains La Maison de Claudine and Sido – with former translated as My Mother’s House.
It isn’t often that I read a new book so soon after buying it, but this one called out to be read straight away. I had seen a few things just before this about Colette – and been reminded that I had only read one book by her, which I had loved. So, knowing I was overdue reacquainting myself with Colette – I dived in just the day after I bought it. It kept me company during some difficult days this past week, it was somehow great comfort – good writing often is, I find.
My Mother’s House and Sido – two, novellas? memoirs? I’m not sure how to refer to them – Colette seems to have styled them as novels and yet we know they are very biographical. They were written by the great French writer when she was in her forties and fifties. In them she is looking back to her youth, to her village childhood, telling stories of her mother; Sido, her father the Captain, her brothers and half-sister and the Savage – her mother’s first husband. It is gloriously nostalgic, but never sentimental. In these reminiscences Colette writes with a glorious lyricism, bringing to life the time and place of her childhood – a time that clearly remained very important to her.
“Both house and garden are living still, I know; but what of that, if the magic has deserted them? If the secret is lost that opened to me a whole world – light, scents, birds and trees in perfect harmony, the murmur of human voices now silent for ever – a world of which I have ceased to be worthy.”
The childhood recounted here was one of country wisdom and good food, wild flowers and animals. A childhood of games with village children who enjoy more freedom than modern children. Colette writes in a series of delightfully vivid vignettes – stories of villagers, siblings, politics and her parents’ marriage, but above all of a place, the place of her childhood – where she was loved.
“A smell of crushed grass hangs over the unmown lawn, where the lush new blades lie trodden in all directions by the childish games, as if laid flat by a heavy shower of hail. Fierce little heels have dug into the paths and scattered gravel over the flower beds; a skipping rope dangles from the pump handle; dolls’ plates the size of marguerites star the grass; and a long feline wail of boredom heralds the close of day, the cats’ awakening and the approach of dinner time.”
She writes with a particularly palpable affection of Sido, her mother – in both these volumes. It becomes clear that Sido was a woman capable of great love, a woman of strength and good sense, who refused to dismiss a pregnant servant girl to the scandal of the village. She kept a large spider in the corner of her bedroom as a kind of pet – and feared, unreasonably, for Minet-Chéri’s abduction when the child was moved into the recently vacated first floor bedroom. In all her reminiscences, Colette talks of her mother with extraordinary warmth.
In the second novella/memoir; Sido, Colette also recalls her father, the Captain – his absolute adoration of Sido. In her middle age she realises that she really hadn’t known him quite so well.
“It seems strange to me, now, that I knew him so little. My attention, my fervent admiration, were all for Sido and only fitfully strayed from her. It was just the same with my father. His eyes dwelt on Sido. On thinking it over I believe that she did not know him well either. She was content with a few broad and clumsy truths; his love for her was boundless – it was in trying to enrich her that he lost her fortune – she loved him with an unwavering love, treating him lightly in everyday matters but respecting all his decisions.”
The Captain, with his amputated leg, occasional rages and money troubles. When he died there was found a shelf of journals – every page blank – in which he had intended to write, though never had.
We then, inevitably see Sido in her seventies – her daughter visits from Paris, a doctor son lives nearby. She is still bright eyed, clear headed but stubborn – resisting the curtailments of her advancing years.
Colette’s prose breaths life again into these people – her family – the people she knew and loved best. Her memories of them almost become part of her readers’ memories – for from the page these long dead people emerge – very much not forgotten.
