Claudine's House was written when Colette was no longer subject to M Willy, her husband and jailer (they had been separated since 1906). He had always been urging her to "spice things up a little" - to him her writings had only one use, to earn money. She had resisted, and we may be sure he would not have welcomed a sad memoir. Throughout her life she did sound notes of loss and sadness, talking about her mother, her mother's life, but there is nothing of that here.
We know all about unhappy childhoods; you could say we specialise in them, to the point where some, upon hearing "I had such a happy childhood," have been known to protest: "Then you must have forgotten."
Colette's memoirs of her childhood are for some of us a reminder of what could have been. She was a child in paradise, presided over by a goddess of love and harmony, her mother Sido. There are no photographs of Sido, and that is as it should be. And I could have done without Colette's description of her: a dumpy red-cheeked little woman with rough hands ... No, I prefer my imagination unfettered by fact. But I may dream of a tall, calm, Demeter-like figure as much as I like: Colette's childhood paradise was made possible by an often impatient, busy country woman who had the gift of absorbing difficulty and discord and creating kindness.
Colette longed for her mother always, and particularly when first married and immured in Paris. The idyll ended when Colette was 12, but she does not dwell on what must have been a tragedy for the family - no room for tears in these smiling memoirs. She does no more than hint at the money troubles and discords that had to end the life in that house. She must have been so painfully aware of the differences between her difficult second life and the one described so nostalgically in this book, where happiness is boundless, spreading along streets and gardens, all under the same beneficent spell.
When Sido visits Paris, she returns to the house - which is a hundred miles from Paris, but could be in another realm altogether - to say she could not bear to live where there were no dogs to greet you, going out and coming in, no cats, none of the vigorous animal life of a village; where a cat or a dog or a horse is known to everyone like a neighbour; where birds, insects, the weather provide the dramas of the everyday.
In Sido's Eden the extraordinary was commonplace. A cat's favourite sleeping place was on top of the birdcage; the birds being so little discommoded by this enemy - which they apparently did not know was one - that they would tweak a hair to line a nest. A rabbit with the heart of a lion vigorously defended his mistress when he thought she was under threat, and Colette's dog carried scars to prove it. Above Sido's bed, a large spider (in shape like a clove of garlic, marked with a cross) pursued its life in a web that was permitted to stay in a high corner of the bedroom. Sido liked a cup of chocolate by her bed, kept warm by a glimmering night light. She would lie and watch the great spider let itself down over the cup and drink its fill of the sweet draught, and then it ascended, slowly, because of its load of nectar.
Colette was Sido's favourite child, her "Minet-Cheri" ("Little-Darling"), her sunshine, her triumph, her achievement, but, as has to be in a fairy tale, there was a bad presence, the elder half-sister, dark and saturnine, and with "Mongol" eyes. She read novels day and night, lived entirely on dreams, and was a stranger in this blessed house. She married unwisely and cut off relations with her family. And why did she do this? She did not forgive carelessness with money, which meant there would be no inheritance for her. Her hair, like Colette's, was never cut, and here is a hint of the disquieting, the dubious: why would Sido refuse to cut her two daughters' hair, though brushing and braiding the young heads wore her out? "I've had enough . . . my left leg hurts . . . I've just been combing Juliette's hair," she would plead, collapsing.
When Colette, at Willy's command, did have her hair cut, Sido complained that he had destroyed her labour of love. When the unhappily married daughter is incarcerated by her wicked husband we expect her to let her braids down over the garden wall so that a rescuer may climb up them.
Claudine's House's dreamy sentences may beckon and promise, but, when alerted by some half-hint or suggestion, one has to realise that the good and benevolent lives side by side with misfortune. This other, darker, parallel life would become visible when Colette once consulted a fortune-teller who told her that her dead father was present, unseen by Colette, sitting there in a corner, unable to take his eyes off his successful daughter, whom he has always envied as a result of her becoming what he had always wanted to be, a writer. When her father died, his family found beautiful books, with enticing titles and sheets of stiff, gleaming creamy-white paper - but they were blank; he had been unable to write. Sido used the glossy pages to make covers for her jams and preserves. This detail is painful, as though she was trying to conceal her husband's failure. Why not secretly burn them? But what thrifty woman could have brought herself to do that?
The father, Captain Colette, had only one leg, having lost the other one on the battlefield, and he was handsome and brave. He also flirted with women, but he adored his wife so much the children often felt they were in the way of this great passion. But he did lose his wife's inheritance, he did impoverish her, and Colette regrets that she did not ask him a thousand questions when he was alive, because he died with many secrets.
It was not only her dead father who haunted Colette - perhaps not as a ghost, which the rationalist Colette would have dismissed, but certainly as a reminder of unanswered questions - her younger brother visited her too. He was the child who adored music so much that he would follow a travelling band for miles and, grown-up, would not take a real job because that would get in the way of his music. "An elf of 63", as once Colette said; he would drop in to his famous sister's flat to say: "I've been there again, you know."
"You haven't! Tell me, tell me!"
And the two elderly people would sit and remember the ancient gate, that always creaked, and long-dead animals and people and, of course, that voice - "that beautiful young voice" - which told them: "Look, just look - do you see?" That bright wasp on a sticky translucent plum, the blackbird holding a cherry in his claw just so, the cat with her nose tucked into her paws because she knows it is going to be cold.
What a pleasure this book is, making you dream of that old house in its garden, just as Colette did, all her life.
© Doris Lessing, 2006 From Doris Lessing's introduction to Claudine's House by Colette (Hesperus Press, £7.99).