by Roger Dobson
More years pass, and the collector, who has developed an interest in Fitzrovia through reading of the colourful antics of Mr Gawsworth and Count Potocki, eventually has the good sense to buy J. Maclaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties (1965). This also, to his shame, was returned to the shelf years earlier, ‘as it didn’t look particularly engrossing’: an unfinished work, it surely could be of little significance. Oh, the shame of it! Not far into the book (around page one in fact) the collector is mentally kicking himself, for it proves a revelation: wonderfully entertaining, sharply observant and the author is a comic maestro. The collector—his faith in his riffling skills is badly shaken—discovers from Alan Ross’s Introduction that The Weeping and the Laughter (1954), Maclaren-Ross’s childhood memoir, has a similar elegiac tone to The Orchid Trilogy. Brooke again . . . The Weeping and the Laughter is tracked down and enjoyed; but a nagging problem remains. If this character Brooke wrote anything like as well as Maclaren-Ross then, orchids or no, he must be investigated.
After all, perhaps the botanical bits can be skipped. . . .
And so, the next time he comes across it (in an Oxfam shop), the collector buys the 1981 King Penguin edition of the trilogy. At this initial reading he wonders what all the eulogistic back-cover fuss is about. Anthony Powell’s informative Introduction fails to convince him that Brooke is of any great significance as an English memoirist. The trilogy seems an unsatisfactory hotchpotch of childhood and wartime memories; rather too confusing and chaotic to be considered anything than a deeply flawed artistic work. The book is put away, but is not forgotten. Brooke can’t be so easily dismissed. His prose is of a high order and continues to haunt the mind: there are passages in Brooke, as Enoch Soames would have said. Those tantalising accounts of the strange Gothic lifeboat station and the bizarre watertower that dominated his life in Kent as a boy. And the fellow is neglected after all; he’s certainly deserving of an essay (albeit a querulous one) in the Lost Club Journal. A few caustic notes are compiled: ‘Brooke needed a good editor’ among them. Rather uncharitable.
Some months after the first reading, to refresh his memory for the essay, the collector charitably decides to give the old boy a chance to redeem himself. The trilogy is retrieved from a cupboard. Slowly, very slowly, light begins to dawn. The scales fall from the reader’s eyes. He begins to realise that his judgement has been overly hasty. The key to the locked door in the wall is found. All the elements drop into their rightful place. The collector sees—at last!—what he was too dim to perceive earlier and becomes a penitent convert. (To atone for his sins, he begins pressing for a plaque in Brooke’s Sandgate.) Far from being chaotic, the trilogy is a superbly patterned artwork along Proustian lines. Viewed in correct focus, rather than through the distorting lens of preconceived notions, the trilogy is revealed as a genuine classic. The collector realises that he has been keeping company with an exceptional writer. He understands that what he originally considered rather ordinary sights and scenes of Brooke’s world aren’t in the least commonplace: significance, as Virginia Woolf says somewhere lies in tiny things as well as great things. Here is a unique voice—a writer whose evocations of the English landscape rival the genius of Machen himself. His one defence is that Brooke’s writing is so subtle that to be fully appreciated he requires to be re-read. Brooke’s works grow in power with each rereading when all the nuances and details missed in the first sampling take root in the mind.
As Machen does with Gwent, Brooke evokes a ‘Land of Lost Content’ filled with mysteries and enchantment. The Kentish landscape viewed through the prism of his childhood fears and fancies becomes ‘a country of the mind’—the locus of the Brookeian ‘private myth’. To Brooke, a timid, shy and painfully sensitive outsider—‘fatally and incurably “different” ’ from his infancy—the unknown country ‘beyond the hills’ north of Sandgate and Folkestone was ‘the Forbidden Kingdom’: a realm which seems to his innocent eyes as exotic and terrible as that presided over by Rider Haggard’s She. Brooke developed a ‘mythopoeic vision of landscape’ enriched by the poetry of Yeats and Housman and the music of John Ireland and Delius, which seemed to him to allude to a legendary past of forgotten rites and druidic mysteries. This sense of his private myth runs like a thread through nearly all his autobiographical writings. As a boy he read King Lear and its local colour reinforced his ‘Gothic vision’ of Dover and its cliffs. The Kentish countryside with its ‘high remote chalk-hills, with hanging beechwoods, scattered here and there with cromlechs or monoliths’ haunted him. ‘Certain features of a landscape—a yew tree outlined against the pale radiance of a February sunset, the “inscape” of dark, glossy ivy beneath bare beech—could become impregnated with an extraordinary “magical” significance,’ he wrote.
The title The Orchid Trilogy is a marketing device. Brooke’s memoirs form a quintet. Because of its unsatisfactory portmanteau title (presumably not Brooke’s creation) the trilogy may be left on the shelf by those readers who have little or no interest in botany, though as Anthony Powell points out in his Introduction to the Penguin edition Brooke writes of his subject in such a way as to hook the non-botanist. And only the first volume, The Military Orchid, is principally concerned with Brooke’s ruling passion; as this is the slightest, and arguably the weakest of the three books, new readers are advised to begin with the more substantial A Mine of Serpents or The Goose Cathedral. (Some literary polymath should compile a reference guide dogmatically laying down the ‘correct’ order in which various authors’ books must be read. All readers live in peril of picking an atypical or difficult work and unfavourably judging the author for evermore.) The books, a mixture of autobiography and novel, are variations on the theme of lost childhood and, since they are only roughly chronological and their time-spans overlap, they may be read out of sequence. As Olivia Manning stated in a rather querulous retrospective published in the Times Literary Supplement in 19691: ‘The three volumes do not offer a conventional journey from birth to maturity. Instead, like the waves of the incoming sea, they wash over the same ground but each spreads a little further than the one before.’
The Military Orchid, A Mine of Serpents and The Goose Cathedral, The Bodley Head, London, 1948, 1949 and 1950.
Indeed, because the pattern of Brooke’s tapestry only becomes apparent in the later works, The Military Orchid, regarded on its own, seems something of a flawed patchwork: Brooke skips about in butterfly fashion: a childhood reminiscence here, a sketch of an eccentric Firbankian neighbour Miss Trumpett there; accounts of his schooldays at a Christian Science school in Sussex; how he ran away (twice) from King’s School, Canterbury, before finding contentment at Bedales in Hampshire. Then, abruptly, Brooke jumps more than twenty years to wartime and to his service in Italy. The thematic link of his quest to find the orchis militaris of the title isn’t quite strong enough to transform new readers into immediate Brookeians, and Brooke may have lost a good many potential readers through the apparent flimsiness of this first book; but read The Military Orchid last and you will appreciate it much more. Brooke’s work will be in many cases an acquired taste.
In the two sequels, as he gets into his stride, Brooke skilfully weaves incidents from his childhood with scenes of adult life to create almost mystical correspondences between widely separate places and events. Time becomes telescoped and fluid as Brooke moves effortlessly between his schooldays and boyhood passions to his brief undergraduate career at Oxford University in 1927 and 1928, and his military service in Italy. But always in the background—and usually centre-stage—is the country of his birth, the theatre of his ‘Lost Paradise’. In A Mine of Serpents, describing travelling through Montreux on a train bound for Milan in 1947, he sees a shop where as a boy in 1924 he had been allowed to buy fireworks. This starts him reminiscing about his childhood pyrotechnomania and the difficulties of obtaining fireworks during the First World War. This sounds deadly dull, since most adults have long relegated such things to the attic of childhood, but Brooke is such a
witty and eloquent writer that he brings his small pyrotechnic triumphs and disasters alive, and his experiments with charcoal and sulphur and saltpetre and big bangs really live on the page. At the end of the book a spectacular firework display in Florence sparks off the poignant image of himself as ‘a small boy crouched motionless, his whole body taut with a fascinated concentration, over a tattered copy of Little Folks’—the children’s monthly in which he first read about fireworks. Encountering on the train to Italy an infamously louche university associate, whom he calls ‘Hew Dallas’—who was rumoured to have celebrated a Black Mass in the Carfax public lavatory—Brooke travels back in memory to the Oxford of 1928, conjuring up a late-Brideshead Revisited world of artificial and decadent pansy poseurs trying to live their lives like Proustian masterpieces (Brooke included). In this cloistered environment women are alien beings, hearties hound and debag aesthetes and drunken parties take precedence over academic studies. Jonathan Hunt has identified the real-life—and exaggerated—counterpart of Hew Dallas, said to be the publisher of an avant garde magazine called Libido (Brooke’s own magazine was called Flux) suppressed by the authorities. It is best that the whole story is related in his forthcoming biography. It’s unlikely readers will guess at Dallas’s origins; though once the secret is revealed A Mine of Serpents will be read in an entirely new light. Brooke does sprinkle clues here and there, but they are so subtle the keenest textual detective will probably fail to realise their significance. (See the end of the scene where Brooke bids farewell to Dallas in Florence, for example.) In his prefatory notes to the three volumes Brooke admits he has fictionalised his memories. In The Goose Cathedral, for example, he says the book blends fact and fiction, and that ‘certain personages and episodes exist on the border-line between truth and phantasy’. Thus any Brooke reader is presented with the challenge to determine what is truth and what is invented. The reader’s suspicions may be aroused by the fact that Brooke asks us to believe that only twenty years on, he has forgotten the famous, or infamous, Hew Dallas and is unable to recall where they met.
Brooke’s love for Kent runs throughout the trilogy. The Brooke family, living in sedate Sandgate, took their summer holidays at Bishopsbourne, a peaceful village in the Elham Valley a few miles south of Canterbury. Although he never names it in his memoirs, presumably to discourage readers from turning up on his doorstep, the village’s identity is only lightly concealed because of the wealth of local geography Brooke includes. He returned to live at Bishopsbourne after the war and died there in 1966.
Over the years many of his admirers have taken the tree-clad Frog Lane leading down to Bishopsbourne from the A2 to see Ivy Cottage, where Brooke lived with his mother and Ninnie, his beloved nurse, and Forge Cottage next door, where his family holidayed in his boyhood.
Like Arthur Machen,2 Brooke was adept at evoking the genius loci and transforming the apparently commonplace into incommunicable symbols of wonder, mystery and awe. What could be more unpromising than a watertower, built by Margate Corporation District Waterworks in 1903? Yet the tower, on Barham Downs north-east of Bishopsbourne, is presented through Brooke’s childhood eyes as an enigmatic symbol standing guard on the frontiers of the known world. Think of the black monolith in 2001 and you will gain some idea of the effect the tower had on the young Brooke. ‘It was a landmark, and a limit,’ he writes in A Mine of Serpents. (Jonathan Hunt says an earlier title for the book was actually ‘The Watertower’.) Brooke and Ninnie frequently visited the tower during the family’s summer holidays at Bishopsbourne. It still stands, a surreal cross between an aqueduct, a red-brick folly, an Italian belltower, and, as Brooke says, a giant lavatory. He found the tower:
. . . vast, sinister and inexplicable, guarding its secret. For it has a secret; and the secret was perpetually, it seemed, on the tip of my tongue—something I once knew but couldn’t remember, like a forgotten tune or the name of a book. . . .
The tower was disturbing, as I now see, largely by reason of its incongruity: Lautréamont’s sewing-machine-on-a-dissecting-table was not more calculated to épater le bourgeois than this enormous lavatory tank resting on top of a folded-up viaduct. I was not exactly frightened of the tower: indeed, I was rather fond of it.
In another fine memoir, The Dog at Clambercrown (1955) Brooke explained: ‘. . . there seemed no obvious reason why our walks should not extend into the regions beyond the water-tower . . . yet the fact remained that we never did go farther in that direction, and the fields beyond the tower thereby acquired a wholly adventitious atmosphere of “foreignness” and mystery’. The tower would crop up surprisingly at intervals during his wanderings, suddenly becoming visible from various viewpoints: ‘Remote, mysterious, it flashed its sudden signal across the sunburned fields: but the message was one which I had never been, perhaps never should be, able to decode . . .’ Even as an adult Brooke was affected by the idea of terra incognita and the sense of a ‘Forbidden Kingdom’ surrounding Bishopsbourne. Walking with an Oxford friend, Jonathan Curling, whom he disguises as ‘Eric Anquetil’3 in the trilogy, through Gorsley Wood, near the holiday cottage, to Langham Park the ‘region which to me had always seemed to exist on the edge of the known world: beyond lay an unknown land into which it still seemed to me almost foolhardy to try and penetrate. Eric’s proposal that we should walk on as far as Upper Hardres [a village a few miles from Bishopsbourne] rather shocked me: it was as though he had suggested crossing the frontier into some alien and savage territory from which we might never return.’ As a child it seemed to him that Gorsley Wood was infinite. (Compare this with Machen’s account in Far Off Things [1922] of his boyhood wanderings in Wentwood near Caerleon: he feels not that he didn’t know the forest but that it wasn’t to be known.)
Brooke-land4, as Anthony Powell calls it in his Introduction to the trilogy, is not always benign. In The Dog at Clambercrown Brooke tells how in early childhood, picnicking with Ninnie on a hot summer afternoon in a field known as California, near woodland not far from Bishopsbourne, he becomes fearful and pleads to be taken home: ‘. . . the woods seemed more than ever to exhale a feeling of enmity,’ he felt. Years later Ninnie confesses to him that she too felt ‘the sense of lurking evil’ emanating from the woods. The episode reads like a scene from Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood.
A Victorian lifeboat station at Seabrook near Sandgate, built in the style of a Gothic chapel, became another potent talisman. ‘Seeing it from a passing bus, one would have supposed it to be some kind of Nonconformist tabernacle—a spiky and ornate affair in pseudo-Ruskinian Gothic,’ writes Brooke in The Goose Cathedral. ‘In later years I could appreciate the oddity of this chapel-by-the-sea; its incongruity was amusing and at the same time rather sinister, like something in a surrealist picture.’ With an Oxford friend, ‘Eric Anquetil’, Brooke invented a fabulous mythology for the Goose Cathedral, which had been converted into a private residence: the occupants kept geese, hence its soubriquet.
We never, I think, caught a glimpse of the ‘chapel’s’ real inhabitants; but if they didn’t (visibly, at least) exist, we were quite prepared to invent them, and during that summer [in the early 1930s] sunbathing on the beach below, we elaborated a whole mythology centred about the ‘Goose Cathedral’. It was inhabited, we decided, by a mad archdeacon named Vindables, who had been unfrocked in consequence of his untimely conversion to Mithraism (he had attempted, with a notable absence of tact, to sacrifice a bull on the high altar at Canterbury). He was also a good amateur alchemist, and had (like Cardinal Pirelli) a marked tendency to transvestism; he had married, in later life, a Roumanian from Bessarabia who, besides, being a noted witch, and the leader of the local coven, conducted as a sideline a highly successful bordello, catering exclusively for the needy and deserving clergyman. . . .
Both the lifeboat station and the watertower become powerful symbols of ‘lost content’ because Brooke is recalling the impressions they exerted on him in earliest childhood—a case of ‘emotions recollected in tranq
uillity’. Besides being a poetic chronicler of the countryside, Brooke was an acute social observer. In the trilogy he paints a vivid satirical picture of an ultra-respectable post-Edwardian society when he was growing up at Sandgate: a vanished world is now gone for ever. The effect can be compared to John Betjeman’s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, in that both budding writers realised their early differences from their fellows, and both were embarrassed by having families ‘in trade’. It’s not surprising that Betjeman praised Brooke’s novels. Like Betjeman, young Jocelyn—or Bernard as he was to his family—was carefully sheltered from the outside world and unwholesome influences, but this only served to make him the more curious. Dover, though only a few miles away, seemed alien and wicked territory:
Dover was considered ‘dirty’, ‘sordid’—one didn’t go there unless one had to. Other, more sinister rumours attached to it, too: ‘things’ had happened there which were spoken of in whispers—‘nasty’ things. This element of ‘nastiness’, I gathered, emanated chiefly from the Dover Hippodrome, a small music-hall which I invested with goodness knows what horrific glamour. I didn’t know what a music-hall was, but I suspected it to be connected in some way with girls—the kind of girls whom my family referred to as ‘fast’ whatever that might mean. (One of two of my sister’s acquaintances were thus stigmatised by my mother: I observed them carefully for signs of this reprehensible motility; but they seemed to me very much like other girls, though somewhat nicer than most.