By Jonathan Hunt

The turn of the year was always a thing of wonder to Jocelyn Brooke. To walk through the woods in spring with him was a revelation, for he saw so much more than the ordinary person. Out with a neighbour for an afternoon stroll, he exclaimed, 'I've just seen your dinner', and later produced a meal containing sorrel soup, giant puffball and stewed nettles. A man who could strike others as shy and awkward, his skill in dissecting an orchid was evident. Such memories of Brooke recall someone who never lost his childhood enthusiasm for the countryside and for the chalkdown flora of Kent.

The most spectacular of the chalkdown flowers - the native British orchids - were plants that fascinated him all his life. Many of their common names - the Military, Lady, Man, Monkey, Frog, Lizard, Bee, Wasp, Bird's Nest, Ghost - derive from resemblances to things that are not plants: insects, animals, and even a soldier's uniform. Their names: their ancient erotic associations; their often spectacular beauty; their highly individual manner of fertilisation; the extreme rarity of certain orchids: all these things add up to a botanical family of great cultural as well as botanical interest.

Brooke was very attuned to such extra-botanical associations, for he was also a man of letters, who in the years after the war was hailed as the author of the Military Orchid (1). This intensely personal and subtle work, but turns humorous and melancholy, was the first of a series of semi-autobiographical books in which Brooke both celebrated and gently sent up his nostalgia for his idyllic Edwardian childhood, shared with his loving Nurse; his passions for flowers and fireworks and literature; and his feeling of being out of place in the modern world.

Brooke was born at Radnor Cliff, Sandgate, in 1908 and lived there until he was seventeen. In The Military Orchid he relates that by the age of four he had learned all the Latin names of the flowers in Edward Step's Wayside and Woodland Blossoms, and was correcting members of his family who said 'Bulrush' rather than 'Great Reed Mace'. Every expedition from his home on the Undercliff to school, to the Hills behind Folkestone, along the coast, or inland to the family's holiday cottage at Bishopsbourne was an opportunity to find flowers. Emily Fagg, Jocelyn's nurse, who took up the hobby, and achieved the feat of finding plants of the Lizard and Monkey Orchids - both great rarities - herself. The roughly triangular area of East Kent bounded by Dover, Hythe and Canterbury is a territory that Brooke came to know intimately as a botanist and which he also made his own as a writer. Readers of his books might well be tempted to think of it as 'Brooke-land'.

School was largely a torment for a precocious child absorbed in flowers, butterflies, snakes and fireworks. Teased as 'nanny's little boy', his only real childhood friends were the three Huggett children in Bishopsbourne. When they found a Lizard Orchid, and committed the awful sin of digging it up, he was furious and yelled at them.

After attending three schools in Sandgate and Folkestone, Brooke was sent to St Michaels's prep school in Uckfield and then to King's School, Canterbury, which he detested so much that he ran away twice within a fortnight. Removed to co-educational Bedales at Petersfield in Hampshire, he as last found a supportive environment for botany, and felt at home. Bedales was in prime orchid-hunting territory, and it was here in 1923 that Brooke and his fellow pupil Gavin Bone, a boy of great artistic flair, jointly conceived the idea of writing and illustrating a book about the British Orchid. 

Already an addicted reader of fiction, Brooke now become absorbed in the avant-garde works of Aldous Huxley and began seriously to write novels himself. Writing brought out a rebellious streak, which was to remain characteristic of the adult Brooke. A short story in Bedales magazine, in which Brooke unwisely gave a character the name of the school matron, got him in trouble. A year or so later, in what was to be a truncated undergraduate career at Worcester College, Oxford, he suffered a similar experience. A piece of 'work in progress'  in Flux, a literary periodical entirely co-written with his friend Jon Curling, was considered sexually subversive by the university proctors, who ordered Flux to be withdrawn from sale.

In 1928 Brooke was sent down from university. For the next few years he regarded himself as a sort of outlaw, determined to become a writer. He was alternately indulged by his family or forced to get a job: he tried (unsuccessfully) bookselling, publishing, and working as a wine merchant in Folkestone in the family firm of J H and J Brooke Ltd. As the 1930's went on he suffered periods of depression and psychosomatic illness. He wrote voluminously but managed to publish only an article on fireworks (2). It was in this period that he read the work of the writer who influenced him most: Marcel Proust, whose multi-volume novel A la recherche du temps perdu is so concerned with time, and which makes memorable use of orchids.

In 1938, with war seeming inevitable, Brooke turned back to the idea of the orchid book. He had been neglecting botany, but got back in touch with Gavin Bone, now a don at Oxford. Brooke began work on the text and collected orchid specimens for Bone to draw. It was a small gesture of defiance towards the futility of the coming conflict. Brooke also met Francis Rose, then a student, and later to become an eminent botanist. An enduring friendship ensued. Rose felt that Brooke had a better instinct for botany than many professionals, a gift for identifying unknown plants and for guessing what might be growing in a particular site. They made visits to, and discoveries, at orchid sites in Kent and, after the war, in other parts of the country. For the Journal of Botany Brooke wrote an article on the Monkey Orchid in Kent (3).

Brooke and Rose jointly wrote another article (4) about a helleborine which they found in August, 1939, at Three Barrows Down near Bishopsbourne, a discovery that was names after them: Epipactis vectensis Brooke and Rose (5).

With the coming of war, Brooke found his way into the Royal Army Medical Corps. Army service took him to South Africa, Palestine, Libya, Sicily and Italy, and he delighted in discovering the flora of each new country. The Army, and Brooke's experiences in a VD treatment unit during and after the war (for he liked the Army so much that he re-enlisted for a short time in 1947), provided him with some of his most vivid and amusing material for the books he wrote after the war.

The immediate post-war period was one of the happiest of Brooke's life. The blocks that had afflicted him as a writer before the war melted away. By 1959 he had published half a dozen books, all well received, and had made a number of important literary friends. As the decade went on, he spent his time increasingly in Bishopsbourne, living in the cottage that his old nurse had bought on her retirement. Ivy Cottage, which was also home to Brooke's mother, was tiny. Francis Rose and his wife, visiting it in summer, had to sleep in the garden hut, but found it idyllic.

The book that launched Brooke as a writer - The Military Orchid - was his most original. For the blurb he conned the word 'Autobotonography' (6) and the reader is immediately launched into an account of Brooke's lifelong passion for orchids, and especially for ht orchid of the title, in earlier times called 'Souldiers Satyrion' and in modern times the Military or Soldier Orchid. In the Military Orchid Brooke uses botany a way of looking at the world, of categorising and describing other human beings. With great subtlety, he makes out of the botanical obsession - something longed for, but never found - a metaphor for life itself.

A rave review by the critic Desmond MacCarthy ensured that The Military Orchid and its two successors, A Mine of Serpents (7) and The Goose Cathedral (8), established Brooke as a writer to watch. Brooke also published poetry (9) and two novels - The Scapegoat (10) and The Image of a Drawn Sword (11) - in which the landscape and flora of rural Kent both play a significant part. The plot of Brooke's single children's book, The Wonderful Summer (12), revolves around a botanical hoax: the deliberate planting of a rare orchid (The Ghost Orchid) so as to fool an orchid collector. In 1950 the long envisages orchid book, entitled The Wild Orchids of Britain (13), finally appeared with Gavin Bone's life-like orchid drawings reproduced by a subtle seven-colour printing process.

As The Military Orchid relates, Orchis militaris had not been seen in Britain for 35 years. But in May 1947, Job Lousley, Secretary of the English Botanical Society, discovered a site of over 40 plants of the Military Orchid in a Chiltern wood. A possessive and secretive botanist, Lousley announced this momentous botanical discovery in The Naturalist but refused to reveal its location. Rumours circulated, however, and Francis Rose organised a syndicate of friends to make an annual search of the likely area.

The search took years. It was typical of Brooke's sense of humour that he joked to Rose that they should dig up 40 plants of the Military Orchid in France (where the orchid was quite common), and send them to Lousley with the message 'Thought you'd like these at home'. The search ended on 14 June 1956, when Rose and Richard Fitter finally tracked down the site. Shortly afterwards, Brooke wrote to tell his friend the writer Anthony Powell that he had just returned from seeing Orchis militaris in both the Chiltern site, and at another newly-discovered site n Suffolk. It was one of the highlights of his life, he told Powell, but now that he had finally found the Military Orchid, perhaps he should write no more autobiographies.

During the 1950's and early 1960's Brooke continued to make botanical trips, for example to Suffolk with Francis Rose to look at Liparis loeselii and Marsh Orhcids in the fens near Redgrave and Thelnetham. He also went abroad, to Hyeres, Amalfi, Taormina, and the Canaries, often in the company of his botanist neighbour, Richard Gore. Brooke made a number of radio broadcasts during the 1950's, often based on or about the flora of places he had visited.

Brooke's other 'botanical' book, The Flower in Season (14), a 'calendar of wild flowers', is a celebration of the British plants that flower in each month of the year. It is illustrated with interesting and often amusing quotations from older botanical writers, especially Brook's favourite Anne Pratt, the Victorian botanist of Kent. The Flower in Season is one of Brooke's most charming works. Rich in observation, written at the peak of his form, it is highly accessible to readers with no special interest in botany, Richard Gorer, dedicatee of Brooke's novel The Passing of a Hero (15), considered it his best book.

By the mid 1950's, however, Broke was once again experiencing difficulties with writing and was suffering from depression. Psychoanalysis gave no lasting benefit but enabled him to produce his last two full-length prose works. The first of these is The Dog at Clambercrown (16), a book in the characteristic Brooke mould, which captures the mysterious atmosphere and associations held for him by a tract of country around the hilltop near Stelling Minnis called 'Clambercrown'. and its isolated former inn, The Dog.

The second book has remained unpublished, Furious and Deadly has the subtitle 'An experiment in Exorcism'. The title is a quotation from Gerarde's Herball of 1604 about poisonous plants such as henbane, monkshood, deadly nightshade and especially the stinking hellebore, '. . . . plants so furious and deadly . . .' This forms the starting point for a meditation on the uncanny and its link to sexuality, which is also an attempt as self-analysis. 

As in earlier years, friends would come to Bishopsbourne to be shown the local botanical rarities. On a drenching April day in 1957, Brooke took Robert and Eddie Gathorne-Hardy to look for the Lady Orchid, and afterwards they all got agreeable tight in Folkestone. Brooke had always been interested in the strange parasitical plants, the Broomrapes. When the rare Purple Broomrape suddenly appeared in profusion on a Bishopsbourne allotment, botanists poured in to see it. A trip to Ireland in 1964 with Richard Gorer led to a joint paper on the Irish marsh orchids (19). In 1966 Brooke had a memorable sighting of the Ghost Orchid, the extraordinary underground orchid, lacking chlorophyll and nearly colourless, the plant he had made the subject of the hoax in the Wonderful Summer years before.

By this time Brooke was living alone at Ivy Cottage. In October 1966 he died in his sleep of a heart attack. Brooke's family and friends - literary, botanical and local - remembered a man of great kindness, a shy and private person with a sly and irreverent sense of humour. A few years after his death a plaque depicting Ivy and the Military Orchid was placed on the cottage wall.

Jocelyn Brooke would probably be appalled by much of the devastation to the countryside and to wild flowers that has occurred in this country over the last forty years. But he would have been cheered by the great upsurge in conservation activities since the beginning of the 1970's. A hater of cold weather, Brooke might well have approved of global warming, which as had a beneficial effect on British orchids, and has produced recently on the Folkestone Hills a more abundant orchid flowering than ever previously recorded. 

Acknowledgements
A number of Jocelyn Brooke's friends have shared memories of him with me. I am particularly grateful to Dr Frances Rose MBE for his generous and enthusiastic assistance.

Jonathan Hunt lives in Buckinghamshire, works for the Open University's Co-publishing Department  and is working on a biography of Jocelyn Brooke.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1) The Military Orchid (The Bodley Head, 1948; reprinted in The Orchid Trilogy. Penguin Books, 1981 and the The Military Orchid and other novels, Penguin Books, June 2002)

2) 'The British fire ritual', The New Statesman, 14 September, 1935

3) 'Notes n the occurrence of orchis simia Lamarck in Kent', The journal of Botany, November, 1938

4) Jocelyn Brooke and Francis Rose, 'A new British species of Epipactis', The Journal of Botany, No. 928, 1940.

5) This name is no longer current, as it was later discovered that the same orchid had been described and named Epipactis phyllanthes by the Rev. Gerard n the early 19th century and published in an obscure journal. 

6) For the second impression (1951) the term 'Autobotanography' was dropped.

7) A Mine of Serpents (The Bodley Head, 1949)

8) The Goose Cathedral (The Bodley Head, 1950)

9) December Spring (The Bodley Head, 1946; reissued in paperback by Turtle Point Press, US, 1998)

10) The Scapegoat (The Bodley Head, 1948; reissued by Penguin Books, 1998)

11) The Image of a Drawn Sword (The Bodley Head, 1950; reissued by Penguin Books, 1983)

12) The Wonderful Summer (John Lehmann, 1949)

13) The Wild Orchids of Britain (The Bodley Head, 1950)

14) The Flower in Season (The Bodley Head, 1952)

15) The Passing of a Hero (The Bodley Head, 1953)

16) The Dog at Clambercrown (The Bodley Head, 1955)

17) The botanical journal Watsonia rejected the article and the manuscript has unfortunately disappeared.

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