The work of the writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908-1966) was unjustly neglected in his life, and while many of these are now back in print again, he has never enjoyed the kind of acclaim that his output deserves. He was a prolific writer, across a range of different genres, and over a number of different subjects. His work in particular on botany led to his being one of the founding members of the Kent Trust for Nature Conservation. It is a great pity that Brooke is not better known and appreciated. His style is witty, quirky, intelligent, subtle and often unsettling. More than any other modern writer, he made the landscape of Kent a crucial part of his work, not only because of his formidable knowledge of its flora and fauna, but also because in a very enigmatic way he was able to read this landscape well, and marry it to his own particularly challenges and lived experiences.
Brooke was born at 9 Radnor Cliff, Sandgate, Folkestone, where his father was a wine merchant and ran a wine shop in the town. Later in his life attempts to involve him in the family business proved unsuccessful – experiences that figured in some of his literature, which was often strongly autobiographical. Attending the King’s School in Canterbury, he lasted only a few weeks before running away twice. This resulted in his family sending him to Bedales school in Hampshire, from where he won a place at Worcester College, Oxford. His first published work while there, in 1928, was a book of poems.
Brooke’s subsequent life was spent partly in London, where he worked at booksellers, and then at the BBC, and, somewhat surprisingly, in the army – both during the Second World War and afterwards. The army proved conducive to his sexuality and personality – he was gay, painfully introspective and shy. As `The Image of a Drawn Sword’ (1950) testifies, the comradery of life in the army, and its highly organised nature, gave him a framework he found comforting. With the commercial success of his Orchid trilogy, containing perhaps his best known work `The Military Orchid’, Brooke was able to buy himself out of the army (he had voluntarily re-enlisted after the war) and move to Bishopsbourne, where he lived with his childhood nanny, Ninnie, in Ivy Cottage. As Brooke himself recalled:
`I returned two days later, to the country – to that cottage in the Elham Valley where, since the war, I had lived with Ninnie and my mother. Driving out from Canterbury, it seemed to me that the wheel had come full-circle: my life during the past year had been, as it were, another `north-west passage’, leading me back circuitously – like the half-remembered journey to the Clambercrown a quarter of a century ago – yet with predestined certainty to the place where, perhaps, my roots went deepest.’ (Quoted, Christopher Scoble, `Letters from Bishopsbourne: Three Writers and an English Village’, BMM, Cheltenham, 2010, 89)
Brooke’s writing shows a deep commitment to a particular kind of place – one that is rural, slightly haunted, elusive, and hidden. `The Dog at Clambercrown’ (1955) typifies this – the description, often hilarious, of a trip through Italy, just after the war, and then the hunt for a kind of personal self-reckoning in a public house concealed deep in the countryside around Bishopsbourne. Dover, Folkestone, Barham, and the spaces around Bourne Park on the way inland where the military exercised in the War and afterwards are all described accurately, but in Brooke’s inimitable, tart style. His works are not easy to categorise – mostly written in the first person, sounding autobiographical, and yet clearly also adorned, fictionalised, raising all sorts of questions about who the writer is speaking off, and what the nature of the mission they are on to such obscure, secret places is. `The Dog at Clambercrown’ public house did actually exist, and was converted into a private house later in the 1950s. But for Brooke, it and other places were part of a landscape freighted with particularly heavy, subconscious, almost mythical meaning: `the lawless territories of the Forbidden Kingdom; familiar now, a trading-ground for the explorer with his beads and gin, yet retaining its essential mystery; a country of the mind, remote and seldom visited, haunted by the rumour of thunder and the crying of distant horns’ (`Dog at Clambercrown’, Sphere Books edition, 1990, 256).
There were moments when this `Forbidden Kingdom’ could be deeply unsettling. Brooke is one of the few writers who captures this. Unlike the bucolic, harmless innocence of the almost contemporaneous H E Bates, another author who located many of his works in the Kent countryside, and celebrated it in his writing, Brooke in a piece like `The Scapegoat’ from 1948, his first novel, shows a place which when explored and ventured in to is often unsettling, still, haunted and haunting. Duncan Cameron, the main figure in this novel, is staying with an uncle, Gerald, at a farmhouse in Kent after the death of his mother. `He would have liked to go for a walk, but the country seemed unfriendly and forbidding.’ Brooke says:
`The silent brown mass of the wood impended heavily above the house, watchful and menacing; there was about it something ancient and still untamed: one could imagine in some future time, the forests creeping back gradually to engulf the farm-lands, the scattered house overgrown and subsiding, the whole countryside reverting at last, the old wealden jungle.’ (`The Scapegoat’, Bello, Pan MacMillan, 2017 reprint, 27)
The memory of the dark `Andresweald’, the forest that had covered much of the southern part of Kent right up to modern times, and of which vestiges remain to this day, is testified to in works of history such as K P Witney’s `The Jutish Forest: A Study of the Weald of Kent from 450 to 1380 AD’ (Athlone Press, London, 1976). This was therefore not mere fancy on Brooke’s part. This was a place which was `chiefly still a primeval forest, though concealing the abandoned workings of the Romans and the roads and tracks that served them’, a place that was `heavily wooded and sparsely populated’ where nature had once more won again – reclaiming the land that had once been taken from it. (Witney, `Jutish Forest’, 1)
In `The Scapegoat’, the ending is almost akin to a sacrifice with Duncan’s death on stones deep in the woods while Gerald looks over him (they had had a erotically highly charged relationship). As Brooke concludes: `the long initiation was over; the rites observed, the cycle completed.’ (118) This alludes to an almost Pagan, pre-Christian religiosity.
No writer has written more brilliantly, and with greater knowledge, complexity and understanding, of the Kent countryside, and captured its spirit. This must be because of the detail of Brooke’s knowledge about botany – the Orchid Trilogy is dense in references to the countryside and the kinds of flowers unique to the area Brooke spent the latter part of his life living in. Brooke was cremated and his ashes scattered at Barham crematorium. His house is marked in Bishopsbourne with a small commemorative plaque.