Jocelyn Brooke

Bernard Jocelyn Brooke (30 November 1908 – 29 October 1966) was an English writer and naturalist. He wrote several unique, semi-autobiographical novels, as well as some poetry. His most famous works include the Orchid Trilogy—The Military Orchid (1948), A Mine of Serpents (1949), and The Goose Cathedral (1950)—and The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950). Life and career Brooke was born at Folkestone in Kent, the third child of a wine merchant, who with his wife was a Christian Scientist. Sent initially to the King's School, Canterbury, Brooke was deeply unhappy there, and ran away twice. He then was moved to at Bedales School before going up to Worcester College, Oxford, Brooke's childhood revolved mostly around his principal interests of amateur botany and fireworks, in the shadow of the First World War. "When the Second World War began he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and became one of the pox wallahs, those working to treat venereal disease. Brooke was decorated for bravery." Elements of his experiences, and his love of the military life, appear in most of his subsequent works, to the extent that much of his fiction can be regarded as at least partly autobiographical novels. Though the Orchid Trilogy strays into a typically English vein of humour, the idyllic land of his childhood and his obsession with le paradis perdu often bring in an element of intense melancholy, something developed in paranoia and isolation in The Image of a Drawn Sword.