Jocelyn Brooke

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.

[citation needed] 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 ('paradise lost') often bring in an element of intense melancholy, something developed in paranoia and isolation in The Image of a Drawn Sword.

I realized that I was sitting, at last, beneath the roof of the Goose Cathedral – that sinister and sacrosanct chapel-by-the-sea where, in my childhood, the enormous blue-and-red lifeboat had crouched, mysteriously, like a sea-monster in its lair."

The book is subtitled "An Excursion", and deals with two journeys which took place at a distance of time; a visit to Sicily in the fifties and his search for the eponymous country inn in a remote part of the Kent countryside as an adolescent.

In the typical Brooke manner, he holds up the narrative for critical digressions on such writers as DH Lawrence and James Joyce, making sharp and perceptive comments about both.