The Orchid Trilogy Read online

  Title

  Jocelyn Brooke

  THE ORCHID TRILOGY

  THE MILITARY ORCHID

  A MINE OF SERPENTS

  THE GOOSE CATHEDRAL

  Contents

  Contents

  THE MILITARY ORCHID

  part one

  part two

  part three

  A MINE OF SERPENTS

  part one

  part two

  part three

  part four

  part five

  part six

  THE GOOSE CATHEDRAL

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  Title

  THE MILITARY ORCHID

  Dedication

  To Jonathan Curling

  Author’s Note

  Author’s Note

  This book is not, strictly, an autobiography, and the author has taken a novelist’s liberties both with persons and institutions. I hope that ‘St Ethelbert’s’ and schools of its kind have long ceased to exist; as for the dramatis personae, so far as they impinge upon reality at all, they are to be considered as caricatures rather than characters.

  Acknowledgements are due to the Editors of Penguin New Writing and The New English Weekly, in whose pages certain passages from this book have previously appeared.

  j.b.

  Epigraph

  ‘Souldiers Satyrion bringeth forth many broad large and ribbed leaues, fpred upon the ground like unto thofe of the great Plantaine: among the which rifeth vp a fat ftalke full of fap or iuice, clothed or wrapped in the like leaues euen to the tuft of flowers, wherupon doe grow little flowers refembling a little man, hauing a helmet vpon his head, his hands and legs cut off; white upon the infide, fpotted with many purple fpots, and the backe part of the flower of a deeper colour tending to rednes. The rootes be greater ftones than any of the kinds of Satyrions.’

  gerarde, Herbal, 1597

  ‘I have found it during the last four years very sparingly. It only appeared in a barren state in 1886.’

  druce, Flora of Oxfordshire

  ‘Orchis militaris shows its close affinity with O. purpurea, perhaps, by sharing its sterility, though this appears to be less pronounced on the Continent . . .’

  edward step, Wayside and Woodland Blossoms (3rd Series)

  ‘Rare in Spring. Grows in chalky districts only and not always there.’ j. s. e. mackenzie, British Orchids

  ‘Now nearly extinct.’

  godfery, Monograph and Iconograph of

  Native British Orchidaceae.

  part one

  A Box of Wormseed

  ‘Thou art a box of wormseed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy.’ duchess of malfi

  I

  Mr Bundock’s function, so far as my family was concerned, was to empty the earth-closet twice a week at the cottage where we used to spend the summer. This duty he performed unobtrusively and usually late at night: looming up suddenly in the summer-dusk, earth-smelling and hairy like some menial satyr, a kind of Lob. (Perhaps the maids left a bowl of cream for him on the threshold.) He became of sudden interest to me one June evening by asserting, quite calmly, that he had found the Lizard Orchid.

  Now the Lizard, at that period, had just made one of its rare appearances in the district: mysterious and portentous as the return of a comet, but, unlike a comet, unpredictable. A photograph of its extraordinary bearded spike had appeared in the Folkestone Herald; the finder was an elderly Folkestone photographer, who had subsequently exhibited the plant in his shop-window, where I had been taken to see it. Very kindly, he had detached two florets from the spike and presented them to me. (I heard, many years afterwards, that he was suspected of importing plants from the Continent and naturalizing them on the hills near Folkestone. The story recalls Gerarde, who glibly asserted, in the 1597 edition of his Herbal, that he had found the Wild Peony in Kent; a statement corrected in the 1633 edition by Johnson, who explains that Gerarde ‘himselfe planted the Peonie there, and afterwards seemed to find it there by accident.’)

  Mr Bundock seemed to think nothing of finding the Lizard. One might have supposed it was an everyday occurrence with him. He promised to bring me specimens the next evening. I waited with immense excitement. He duly arrived, and presented me with several specimens of the ‘Lizard Orchid’. Alas! it was not the Lizard at all, but the Green Man Orchid, Aceras anthropophora: a rarity, certainly, but not to be compared with the almost mythical Lizard. Besides, I had already found it myself.

  My disappointment was immense, but mitigated by the other orchid which Mr Bundock had brought me. This was unfamiliar: a tall, handsome spike of purple-brown and pink-spotted flowers. Obviously, I thought, it came under the desirable category of Very Rare Orchids. But which was it?

  I must have been about seven years old at this period; and besides being a keen (if somewhat erratic) botanist, I had already begun to specialize: I was bitten with the Orchid-mania. Up till this time, the only ‘flower-book’ I had possessed was Edward Step’s Wayside and Woodland Blossoms: adequate for the amateur, but not of much service to the specialist. On my seventh birthday, however, I had acquired a book on the Orchids themselves: British Orchids, How to Tell One from Another, by a certain Colonel Mackenzie. I still possess the book: produced in a rather sub-arty style, it bears no publication-date, and must have been long out of print. It is illustrated with a dozen rather ladylike watercolours, mostly of the commoner species; the sole exception is the very rare, almost extinct, Lady’s Slipper, which I am prepared to wager the Colonel had obtained from a florist.

  For the Colonel was an amateur, and not a very enterprising one, either. In his foreword he naïvely confesses himself baffled by the ordinary Flora, with its scientific classification of species; and in the subsequent text, invents a system of classification entirely his own. About the rarest orchids, which he had evidently not seen, his tone becomes almost sceptical; one feels that he doubts their very existence.

  Poor Colonel Mackenzie! His book was not the best of introductions to its subject. Yet he was a true orchidomane, and I salute him across the years. I imagine him living in comfortable retirement in Surrey, in a red house with a drive and spiky gates, among pine-trees; pottering on the downs above Betchworth and Shere, but not often venturing further afield. Probably he did possess a copy of Bentham and Hooker; but he could seldom have looked at it. It is a pleasing thought that another retired officer, Colonel Godfery, has since written the standard Monograph1 on the British Orchidaceae. (He also lives in Surrey.)

  So, with Colonel Mackenzie and Edward Step open before me, I addressed myself to the identification of Mr Bundock’s new Orchid (he had no name for it himself). Now, according to Colonel Mackenzie, the plant was none other than Orchis militaris, the Military Orchid. But according to Edward Step, it might equally well – more probably, in fact – be Orchis purpurea, the Great Brown-Winged Orchid, which the Colonel didn’t even so much as mention. The discrepancy provoked in me a moral conflict; for I wanted, very badly, to find Orchis militaris.

  The Military Orchid . . . For some reason the name had captured my imagination. At this period – about 1916 – most little boys wanted to be soldiers, and I suppose I was no exception. The Military Orchid had taken on a kind of legendary quality, its image seemed fringed with the mysterious and exciting appurtenances of soldiering, its name was like a distant bugle-call, thrilling and rather sad, a cor au fond du bois. The
idea of a soldier, I think, had come to represent for me a whole complex of virtues which I knew that I lacked, yet wanted to possess: I was timid, a coward at games, terrified of the aggressively masculine, totemistic life of the boys at school; yet I secretly desired, above all things, to be like other people. These ideas had somehow become incarnated in Orchis militaris.

  But alas! according to Edward Step, the Military Orchid occurred only in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, and I lived in Kent. True, there was said to be a subspecies, O. simia, the Monkey Orchid, ‘with narrower divisions of the crimson lip, occurring in the same counties as the type, with the addition of Kent’. But if Mr Bundock’s orchid was not the Military, still less could it be the Monkey; its lip was not crimson, but, on the contrary, pale rose-coloured or nearly white, and spotted with purple. Moreover, the sepals and petals were striped and stippled with dark purplish-brown, which fitted with Step’s description of Orchis purpurea. Furthermore, the Great Brown-Winged Orchid was said to grow in ‘Kent and Sussex only’. Judging by Edward Step, Mr Bundock’s orchid was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, Orchis purpurea.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . if only it could be Orchis militaris! After all, if one could trust Colonel Mackenzie, it was the Military. So far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as a Great Brown-Winged Orchid. All I had to do was to ignore Edward Step, and pin my faith to Colonel Mackenzie. The Colonel, moreover, provided an additional loophole for my conscience: in his descrip-tion, there was no nonsense about Oxfordshire and Berkshire; he merely contented himself with saying that the plant was ‘rare in spring’, and grew ‘in chalky districts only and not always there’. Consequently, since Kent was chalky, the Military Orchid might be expected to occur there . . .

  I repeated to myself the statements of each writer, till they sang in my mind like incantations. ‘Rare in spring: in chalky districts only, and not always there.’ The words beckoned like a far bugle, remote and melancholy beyond mysterious hills . . . Yes, it must be the Military . . .

  So Edward Step was firmly closed and put away, and I basked in the glory of having found (or at least been told where to find) the Military Orchid. Another book which was presented to me at this time – British Wild Flowers, by W. Graveson – confirmed my decision, the author relating how he had found the ‘Military Orchid’ in the Kentish woods. (No doubt, like Colonel Mackenzie, he considered O. purpurea to be the same as O. militaris.)

  Conscience, however, triumphed in the end, and I had to admit that Mr Bundock’s Orchid was not the Military but the Great Brown-Winged. Edward Step, after all, could hardly have invented Orchis purpurea out of sheer malice. No, the Military Orchid, alas! was still unfound.

  And it still is – at least by me, and, I imagine, for the last forty years, by anybody else. For Orchis militaris is one of several British plants which have mysteriously become extinct, or very nearly so. The last reliable record for it dates from 1902, when it was found in Oxfordshire. An unconfirmed report does, indeed, state that it occurred near Deal, in 1910. But botanists are sceptical about Kentish records for O. militaris; Edward Step, after all, was probably right . . .

  As for Colonel Mackenzie, I am prepared to bet that he had never seen either the Military or the Brown-Winged – nor, for that matter, the ‘subspecies known as the Monkey Orchid’ which nowadays, raised to the status of a species, and more fortunate than its Military relation, still survives in a single locality in Oxfordshire: the exact spot being a closely-guarded secret, known only to a few botanists.

  The Colonel, of course, was partly justified in his omission of the Brown-Winged and the Monkey; his list of species, no doubt, was based on early editions of Bentham and Hooker, and consequently (more or less) on the original classification of Linnaeus, who ‘lumped’ O. militaris, purpurea and simia together as a single species. So I could have said, had I but known, that in identifying Mr Bundock’s orchid as the Military, I was merely following the example of Linnaeus. I am still, I must confess, in my less conscientious moments half-inclined to yield to the temptation.

  II

  No psycho-analyst, so far as I know, has yet attempted to explain the love of flowers in Freudian terms. Art has long since been reduced to its true status – a mere function of the neurotic personality; the young Mozart presents a perfectly clear clinical picture. Even the scientist can be explained away, I suppose, in Adlerian terms, as a victim of organic inferiority. But the botanophil – the unscientific lover of flowers, as opposed to the professional botanist – remains a mystery. It may be that his singular passion is a relic of totemism; flowers, perhaps, provide a lodgement for the External Soul, thereby rendering the body invulnerable against all perils, magical or otherwise. Doubtless, the matter will be cleared up before long; but – happily, perhaps for its adherents – the cult of botanophily has been so far neglected by investigators.

  Often, but not always, the botanophil is precocious. A family legend relates that myself, at the age of four, could identify by name any or all of the coloured plates in Edward Step’s Wayside and Woodland Blossoms. For the truth of this I cannot vouch; but my own memory testifies to the fact that I could perform this disgustingly precocious feat two or three years later. By that time I had learnt to read; and, not content with the English names, I memorized many of the Latin and Greek ones as well. Some of these (at the age of 8) I conceitedly incorporated into a school-essay at the day-school in Folkestone which I attended. The headmaster read the essay aloud to the school (no wonder I was unpopular); but this flattering tribute was mitigated by his pronunciation of the names. My knowledge of Latin had scarcely progressed beyond the present indicative of Amo; for flower-names I had my own pronunciation, and the headmaster’s version of them came as a shock. I still utter the specific name of the Bee Orchid – apifera – with a slight feeling of flouting my own convictions. I realize now, that the accent is on the second syllable, but my own inclination would still put it on the third.

  Why, without any particular encouragement, should flowers, rather than stamps, butterflies or birds’ eggs, have become my ruling passion? True, I flirted, throughout my childhood, with butterflies, tame grass-snakes, home-made fireworks; but flowers were my first love and seem likely to be my last.

  Here I had better confess (since this book is largely about flowers) that, not only am I not a true botanist, but that even as a botanophil I am a specialist in the worst sense. Whole tracts of the subject leave me cold: certain Natural Orders or Genera frankly bore me, and always will – the Chenopodiaceae, for example, or those tedious Hieracii, or the Chickweeds. Recently I went with a real botanist to the Sandwich Golf-links, celebrated for a number of rare plants; it was a chilly afternoon in spring, and no weather to dawdle unless for a very good reason. My friend was in pursuit of a rare Chickweed – or one, at any rate, that was rare in Kent – and every few yards would throw himself flat on his face and remain there, making minute comparisons, while the glacial sea-wind penetrated my clothes and reduced me to a state of frozen irritability. I could almost realize, on this occasion, how boring botanists must be to non-botanists. Yet had the elusive Chickweed been, say a rare or critical Marsh Orchid, I would have risked pneumonia with as much enthusiasm as my botanist friend. A rare Broomrape – Orobanche caryophyllacea – was indeed said to grow half-a-mile away, and I was as anxious to see it as my friend was to identify his Chickweed. Why? The Broomrapes are not notably beautiful. The Clove-scented one is very rare, certainly; but mere rarity is not enough – the Chickweed was rare, too. If the love of flowers itself is hard to explain, still harder is it to account for the peculiar attraction of certain plants or groups of plants.

  Most obvious, of course, is the appeal of the Orchidaceae. It is easy enough to see the attraction of those floral aristocrats, with their equivocal air of belonging partly to the vegetable, partly to the animal kingdom. Myself yielded to their seduction at an unnaturally early age. But Broomrapes
? Chickweeds? There seems no reasonable explanation.

  For non-professionals, like myself, such prejudices condition the extent of such little true botanical knowledge as we may possess. I know something about the flower-structure of the Orchids, because I happen to like them, and a minimum of technical knowledge is necessary to identify the more critical species. But ask me to explain by what similarities of internal structure a Delphinium is placed in the same Natural Order as a Buttercup, and I am stumped. Yet I like the Ranunculaceae. To find either of the two Hellebores is always a major thrill – particularly Helleborus foetidus, the Setterwort, that august and seldom haunter of a few south-country chalk-hills. One of my cherished ambitions is to see the truly wild Monkshood in the few places where it is still said to survive; and another is to find in England the wild Larkspur which I have seen growing as a cornfield-weed in Italy. The Ranunculaceae, however, as a family, just fail to excite me sufficiently to overcome my ignorance about their internal affairs. I admire them as I once heard a certain French lady, at Cassis, confessing that she admired the proletariat: ‘J’adore les ouvriers,’ she declared, ‘mais de loin, de loin.’

  III

  I suppose for many people, as for myself, some childhood-scene tends to become archetypal, the hidden source of all one’s private imagery, tinging the most banal and quotidian words and objects with its distinct yet often unrecognized flavour. For me the village where we spent my childhood summers, where Mr Bundock lurked like a wood-spirit in the warm, tree-muffled evenings, has this quality of legend. Certain basic, ordinary words such as ‘wood’, ‘stream’, ‘village’, in whatever context I may use them, will always, for me, evoke a particular wood, a particular stream, almost always in the immediate neighbourhood of our summer-cottage.

  For some people, I suppose, such words have become entirely abstracted from any such archetypal images – mere generic names for natural features. One might divide the human race into those who develop this power of abstraction and those who don’t; it would probably serve as well as a good many other artificial categories. I have read somewhere that the more primitive languages have no generic name for, say, a tree or a camel; each individual camel or tree has to be given a name of its own as required. Children, like other savages, develop the ‘abstracting’ faculty slowly; many, like myself, never fully develop it at all.