loomed through the blackness; I crossed the road, and approached the back entrance, facing towards the camp. A small conservatory or 'winter garden', like some salvaged fragment of the Crystal Palace, had been built on to this side ... In the faint electric light, the interior of the café seemed enormous, barn-like...down the sides of the room were placed a number of solid, mahogany tables: the light gleamed vaguely on their polished surfaces...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 Dog at Clambercrown In 1955 The Bodley Head published The Dog at Clambercrown, which The Times described as Brooke's 'latest autobiographical voluntary'. The book is subitled '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. Anthony Powell, Brooke's friend and champion, thought it Brooke's best book. It revisits ideas and themes from the earlier Orchid Trilogy, but with perhaps an even greater confidence. 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. Lawrence, Brooke thinks, was homosexual. In his childhood the countryside behind Folkestone was seen by Brooke as a 'forbidden kingdom' and in the latter stages of the book during a hot and thundery afternoon while on an adolescent quest to find the pub, he undergoes a sexual awakening; the pub and the countryside symbolising the mystery of adult affairs. On December 15, 1955, the Times critic – anonymous in those days – wrote in a review: Mr. Brooke writes with the disciplined freedom that has always led him, enchanted and enchanting, round the spirals of his personal experience. It was his last book of that type though one manuscript, possibly in the same style, remains unpublished in an American academic archive. Bibliography Fiction: The Orchid Trilogy: The Military Orchid (1948) A Mine of Serpents (1949) The Goose Cathedral (1950) The Scapegoat (1948) The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950) Passing of a Hero (1953) Private View (1954) The Dog at Clambercrown (1955) The Crisis in