Sometimes the story around a book is even better than the book itself. This is definitely the case with Dinah Brooke’s 1974 novel The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert.
The Miserable Child is a six-year-old English girl abandoned in a dismal boarding school in the south of England. Her mother is in a sanatorium, her father, as the title suggests, is in the desert — in this case, serving with Montgomery in Egypt. It’s the autumn of 1942. At the school, they have whalemeat stew for lunch: “There is a war on, you know.”
The little girl knows she’s been abandoned: “Daddy Daddy Daddy, you don’t think of me at all,” she complains. “You imagine that I am secure, but there is no security for me if you are about to die.” In the desert, Monty has a Plan. A great offensive against the Germans is in preparation. The girl, of course, knows nothing about this — at the time.
In telling the story of The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert, Dinah Brooke adopts both the perspective of a frightened and lonely little girl in 1942 and of her adult self, aware of history with a big H (the battle of El Alamein) and a little one (her father’s being evacuated with a case of jaundice before the attack). At school, “The Miserable Child is alone and panic-stricken.” At the same time, however, she also wanders around the front in Egypt, observing the progress of the battle: “The Miserable Child wanders up to Kidney Ridge, where the enemy are launching heavy armoured counterattacks…. She prowls around the battlefield like a jackal, a hyena, sniffing at bodies as the sun rises high and the heat and the flies and the stench rise with it….”
Brooke switches perspectives instantly, without offering us signal or clue. It makes reading a disconcerting experience but also adds to the impact of the narrative. Though things follow a roughly chronological order, we are never quite sure of where the narrator stands. Are we seeing things through the eyes of the Miserable Child in the moment or through the eyes of the woman whose memories of her miserable childhood and knowledge of other facts provide context not available to the girl?
We are one-third of our way into the book before it becomes clear that this is really the story of the father, not the child. The son of a steel-makng family in the North, Bob is a promising young man, ready to work his way up the ladder at the works, eager to push for improvements. His judgment is not always sound, however. He has a bit too much of a taste for drink and he marries a fragile, artistic woman suffering from TB. When the war comes, he is happy for the opportunity to escape into the Army, placing his daughter into a convenient school and enjoying a spree in London with his best friend’s wife before shipping out.
Though Bob proves unfit for service and returns to a post with the steel works, his promise has already faded. He knows neither how to accommodate the growing role of the trades unions nor how to keep the trust of the financiers or government ministers. So, he heads to Kenya to launch himself again, divorcing his first wife and picking up another along the way. The Miserable Child, of course, is left to make her way at the same miserable school.
The construction firm he joins in Kenya goes bust, and Bob takes to drink while his new wife’s popularity among the clubmen leads to mocking comments behind his back. He gives up Kenya and the wife and heads back to England. Within weeks, he’s lying in a locked ward for alcoholics, admitted through the collusion of his brother and the presiding physician.
From here, Bob’s story is one of steady decline, with most of his time spent in jail or asylums. Everyone agrees he’s a fine fellow. On the few occasions when he’s able to visit his daughter, in school or in London or on the maternity ward after the birth of his first grandchild, everyone comments on his manners and charm. It’s just that he can’t take care of himself, let alone anyone else. And so he leaves the Miserable Child there in the hospital facing the prospect of raising her child without the help of her own parents.
With only what we’re told in the book, we’re left wondering what Dinah Brooke was trying to do in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert. We feel sympathy for both father and daughter, but what is the point of this account of their miseries?
Fortunately, Brooke gave us her answer in “An Obsession Revisited,” an essay she wrote for Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, a collection edited by Ursula Owen and published in 1983 by Virago. “I was obsessed with my Dad for twenty years,” she writes.
You could almost say I made a career out of him – or out of the lack of him. Do people whose fathers are more present in their lives become so obsessed? I never lived with him after I was three, hardly saw him between the ages of seven and twenty-five, yet the amount of energy I focused on him was phenomenal.
“It would be hard not to describe his life as a failure,” she acknowledges. Like Bob in the book, his father ran a steel factory — Lysachts Steel Works in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. He married a painter with lung problems, hit a plateau in his rise in the firm, and shrugged off the fetters of that life by joining the Army and warehousing his daughter in a boarding school. After the war, he divorced, remarried, went to Kenya and failed to make a new start. And from there, as Brooke puts it, “He became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror.”
In hindsight, she sees the novel as an act of reparation — a posthumous attempt to establish kind of relationship she never had — and of restoration (of her father’s reputation):
I mean look, a book, printed pages, hard covers, shiny pictures. Just look at you, see what a mess you made of your life? You’re much better like this. Neat, full of good things, fixed, appreciated. You really fucked it up didn’t you, you silly old man, but don’t worry, I’ll make it OK. I’ll rewrite your life for you, not improving things much — playing around with the facts a bit, yes; putting you into the army instead of the air force so I can have some nice games with Monty at El Alamein, but not papering over the cracks; not trying to make you appear better, more successful, a better father.
Joe, while I’m writing about you I feel as if I’m pushing something uphill. Making a tremendous effort, as if I have to act both parts at once, the parent and the child. I did so want you to be a father to me. I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.
It wasn’t enough, though. “I was really hooked on fathers,” Brooke admits. She wrote another novel (Death Games (1976)), in which “a suicidal daughter pursues her father through the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, and finally, in the heat of the afternoon, she makes love to him, and as he comes he has a heart attack and dies.” In an early fictional instance of self-harming, the daughter holds lit cigarettes to her skin just to feel something.
“Thank goodness I’ve finished with that little lot,” she concludes.
There’s another twist in the story, however. In “An Obsession Revisited,” Brooke mentions spending six years at the ashram of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. After becoming interested in the Bhagwan’s teachings in London, she travelled to India and made several short stays, during the last of which the Bhagwan annointed her with a new name, Ma Prem Pankaja.
Brooke decided to bring her children along and to settle in India for the long term. As she later wrote,
So we went, and settled into a run-down ex-British Raj house next to the ashram, surrounded by mangoes and palm trees. The only trouble was the kids didn’t like it much. The schools were dreadful, and there weren’t any kids their own age, turning ten, around the ashram. My daughter was having quite a good time, but my son desperately wanted to go home, and I more and more wanted to stay.
So, Brooke took her children back to England, left them in the care of their father, the actor Francis Dux, and returned to India. Brooke’s close friend, the writer Sally Belfrage, joined her and remained at the ashram for the better part of a year. Belfrage later published an account of the experience, Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram (1981), that offers an independent, if not entirely objective, view of Brooke’s time as a sannyasin (convert).
Belfrage was outraged by Brooke’s decision to leave her children behind. She also wasn’t convinced by Brooke’s embrace of her new faith. “They make her wear only orange,” Belfrage wrote, but in Brooke’s case, “It’s not by any means the shaven-headed-saffron-Buddhists-of-Oxford-Street sort of thing — Dior or Chloe will do as long as it’s orange,” and she looked “as Vogue-y as ever.” To Belfrage, the Rajneeshis were nothing more than a cult: “If Bhagwan were Billy Graham, they’d be out crusading; if he were Charles Manson they’d be out killing….”
Brooke returned to England, having decided against following the Bhagwan to his new enclave in Oregon, around the time that Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram was published. Feeling attacked by her friend, Brooke wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Responsible Mother” that appeared in The Guardian in May 1982. “I’d like to say something about motherhood from the point of view of this character, which was me,” it began.
“Leaving my children certainly did not happen easily or casually. Being an averagely neurotic, guilt-ridden middle-class Englishwoman I manage to make it as difficult as possible for myself and everyone else by endless agonies of indecision,” she admitted. In her response to those who criticized her decision, Brooke also pointed to experiences recounted in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert:
Among the myths to which I have subscribed is the one which decrees that children can only be happy rolling around like puppies in large groups wearing the minimum of clothes and not being forced to learn anything — because of course I was an only child and went to boarding school and had to wear a uniform.
And her feelings during this separation were perhaps not that different from those of her father over those years in the boarding school. “Most of the time I didn’t miss them at all,” she confessed. “My mother wrote regularly, sending photos and telling me how they were.”
After two years at the ashram, Brooke returned to England to spend Christmas of 1977 with them. When she returned to India, however, “I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for six weeks, almost all day, every day.” “Somehow,” she recognized, “all the sorrow of my own childhood were condensed into this endless crying.”
Discussing her situation, the Bhagwan suggested that Brooke was making the mistake of trying to take responsibility for her children’s feelings. She came to accept this view. “My parents are not responsible for the way in which I experience my life,” she informed The Guardian’s readers, “and neither I nor their father are responsible for the way in which our children experience theirs.” She felt justified in her choice: “I spent six years with an Enlightened Master, and not gift that life has to offer can be greater than that.”
As one can imagine, not everyone agreed with Brooke’s conclusion. The Guardian printed a number of angry responses to what most seemed to consider a “self indulgent” article. “I’m sorry that Dinah Brooke got so little out of being a mother,” wrote one. “My stomach churned on reading about Dinah Brooke’s six-year stay in India sans children,” wrote another, who couldn’t imagine spending even six days away from her own.
Dinah Brooke effectively disappeared from the printed page after “An Obsession Revisited” was published. In the short biographical remarks that preceded the essay, she wrote, “Returned to London. Ran a market stall, met Derek, now Mahabodh. Work as temp. sec. and freelance journalist. Tomorrow?” From what I’ve been able to determine, although Brooke had worked for The Observer and others prior to taking up fiction, her work after the ashram wasn’t for any major papers or magazines. [2023 update: Perhaps more will be revealed with the republication of her novel Lord Jim at Home by Daunt/McNally Editions.]