Brooke was often ill, and sometimes very; the entire family was always getting over something or other. As a child he was particularly prone to pink-eye and chronic sore throats. Cut off from his friends, isolated in the sick room, alongside his passion for literature this accounts for the fact that, even at a young age, he produced so many letters and poems. His writing must have entertained him as much as it did others, lest they forget about him. His fragility also allowed him space for fantasy, even as he bemoaned the fact that this was ‘the most exciting part of my existence at present’. At one point he recorded a particularly compelling instance:

Actual death was less romantic. Suddenly, only days after his fanciful letter to Erica Cotterill, wherein he dramatically proposed to drink wine from polished skulls, his elder brother Dick was dead from pneumonia. Shocked, Brooke quickly returned to Cambridge. Of ‘our trouble’, as he called it, he wrote; ‘I could not face everybody. The only thing was if I could help Father and Mother by staying, but they say not, and I do not think so. And if I stayed I know that I should break down’. He worried about his remote but gentle father in particular, who ‘is very tired and broken by it’.

Although the loss of his brother was a blow, Brooke did begin to find his social feet at Cambridge. His friendship with Hugh Dalton helped; in addition to their political activities, they decided to set up a semiliterary, mildly political group called the ‘Carbonari’. This provided an opportunity to read poems and discuss the state of the world with a group of like-minded and, it must be said, carefully selected and screened undergraduates: Brooke was ever a keen controller of his company.