Aunt Louisa and Walter Sickert

Two final visits remained on my Broadstairs agenda. The first was Upton Lodge, home of Louisa Noott, Lady Fox’s mother, where Denton took tea. Hopeville (then Hauteville) in St Peter’s was my second destination, once the residence of Walter Sickert, with whom Denton also took tea towards the end of his time in Broadstairs. The essay describing his visit to the eccentric, elderly artist was Denton’s first published prose, appearing in Horizon magazine in August 1942. It was to bring him to the attention of Edith Sitwell, prompting her oft-quoted declaration that Denton is a born writer.

I cannot tell you how much my brother Osbert… and I enjoyed your alarming experience with Mr Sickert. We laughed till we cried  – though really in some ways it was no laughing matter. But one thing came out very clearly and that is, that you are a born writer.

But let’s visit Aunt Louisa first. Upton Lodge is a five-minute walk from Southcourt, on the way to the church that fascinated Denton so much. 

Louisa Noott was really no relation at all. She was the mother of Lady Dorothy Fox, who became the second wife of Denton’s uncle Harry in 1905, who was first married to Denton’s aunt Josephine, who was his mother’s sister and who died in 1900. All clear? Splendid!

Denton leaves Southcourt and is soon approaching the house that he last visited aged six, recognising the grove of ilex trees that screened the garden from the road. He reaches the entrance, which was a “plain little Gothic revival porch painted cream colour”. From there, a covered walkway made of spindly cast iron led to the front door.

The Gothic arch no longer stands. Instead, tall, solid gates with a push-button entry system block even the tiniest peep of the house. Looks like the ilex trees are still there, though.

Happily for us, Upton Lodge is now a holiday rental, and you can see several pictures of the interior and exterior of the house as it looks now here. Denton remarks that 

Outside the oldest part of the house was a narrow verandah under a tin pagoda roof, delicately curved. There were square French doors on the ground floor, but the upper windows had slight Gothic decorations at the head. These and other details, together with the pillars of the verandah, were picked out in black

The ‘narrow verandah’ that Denton describes still stands, but most of the garden has now gone. If we compare the size of Upton Lodge’s grounds on a contemporary Ordnance Survey map with an aerial view of Upton Lodge today, it’s clear that the “wide lawns” and the underground bunker that Denton enjoyed visiting are long gone. Louisa Noott died in 1936, not long after Denton left Broadstairs, and the age of the buildings around Upton Lodge suggests that they were built around then. Perhaps the gardens were parcelled off and sold separately as part of the disposal of Aunt Louisa’s estate.

A little diffidently, Aunt Louisa tells Denton about her weekly meetings with her medium, and the deep comfort she draws from the messages from her son. Mervyn (Malcolm in AVTAC) was killed in action in WW1 on 20 October 1914, aged just 24. His name is immortalised in the memorial East Window of St Peter’s-in-Thanet church, and also in the 1971 comedy All Gas and Gaiters. Frank Muir, the author, was so taken by the name that he bestowed it upon the character of the Reverend Mervyn Noott, played by Derek Nimmo. 

Later that day, as he is undressing for bed, Denton realises that the worn, stained bottle-green velvet smoking jacket bestowed upon him by Louisa soon after his arrival at Southcourt had belonged to Malcolm.

I had been wearing it for months without thinking; but now, if I put it on, surely I should feel something, know something of him! All of him that was left in the world above ground lingered in the coat.

But, sadly for Denton, despite his vivid imagining of the medium’s appearance and motivations, nothing happened. Diligently burying his head into it and breathing deeply, the only smell was camphor. 

I left the gates of Upton Lodge and walked to St Peter’s, past the Roman Catholic church (yes, that one) and through what feels like an endless middle-class housing estate. The road finally ends at a T-junction, where the church that honours the memory of Mervyn Noott in its East Window stands. Heading right along the skinny pavement, navigating my way past a steady stream of oncoming pedestrians, I took an immediate dislike to St Peter’s. Its narrow main road is bordered by houses that come right up to the pavement on both sides, giving no room to widen the road for two-way traffic. Rather than deter traffic from driving through the village, the road is widened where it can be to allow traffic to pass, but there’s no traffic management. It’s every motorist for themselves. So long queues of cars sit idling, engines revving, enveloping pedestrians in their fuggy emissions. The drivers are ready to leap off the clutch at the first opportunity, indignant horns blaring every few seconds. Don’t visit St Peter’s, readers. It’s a polluted, noisy village. 

In a very few minutes I saw Hopeville on the other side of the road.

I imagined the taxi pulling up to deposit Denton and Gerald, then imagined their mix of discomfort and excitement being at a bohemian tea party where little of the usual etiquette was observed. If Denton was so horrified at Gerald accompanying him to tea uninvited (which I suppose reflected on Denton’s own manners, as his hosts would likely presume that he extended the invitation), it’s not surprising that he found Sickert’s departure from etiquette so disconcerting and difficult to respond to. I wondered a little at Edith Sitwell and her brother finding Denton’s account of his visit so side-splittingly hilarious. Whilst I delight in Denton’s dry humour, I don’t remember ever laughing out loud. I decided that it was probably because of the then-shocking behaviour of someone they knew being described, pitch perfect, in print. 

According to his Wikipedia page, Walter Sickert was ‘cosmopolitan and eccentric’, and extremely interested in Jack the Ripper. According to the author Patricia Cornwell,  Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Cornwell went as far as comparing Sickert’s mitochondrial DNA with that found on one of the hundreds of letters that Jack Ripper purportedly sent to Scotland Yard. Her claim has been celebrated and dismissed with equal fervour. I wondered if they discussed Jack the Ripper. I wondered how thrilled and horrified Denton would have been to know about Sickert’s obsession with, and possible involvement in, serial murder. However, he found himself utterly unable to respond to Sickert’s disconcerting questions and comments, so it’s unlikely that he would have found the presence of mind and composure to engage in conversation on the topic.

Without a pavement directly in front of the house to safely take more pictures, feeling my lungs filling with car emissions, I strode briskly on without attempting to cross the road and thankfully left St Peter’s behind.

Sorry that my time at Broadstairs was coming to an end, I wandered back towards the train station, and was astonished to come across a flint tower that had no apparent purpose. Astonished, because Denton declared himself longing 

…to go somewhere unknown, see some new sight, feel the world filling me…

How odd, then, that he didn’t mention the Crampton tower, which was built in 1859 to hold drinking water for Broadstairs. However, although it’s quite a tall building (perhaps the height of a modest church tower), it’s not built on elevated ground, so it’s possible that Denton didn’t see it at all. I found myself oddly saddened by the thought, and all the fancies that he could have had about it.

It was time to head home. Happy to have walked in Denton’s footsteps and seen so much of Broadstairs as he had seen it, I wondered what my next project should be. It would be exciting to see Shanghai, but travel isn’t really an option right now, and Shanghai – indeed, China – is utterly changed from Denton’s time there. Perhaps more archives are beckoning…