The pavilion and the church

My first Denton odyssey was complete. I checked the time – a couple of hours before dark, enough to walk back into Broadstairs by the coastal path to see if I could identify any of the other places that Denton refers to. 

Western Esplanade sweeps north into Broadstairs from Corlismore, separated from the coastal footpath by 100 feet or so of luxuriously green grass. Unsurprisingly, the footpath is lined with wooden benches. Even with the bitingly bracing wind, it’s a lovely place to sit and lose yourself in horizon-gazing thought. More surprisingly, every single bench is in memoriam, making them feel slightly disrespectful to sit on. It feels a bit like sitting on someone’s gravestone. And they’re not socially-distanced benches – they’re jammed along the path arm to arm. This is clearly a Broadstairs Thing. The nearest cemetery is in Ramsgate, two miles down the coast, and this is a lovely, local way to remember. Buy a bench, engrave it and install it on the sea front so you can sit in contemplative thought, feeling close to a loved one. I wondered what I would inscribe on a bench dedicated to Denton (feel free to make suggestions in the comments!). Broadstairs wasn’t somewhere he was terribly happy, but it was an important place in his life. Given that Denton never had a grave, it would be nice to have a memorial to him in some form.

A ten-minute stroll towards Broadstairs brought me to Viking Bay, and the path wound past a curious building.

Inaccurately called the Clock Tower (clock, yes; tower, nope), it’s squat and oxidised, with a clock box, then a weathervane, perched incongruously on top of two different roof designs. Here was an indecisive architect who clearly favoured a kitchen sink approach. Underneath this very busy roofage was a partitioned structure, providing lots of socially-distanced seating. Wikipedia informed me that the Clock Tower was erected to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, burned down in the 1960’s, and was rebuilt to almost the exact specification (why?!) to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. 

Beyond the Clock Tower was the promenade proper, benches still jostling for position. I sought the Royal Albion Hotel. The first time that Denton goes out without Dr Easton, he takes a bus into town and heads straight into a chocolate shop. A man after my own heart. 

“Then I walked down the narrow lane between the Royal Albion Hotel and the shop which showed in one corner of its window small boxes decorated with many different shells.”

The Royal Albion Hotel is still there, as is the shop, now a tourist gift shop. It’s not such a narrow lane, but the building does look as though it was there in 1935. Denton stops to look at the shells, then moves on to the “glass pavilion on the edge of the cliff”.

Was the pavilion still there? Glass structures aren’t terribly robust, so my hopes weren’t high. At the bottom of the lane between the Royal Albion Hotel and the gift shop, the Pavilion Hotel is a short walk to the left, from whence the road climbs steeply up the cliff. I walked along to check it out, wondering if the hotel had been built on top of Denton’s pavilion, or perhaps took its name from one that still stood in its grounds. However, given its Art Deco glasswork, and its integration with the buildings around it, the Pavilion hotel has clearly been there some time, and it has no grounds to contain a namesake pavilion. I donned my mask and went in for a cup of tea, asking my server if he knew anything about the history of the building, and whether there was an original pavilion. He was very keen to be helpful, flagging down other members of staff to ask about it, and allowing me to peep into their function room, which was lined with pictures of old Broadstairs. The consensus was that the Pavilion hotel wasn’t connected to an actual pavilion.

Glumly, I toiled up the cliffside path towards Bleak House (yes, THAT Bleak House). No pavilion, no room for a pavilion, and would Denton have been capable of that steep climb? Doubtful.

I returned to the bottom of the lane and headed off to the right. The promenade is quite wide, but it seems unlikely that it would once have been obstructed by a pavilion, and indeed, contemporary aerial pictures show nothing at the edge of the cliff in 1935. In a few minutes I found myself back at the Clock Tower. I sat down to consult ‘A Voice Through A Cloud’ to refresh my memory on the description of the pavilion.

“It was a damp, weighted, early November day with almost warm mist blowing in from the sea, and when I reached the pavilion I found someone already sheltering there from the watery vapour. He was pressed close against one of the glass partitions with his head sunk down between his hunched shoulders.”

Glass partitions? I’d been picturing a sort of cricket pavilion-cum-greenhouse, an enclosed building. But they wouldn’t have had glass partitions. The Clock Tower, however, had several glass partitions. It was at the edge of the cliff. It was there in 1935. Readers, I had found the ‘pavilion’ without even realising it! Bitterly regretting my lack of chocolates to smilingly offer a fellow pavilion inmate, but exultant at my successful detective work, and now very happy that the Clock Tower had been rebuilt to the original specification, I decided to call it a day.

Day two in Broadstairs, and I was off to church. As Denton grew stronger, he had a sense of “unused energy and restlessness”.

“I would long to go somewhere unknown, see some new sight, feel the world filling me”

A few minutes walk in the opposite direction to the railway bridge from Southcourt

“I could see a new church, twentieth-century Romanesque, built carefully of sliced flints, and with a shallow roof of crinkling pantiles.”

The church is Our Lady Star Of The Sea Roman Catholic Church. Finished only with boards when Denton saw it, it’s now complete, with a matching church hall which opened in 2012 now standing opposite the main door. To my great sorrow, neither building was open, and there was no sign of life. The noticeboard outside informed me that mass would remain online until further notice. 

I walked all around the church, working out from the architecture what was where. I identified the location of the altar, the little recesses in the north and south walls, and of course the bell tower. I sat on a bench to read Denton’s account of glimpsing the boy in the belltower through an open door.

“In the dim light it might have been a boy, a girl or a dwarf… there was something strange about it… It seemed very intent on its work and did not look once in my direction… I saw that it was a boy, perhaps nine or ten years old. He was wearing a curious helmet seemingly padded or covered with dark velvet. It was this helmet which had given him the strange appearance of a dwarf or some medieval knight, whose limbs had shrunk, but whose visored head had remained as large and threatening as ever.”

Nurse Goff later told Denton that the boy had been knocked out by the bell crashing down the bell tower and fracturing his skull. Against the odds, the boy survived and returned to his duties. 

“It was amazing to me that the boy could be back now, ringing this same bell. Did it never terrify him? Did he never feel the weight of it swinging far above him – the bell that had his blood on it? I thought that when its clapper tongue clanged in the hollowness, swelling the tower with its vibrating drone, he must feel terror at its violence. But his face on that afternoon when I first saw him was smoother than any sea-ground pebble.”

I wonder if Denton compared himself and the boy. Both had been terribly, life-changingly injured by the carelessness of others. The boy was back doing what he presumably loved, what gave his life meaning. Denton desperately wanted to do the same. I wonder if the boy inspired him in some way, renewed or accelerated his determination. Normal, independent life was slowly starting to feel a little more within his grasp.