Cooksbridge
Powys and his literary friends would often meet at convenient hostelries. The 'circle' included his brother-in-law, T.H.Lyon, and J.W.Williams, "the Catholic", whom he credits with having first encouraged him in the ambition to write major works of fiction.
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' I well recall in the Station Inn at Cooksbridge once, making the remark, when "The Catholic" was qualifying, with rather over-elaborate caution, some wild Swift-like outburst of Thomas Henry's, that it was like Machiavelli taking upon himself to tutor Caesar Borgia.' |
JCP's neurotic aberrations and manias were in full flight at this period. He describes how he developed a fear that he would be killed in a railway accident, and so secretly travelled first-class, on the grounds that first-class passengers seemed to appear in the lists of the dead in railway accidents less frequently than those travelling third-class!
' I now can remember the queer sense of shame...with which, at the little aperture in that Cooksbridge station I used to receive my white ticket. "First-class return to Eastbourne, if you please," I would murmur, in as natural a voice as I could assume...' |
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The name Cooksbridge, despite Powys's fears, has nothing to do with kitchens. The version in circulation, it is true, is that it refers to local cooks who fed Simon de Montfort's men at the Battle of Lewes. But there is no evidence for this account, which has a distinct odour of the post hoc about it. It seems that the name actually derives from a bridge a quarter of a mile or so north of the station, known formerly as Cooke's bridge after a local landowner (Mawer and Stenton, The Place-names of Sussex, CUP, 1930, p.315).
But that need not prevent us enjoying JCP's mutterings over 'this frying-pan name'.
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