Portslade
Powys walked into Hove each day to give his lectures and his route took him past the Portslade gasworks. Here he often came across a solitary woman carrying a basket who came to have a lasting symbolic significance for him.
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' ...mystical figures, messengers of the Grail you might almost call them, that all my days have at intervals crossed my path. Such was the madwoman I used to encounter by those Portslade gasworks, as I walked from Southwick to West Brighton...' |
The gasworks, and the ferry boat by which workers crossed, were a familiar feature of Portslade for a hundred years or so but finally closed in the 1970s.
Also at Portslade, Powys was introduced by Mr Pollard to the ageing poet Alfred De Kantzow who lived in Carlton Terrace next to the railway station. Powys and De Kantzow became firm friends and would accompany each other on lengthy walks through the byways of Sussex, visiting out-of-the-way taverns and ancient village churchyards, all the while conducting philosophical debates and quoting poetry to each other.
' Our excited voices, the voices of an aquiline-nosed lean old man and an aquiline-nosed lean young man rose and fell as we stood among the patient tombs and under the echoing porches of these quiet purlieus of rural piety...prophesying planetary catastrophes and universal overthrows.' |
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De Kantzow died in London in 1919. His wife, son and grandson are all buried in the graveyard of St Leonards, Aldrington.
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