Long John Silver and the heroine of Peter Pan are buried together in the Bedfordshire country churchyard of St John’s, where fact is sadder than fiction. Dwarfing the quiet headstones and crosses of local folk among the limes, their hulk of a memorial is more like a mausoleum. “William Ernest Henley”, my son could read out aloud from the opposite side of the graveyard, such is its dominance over this sparsely populated plot.
Perhaps it is a fitting size for Henley – poet, editor and amputee, whose larger-than-life character and mastery of his disability inspired his friend Robert Louis Stevenson to conjure up the antihero of Treasure Island. Henley’s wife Anna is barely acknowledged at the foot of the inscription, while pathos dwells at the back of the monument in the epitaph for their only child. Little lisping Margaret Henley told another of her father’s literary acquaintances that she was his “fwendy-wendy”, and JM Barrie duly coined the first name that would be given to countless girls over the following century and beyond. Poor Margaret, however, didn’t live to see her sixth birthday.
Another distinctive monument, foregrounding its illustrious neighbour, commemorates four young men who did not live here but died within sight. The writing on their memorial faces a ploughed field, and on the other side is Potton Wood, where their Liberator bomber aircraft crashed on a test flight only weeks after the end of the second world war. People from the village and nearby farms rushed to the scene and saved three of the seven crew, as well as Bitsa, the dead Australian pilot’s scottish terrier puppy, who stood barking over one of the injured men until the rescuers found him.
As always when I come here, I run my fingers over the soft contours of the hard Welsh slate. Sculpted into the shape of the aircraft’s wing tip and engraved by the East Anglian sculptor Gary Breeze, it was mounted here a quarter of a century ago. It looks as good as new, a fitting tribute to men in their 20s who outlived the war only to die in peacetime.
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