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.
