Not many people can say that their parents are buried close to Napoleon!
I first saw this grave at my mother's funeral in the same year that Napoleon, the Suffolk one, died. At the time I knew little about Napoleon Bonaparte, and nothing of his place in the popular imagination and memory of the inhabitants of these islands.
Some 20 years after the Suffolk Napoleon was born, in what at the time would have seemed far off Manchester, the future writer Anthony Burgess's father apparently wondered whether his son would be another Napoleon, but he didn't go as far as Mr Harper's parents, settling on the names John Anthony for his son.