In the descending gloom of an autumn evening, a small funeral party has gathered in the graveyard of the church of St John the Evangelist, a Gothic edifice faced with knapped, squared flints and roofed in blue slate, which stands in the Hampshire village of West Meon. It is a pleasant, sleepy, ancient spot, where a succession of churches have stood since the twelfth century.
Around the funeral party stand lichened gravestones dating back more than four centuries. The buried include William Cobbett, the radical pamphleteer, and Thomas Lord, the cricketer and founder of the cricket ground in St John’s Wood that bears his name. To the north of the church and about three-quarters of the way up a shallow embankment is a low grave with a cross, and it is here in the evening darkness that the funeral party stand.
There are just five of them. The Reverend John Hurst has been vicar here since 1950. Beside him is a slim man of fifty wearing spectacles, and with him, his wife and his son who is in his early twenties. There are three wreaths – the largest reads, ‘For my darling, dearest boy with all my love, from Mum’. The elderly mother is too ill to attend. Another is from the man’s brother, Nigel, who is at the graveside, and the third is from a group of friends. It is a simple service with no music, hymns or sermon.1
They have gathered in darkness to bury quietly the ashes of a son of West Meon – a man as English as this place in which he spent his childhood, a man proud and fond of his country, yet a man who was also a traitor, a man so unwelcome here that even in death his remains must be interred in secret.
‘There was such strong feeling aroused,’ the Reverend John Hurst would recall many years later, ‘that I thought some reporter might have followed Nigel down to West Meon when he brought the ashes, so I did not dig the hole for the casket till ten minutes before he was due to arrive.’ As he places the small casket into the hastily prepared hole, the vicar experiences an awkward moment: it isn’t quite deep enough for the ornate vessel. ‘There was a plaster spike on top, of which the tip was just level with the grass, so I broke off the tip and put it in my pocket.’2
The dead man’s ashes are placed in the family plot besides those of his father, who had died almost forty years earlier. On the front of the cross is inscribed: Malcolm Kingsford de Moncy Burgess died 1924. To it would now be added: Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess d. 30 August 1963.
Guy Burgess had finally had his wish and returned home.