He brought the coffin home to substantiate this tale

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

Her tale is full of marvellously improbable family stories that are distinctly a product of England and its empire.

Arthur, the next eldest, was grey-eyed and rather more dashing; a magnificently well-made man, with a long-jawed throwaway charm; though certainly brave he was not conspicuously affectionate and only intermittently mild. He had just come back with his regiment from the West Indies, where, beset by yellow fever, they had died in great numbers. He himself was so desperately ill that his companions, not knowing about the Slessor constitution, had made his coffin and engraved his name on it and marched some miles in the hot sun to dig his grave. He brought the coffin home to substantiate this tale, and because it is one of those few things that cannot fail to come in useful. In fact he had no need of it for another sixty years. It hung about in the stables, getting underfoot, until someone hit on the notion of making it into a toboggan.