Christopher Billing

And Do the Dead Feel Spring? Christopher Billing

At the beginning of the 20th Century millions of people's lives were affected, to varying degrees, by the events of the First World War. My grandfather, Howard Hardy, was one of many. Returning from teacher training college in 1912, with a bright future ahead of him, nothing could have been further from his mind than the traumatic experiences meted out to him within a few short years. And Do the Dead Feel Spring is based on a selected amount of factual events from Howard's life that have been passed on to me by my mother, Howard's daughter, and mine is the story they appear in. A story that highlights the effects of war on those 'innocent and naive' men, women and children, and how, even years later, the struggle to reconcile the experiences, and in some way integrate them into a 'normal life', continues - even to, in Howard's case, a premature and unnatural death.