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Emma Rice on her Grandad

My Grandad was the gentlest human being I have ever met. He had a wide, clear face, snow-white hair and rough gardening hands as wide as shovels. He was as magnetic as catnip to the local cats as he stroked them so hard their tummies would dip down to the ground. As a child, I loved to be with him, calm and safe, picking runner beans or collecting sweet tomatoes from his green house. My Grandad was also almost totally silent.

A lifelong campanologist, he carried a set of handbells with him throughout the war. He and his fellow soldiers would play them over the graves of the friends that had fallen.

I have talked to my family and now have a few more fragments to add to my own memories.

– Born in 1907, he left his home in Hampshire at 14 and walked to Dorset where he got a job working for the vicar of Evershot. He gardened and dug graves and learnt to ring the bells. He met my Gran, Edna Mary Rutley.

– He was enlisted into the Dorset Regiment in 1939 along with all the other young men he had grown up with. He left my Gran with my mother, who was one year old, and pregnant with my uncle, who he would not meet properly for another six years.

– In 1944 he was part of the second invasion, pushing forward through Holland and towards Arnhem. He was part of the battles dramatized in A Bridge Too Far.

– He described seeing bodies at the side of the road stacked like haystacks.

– My mother remembers him saying that after the war, he vowed he would enjoy every day.

– My uncle believes that if he had had the education and the support, he [my Grandad] would have been a conscientious objector – if he'd met a German soldier, he would have shaken his hand.

So, this production of A Matter of Life and Death is dedicated to Harry Dennis Watton Bishop, my beloved Grandad, and all the memories he chose not to burden those he loved with. I thank him and all the other good men and women that fought with him for their bravery and their terror and the shadows they endured for the rest of their lives. It is in their honour that we will play Grandad's handbells in the performance. We will play them for the dead of all wars, thanking them, mourning them and raging against the dying of the light.

© Emma Rice, 2007

The full version of Emma Rice's article appears in the programme for A Matter of Life and Death (see related link to the right)