A terrible mystery of war, behind the basement steps
A First World War soldier’s plight and eventual death is revealed in found letters
You start to get a feeling for this soldier, Reginald Cox, and then, in April 1917, things change.
The house they live in rose from the ground on a tide of peace in 1945, the peace at the end of one war, but in its depths lay hidden a mysterious reminder of the horrors of another, Gillian Love and Colin Brow recently discovered.
It’s a handsome house on the Mountain, good bones as they say, modest in size but stout, with a great view of the city. Bob Mercer staked it out after he returned from the Second World War, taking advantage, as many soldiers did, of the Veterans’ Land Act.
Mr. Mercer had already died when Colin and Gillian took possession, only the second people to live there, 12 years ago. Widow Doris Mercer was in her 90s when she sold to them, and she has since gone as well.
Colin and Gillian have overhauled the place, stem to stern, cellar to ceiling, respectfully. The renovations are superlative, not surprisingly, as Colin, aside from working on the house, restores old Indian motorcycles. He’s got a gift.
Which brings us to the stairs down to the basement — an elegant stained pine flight with a gentle turn at the bottom. When they were ripping out the old ones earlier this year, they noticed something.
“There was a cavity (behind the wood of the step) at the bottom where it (the staircase) hooks down,” Colin tells me. Gillian reached her arm in deep and said, “Oh.”
It was a large old-fashioned tin container, with darkened embossed letters spelling out Silver Cross Tea, and inside Gillian and Colin found well-preserved letters, written in faded pencil on ruled paper, many probably scrawled in a trench. Most of the correspondence is from Reginald James Cox to his wife May.
There were also medals and impressively wrought brass regimental badges and pins, with fine leaf work, including Reginald’s 86 Canada Overseas Machine Gun Battalion.
From the letters evolves a picture of a soldier’s embitterment. They go from expressing excitement to boredom to a kind of gnawing misery and also remorse at the way he treated May, though we don’t find out why.
In one letter he explains eight men had to share “a bowl of mince and rice mixed with water.” In another, on YMCA letterhead he responds to news, presumably from May in an earlier letter, of some young man for whom he clearly has little patience.
“Oh, the great big baby ought to be out here where better men are getting killed every day. I would like to see him when a few rats ran over his face.”
He had awful toothaches but didn’t care for the dentist, who had terrible bad trench-side manner.
“The dentist is quick-tempered and makes me feel very uncomfortable. The first day he was shouting at me because I did not open my mouth wide enough to suit him.”
The letters are mostly dated 1916. You start to get a feeling for this soldier, Reginald Cox, and then, in April 1917, things change. The letters are not from Reginald Cox but about him. He is terribly wounded, in the abdomen, on April 9 of that year and some of you will recognize it as the first day of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. There is original correspondence, among what Colin and Gillian found, from the Canadian war authority notifying relatives that Reginald Cox died in the clearing station the next day; the addressee is a Mrs. Cox, 375 Barton St. E., Hamilton. A tragic coda.
There are other fascinating odds and ends. A very proper event program for the fancy dress dinner and dance Christmas program, 1927, Prospect Private Hotel, Promenade, Blackpool. Who knows what significance it had?
There is also an earlier letter, dated 1914, from a Harold Jowett who died that very year, near the beginning of war, apparently in a bomb blast that left nothing of him but a battered metal dog tag.
“I believe Doris (Mercer) was a Cox and may have been the daughter of R.J. Cox,” says Gillian. But they don’t know for sure and have no way to find out.
If you can help with the mystery please contact me, and I will be in touch with Colin and Gillian.