The Keepsake Box: Prologue to Kathleen's Cariole Ride

This true tale begins in 1917 and glides through the roaring, optimistic Twenties. The automobile, airplane, radio, telephone and telegraph have just been invented. Prohibition is the law; flappers wear their hair in bobs; Charles Lindbergh and the Prince of Wales are super heroes.

Like most people, I didn’t think much about what my parents were like before I was born. They hardly ever talked about it either.

It wasn’t until I was  63, and they were dead, that my sister startled me with something I had never seen before. It was a green metal box with a collapsible chrome handle on top, and a little key dangling from the  lock by a leather lace. (Our mother did leather work as a hobby.)

“If anyone is going to write a family history it will be you,” Tanis said, and left me and the box alone to stare at each other. I was busy and didn’t welcome having another chore thrust upon me, so just put it on a shelf in the basement.

Books find their own readers, the Canadian author Robertson Davies once said, and in this case the book found its own writer. The day I opened the box to read a journal to school children or, more precisely, the moment the teacher told me I should write a book (because I was crying) I became an author, obsessed with a love story that could be described only in epic terms.

Kathleen Elizabeth Ward and Jack or JAC (John Ambrose Campbell) Kell encountered each only because of World War I. She was a city councilor's daughter from Portsmouth, England, population 190,000. He was a farmer from Cookstown, Canada, population 550, not counting the pigs, horses and cows.

In her last year at high school, Kathleen’s fiancé, Victor, came home from the battlefield in France wasting away from typhoid fever and soon died. Almost 900,000 of the most eligible Englishmen were killed in the war, a monumental sacrifice.

The sporting, adventurous, romantic, idealistic side of war lured Jack with posters, marching bands, sweethearts' farewell kisses, a uniform, pay and free passage to Europe. At the military age of 19 he left the hills of beans he was hoeing and the earth he was plowing with teams of up to six horses and said goodbye to his family on their 100-acre farm.

Soon after Jack arrived ‘over there’ a Sunday school teacher, Mr. Ward, invited him and other colonial servicemen to his home for tea with his family of a wife, eldest daughter and twin girl and boy.

When I was a child, I thought my parents’ bedroom with two bear skins on the floor, complete with heads, eyes, open jaws, teeth and claws, was a strange place to seek comfort. But they had fond memories of the North and the Swampy Cree.