William Moutrie never spoke much about his time on the Western Front during the First World War, and when he died in 1975 it seemed his memories had gone with him.

But then in 1987, 99 years after he was born, the Great Storm of that year blew the roof off a family home, and blew open a portal to the trenches of 1915.

“My cousin was living there,” recalled son Douglas this week, 100 years after the end of the conflict.

"And when they cleared the loft they found a box and this letter was in it.”

Dated August 1915, the letter to William’s “mother, father, and all” is an eight page account of several months in Northern France - and now rests in the hands of William’s 97-year-old son at home in Queendown Avenue, Rainham, where he lives with wife Margaret.

William - or Billie as he signs off - begins recounting the “rotten ride” to the front line in cattle trucks, to “a place called La Flinc near Laventie”, and after a night’s rest, he and his company set to digging, erecting barbed wire, and burying the dead.

“It was not very nice to do this work and within a week of our departure from home to be put on one of the most remarkable battlefields during this war I thought was enough to unnerve some fellows but they way they stuck it... was wonderful, knowing the German trenches were only a hundred yards away and very often having either to walk over or remove a dead body.”

He describes wandering through captured German trenches, where “there seemed to be a strange quietness about the whole place”, and when his company move to La Gorge a few days later they suffer their first casualty - “Corp. Knowers, who was mortally wounded by a cart load of bombs going off.”

Easter of 1915 finds him in a church at Fleurbaix, being bombarded by big shells for the first time.

“They just skimmed the roof and dropped in the churchyard with not pleasant results,” he writes. “They had three hits one right through the window bursting inside the church and generally messing up the organ etc.

“All this time we were crouching down in a cellar and one fellow nearly went off his head.”

Billie himself - a clerk by trade and a stretcher bearer in the war - would win the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his bravery, but that would come later.

Moving back from the front line he saw the French countryside in desolation, although many inhabitants remained.

“In one case I came across a farm and all its buildings level with the ground but an old woman about 80 years of age had erected a small shanty of straw where she lived so as to be on the site where once stood a large farm; her looks were terrible and she would not speak to anyone.”

A bloody account of the Battle of Aubers Ridge, May 9, 1915 - a disaster for the British - begins optimistically with: “Our artillery opened fire about 5 o’clock in the morning and had their Trenches to a T”, but goes downhill with Billie recounting the men going over the top. “Then you saw what machine guns could do,” he writes. “They absolutely mowed our supports down.”

Later on, amidst the “smashed and twisted” ruins of Laventie, he has time to reflect “what is to be the price of all this?”

Near the end of his letter he adds: "I have enclosed a few postcards which I hope you will get safely but some of them are not true now, especially Ypres which is now nothing but ruins everywhere."

A century on from the war’s end, his son is also reflective on that price.

“I feel it’s a blooming waste,” he says “It’s a terrible waste, and a criminal waste.

“There were a lot of young widows around when I was young and you couldn’t help knowing about that.

“That is one of the biggest tragedies of war. It’s not only the people that died but the people that are left behind.”

But Billie did come home, and there’s still a sense of hope as he signs off: “I hope I have not wearied you with these few lines or made you worry yourselves unnecessarily over me, but I will now close with my love to you both and all with great hopes for the future.

"I have enclosed a few postcards which I hope you will get safely but some of them are not true now, especially Ypres which is now nothing but ruins everywhere.

"I remain,

"Your loving son,

Billie.”