Letters from Vimy
THE DEATH OF AUDREY LESTER FOSTER WAS JUST THE BEGINNING FOR ONE NOVA SCOTIA FAMILY.
The letter from France arrived at the farm in White Rock, N. S ., during the summer of 1917. It was delivered to Mrs. William Foster — Minnie — to those who knew her well. Minnie’s second- eldest son, Audrey Lester Foster, was killed on April 9 in the Canadian assault on Vimy Ridge. The correspondent was a family friend, a member of the “4th Platoon” named Eddie. Eddie wrote to say how “sorry” he was for the Fosters’ loss and how he had had “quite a long” talk with Audrey on Easter Sunday.
“He seemed quite cheerful. But Monday afternoon I heard about him getting killed. While going over the top, he got shot by a machine gun, getting three bullets through the stomach. He still continued on, until he dropped dead.”
A life cut short shifts the narrative arc in a family, from what might have been, had the dead lived, to what came to be in the wake of their passing. And what came to be, after Audrey Lester Foster’s life ebbed away in the mud at Vimy, is a deeply personal matter for Dave Guy. Dave is an editor here, at Postmedia. He is tall and friendly and smart and loves hockey and has, according to his older brother, Stanton Guy, the “classic Foster nose,” reminiscent of their great-uncle, Audrey.
Dave and his siblings and their cousins and their children — and their children’s children — are heirs to the events of April 1917. Audrey Lester Foster’s death was a tragic end, but it also marked a beginning.
“If my great-uncle doesn’t get killed at Vimy,” Dave said, “then I don’t exist.”
Stanton Foster was Audrey’ s older brother. He joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force on July 15, 1915, listing his profession as “bookkeeper.” Stanton was 25 years old and single. Audrey, born on Christmas Day, 1894, enlisted six months later. Audrey had dark hair and blue eyes. A third brother, Bill, was deemed medically unfit for military service, while the fourth Foster boy, Bert, was too young.
Audre y was sent to France to fight. Stanton, the bookkeeper, was assigned to keep the books, and worked as a paymaster at the Canadian base in Folkestone, England. Audrey wrote several letters home. In one he describes how good “it felt to get a bath,” and that he hoped to be back in Nova Scotia for apple picking season the next fall.
“As far as I can tell everything is about the same, but we are living in the hopes that it will end sometime,” he wrote.
He signed each of his letters: “Your loving son, Audrey.”
Minnie Foster received Audrey’s final dispatch after having already learned of his death. She then sent a letter to her son, Bill, in Massachusetts, a heartwrenching note that her great- granddaughter, Anne Foster Worlock, vividly recalls reading some years ago.
“She wrote all this ordinary news to Bill — about a cow escaping into a neighbour’s yard,” Anne says from her home in England. “But then, in the middle of a sentence, she would write: ‘ Oh Audrey, my darling Audrey, he can’t be dead, his clothes are still in the closet ... Oh Audrey, my darling, darling Audrey.’ ”
“It goes on l i ke t hat throughout the letter. It still makes me cry.”
After Audrey’s death at Vimy his older brother, the bookkeeper, begged his superiors to let him join the fight in France, to avenge his brother’s death. Stanton ultimately accepted a demotion in rank from sergeant to private to gain his transfer.
But the plan backfired. He was badly wounded and returned to England on a stretcher, deaf and battered, with a bandage around his head. He would spend about a year in hospital. Stanton was a funny man, a true farm boy, with a gift for storytelling. One of his hospital bedside listeners in England was Mabel Davies. Mabel was from London. Mabel was five years younger t han Stanton. Mabel would visit the wounded Canadian.
Whenever she left, Stan- ton wasn’t able to get her off his mind. He finally wrote to his brother, Bill, about “the girl.” He was too gentlemanly to name names. Instead, he agonized over how many years he had wasted because of the war, and he wondered whether he was too old — 29 in 1918 — to ask “the girl” to marry him. How could he possibly give her all that she deserved in life?
Eventually, he proposed. Stanton was shipped home to Canada in 1919. Mabel followed a year later, aboard the RMS Caronia. They wed on the Halifax docks on Aug. 13, 1920. Stanton became a successful chartered accountant. The couple had four children — including Margaret, Dave Guy’s mother — and a cottage in St. Margaret’s Bay, N. S., where the Foster clan would gather for Sunday night dinners. Mabel would cook roast beef and blood pudding and joke with Stanton, although everybody, i ncluding his grandchildren, knew him as “Pop.”
“Here was this man who had been through all this considerable loss and he was gentle, absolutely gentle,” Anne Foster Worlock says. “Pop, I think, was besotted with Mabel, right up until the very end.”
Pop would read to his grandchildren in his later years, mesmerizing them with his magic tricks, including an ability to hypnotize a bee by stroking it as i t perched on his finger. He never talked about the war or his brother Audrey’s death.
Audrey Lester Foster is buried i n France not far from the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge. There is a maple tree near his grave, whose leaves turn golden in autumn. His headstone bears the inscription: “It is sad that one we cherish should be taken from our home.”
Pop and Mabel are buried alongside one another in Sackville, N. S., while their descendants are scattered across Canada. Dave Guy’s daughter was married this past November. Stanton Guy’s daughter had her second child days ago; and so the family thread continues, binding the joys of the present to a young man’s death, long ago, on the faraway fields of France.