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Author: Giles Walker

ISBN: 978-0987793102

I am always a little cautious when an author tells me that his or her book must be read and reviewed for “it is a story that must be told.” Giles Walker was one of those authors whom I met in the locker room at my local YMCA in Montreal. Prior to reading his debut book, Wake Me in the Morning: Uncovering A Secret Life, I knew very little about Walker and when I agreed to review his book, I Googled his name and was most impressed with his credentials.

Walker is a Montreal film-maker who has directed six feature-length films, two mini-series, and over one hundred episodes of several television shows. He was staff director at the National Film Board of Canada for twenty years. His short drama Bravery in the Field was nominated for an Oscar. However, his book is not about his career as a director, or for that matter, anything to do with the movie industry. Rather, it concerns his thirty year obsession in revealing the true story of a repulsive and monstrous teacher whom he came in contact with while attending a private boarding school in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Bishop's College School (BCS) during the late 1950s. The monster was the Reverend Harold (Harry)Theodore Gibson Forster whose sadistic behavior towards young boys should have landed him in prison and the keys to his cell thrown away.

Walker's narrative begins in 1957 when his parents shuffled him off from his hometown of St-Andrews-by-the Sea in New Brunswick to BCS in Lennoxville, Quebec. At the time, Harry, as the students nicknamed Forster, was the choirmaster, chaplain and more significantly the housemaster of the School House. As Walker recounts, he pretty much ran the students' lives and meted out punishment for wrongdoings against all traditional rules, plus his own demented rules. In addition, he was quite cunning in wining favor with the administration of BCS through his work with the choir and his firm sense of discipline. We should not forget that this was a time when corporal punishment was almost universal and was considered an essential component of boarding school life.

BCS provided Forester the perfect place where he, as a sadistic pedophile, could carry out atrocities without being reprimanded. Moreover, due to the lack of due diligence on the part of the BCS administration, he was able to fall through the cracks and gain employment while concealing some of his past hideous transgressions. In fact, he was able to be hired all over the world on the strength of recommendations from a few well-chosen friends and as he was a Cambridge educated cleric and choirmaster who taught at prestigious English schools as Eton and Shrewsbury, no one really bothered to dig a little deeper into his background.

It did not take too long after Walker landed at BCS that he experienced Forster's mercilessness when one day he lost his Latin primer and informed his teacher of his problem. Forster reminded poor Walker that you do not lose a book but rather misplace it, and ordered him to wake him at six the next morning bringing along with him the book. Walker had little choice but to obey and show up the next morning with hopefully the primer in hand. Unfortunately, after an agonizing night, and as he states, the longest of his life, Walker showed up without the book.

Forster, as was his custom when doling out his notorious insane brutal punishments during his sojourn at BCS, ordered Walker to pull down his pants and to lay across his bare thighs, whereupon he began severely beating him with a large wooden clothes brush with bright red bristles and a long handle. After putting down the brush, he continued beating Walker with the bare hand that had won him the Cambridge Heavyweight Boxing Championship, finishing with cupping his rear end for a few lingering moments. As Walker mentions: “This was no flailing act of anger, but a slow, almost ritualistic, torture,” and this was something to be repeated methodically at BCS over a span of seven years as he abused and terrorized more than five hundred youngsters. As Walker states: “it was consistent, even relentless, in the calculating way he pursued his sexual needs.” Apparently, Forster received sexual gratification from these beatings and today, as Walker was to discover, he would be categorized as a paraphiliac with pedophilic and sadistic tendencies seeking out an abnormal and very narrow circumscribed source of stimulation.

Forster was killed in a terrible train crash in 1968 in England. In 2006 BCS was the defendant of a fifty million dollar class action lawsuit that eventually was settled with thirty-seven claimants receiving a mere twenty-three thousand dollars each.

Wake Me in the Morning: Uncovering A Secret Life provides an insightful narrative that elucidates an era where deprave behavior on the part of teachers such as Forster were tolerated and acceptable. It was also an era where paraphiliacs and pedophiles were not exactly on the radar screen and even if the children would complain to their parents, their complaints would be considered an over-exaggeration and furthermore their fathers expected the boys to face adversity the way so many of them had done in the past.

This is a remarkably good book and an utterly absorbing read, as Walker illustrates investigative journalism at its best in relentlessly pursuing his story over a period of thirty years, tracking down individuals around the globe, digging up essential facts necessary to expose the secret life of Forster, and exhibiting superb research skills, all of which are meticulously detailed in the book. And yes, Mr. Walker, it is a story that must be told.