- Deeply Rooted in Our History
Personal stories are powerful.
Every year, hundreds of schoolchildren make a trip to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa to visit a small, hundred-year-old teddy bear. The bear belonged to ten-year-old Aileen Rogers from East Farnham, Quebec, who gave it to her father as a good-luck charm when he left to fight in the First World War. Aileen never saw her father again, as he was killed during the Battle of Passchendaele in the fall of 1917. The bear was found in Lawrence Rogers’s jacket pocket and sent back home to his family. For kids today, Teddy is not only a worn and familiar object but also a powerful reminder of the horrific ways in which war continues to affect families.
Like A Bear in War (Innes and Endrulat), which Brian Deines also illustrated and which tells the story of Teddy and the Rogers family, The Vimy Oaks is based on a true story. Leslie Howard Miller was a twenty-five-year-old teacher living in Scarborough, Ontario, when he signed his attestation papers in December 1914. In the portraits taken of him in uniform, Miller looks less like a soldier than a loving big brother. Indeed, like tens of thousands of other Canadian soldiers, Miller was a son, a brother, a young man with a life ahead of him. He chose to leave everything behind to serve in this overseas war.
Through Lieutenant Leslie Miller, The Vimy Oaks introduces young readers to the world of communications in the First World War, and to the work of the not-so-well-known Canadian Signal Corps. The book also depicts the daily experiences of Canadian soldiers, from the training and preparation that preceded the battle to the excitement that came with fighting—in this case in the Battle of Vimy Ridge—and then the return [End Page 191] to the calm before another storm of steel.
It was during a period of relative quiet, after the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, that Lieutenant Miller gathered acorns from war-damaged oak trees near the trenches in France. The author states that he mailed those acorns to his family back in Ontario. As was often the case in First World War paintings and artworks, trees are central to this book. For many Canadian soldiers and nurses serving overseas who witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by the war, trees and flowers were symbols of strength in the midst of battle, of survival, regeneration, and the hope for peace and brighter days. Many soldiers and nurses discussed trees and vegetation in their correspondence with loved ones at home. Researchers today still find flowers and leaves between pages of soldiers’ letters and in their diaries and photo albums.
Although sending flowers to dear ones at home was relatively common during the First World War, the next chapter of this story is unique. Leslie Miller survived the war and returned to Ontario. In the 1920s, he married Mary Isabel “Essie” Fraser, and together they built the Vimy Oaks Farm. According to Granfield’s research, this is where the Vimy acorns were planted and grew into magnificent trees. For Miller, the Vimy Oaks Farm was a safe haven where he reconnected with nature after years of devastation. It is also where, for four decades, Essie and Leslie Miller welcomed family, friends, and members of the local community, with whom he often shared his war stories. After the sale of the farm in 1965 and Miller’s death in 1979, the story of the oaks that had grown from Vimy acorns started slowly to fade from memory. But even as the site of the Miller family farm became the grounds of the Scarborough Chinese Baptist Church, the trees continued to grow wider and taller. The book ends with the author introducing the Vimy Oaks Repatriation Project, which aims to bring some of the oaks of Scarborough-Agincourt back to Vimy.
Granfield’s book is a touching tribute to an...