Lives in Cricket No 18 - FR Foster

The most remarkable facet of this series of correspondence is that on 27 June, a day after Foster’s first letter to Rego above he wrote the following somewhat pathetic epistle to a branch of Midland Bank in Birmingham: Dear Mr Rossier, Elizabeth Foster, dec. 74 I have to thank you very much indeed for your extreme kindness in sending the money to the Midland Bank at Leigh-on-Sea. There was no letter awaiting me at the bank, and I received no letter this morning. Am I to take it you are sending me the full £150 on Friday to the same bank, because if you do I shall never forget the goodness that you have all shown me since the death of my dearly beloved mother. Practically all the money I received yesterday has gone paying the most urgent bills, but there is still one very important account to settle and that is a loan on my car. I had a visit yesterday from two CID men about this very account and they gave me rather a rough overhauling, with the threat of reporting the matter to the Chief Constable. I did my best and we parted on a fairly friendly basis, but as they left one man said ‘We will do our best for you, but it is a very serious matter and I think you will see us again.’ Mr Rossier, I don’t want any more trouble in my life. I have had enough of it. For the last time, and I mean it, I beg of you to help me by sending The cloudy days of autumn and of winter 111 Do Not Pass ‘Go’. In 1946, Foster lived in Clarges Steet, Mayfair (left) but by 1950 had moved to Nelson Road, Leigh-on-Sea (right). Charles James Fox, Whig Foreign Secretary, once lived in the Mayfair house. Both pictures taken in 2010. 74 Foster’s mother.