I am his grandson and I attended the ninetieth anniversary of the battle of Vimy in April 2007. The great monument had been cleaned up, the names carved into its plinth had been restored; the two soaring columns and the sculptures of the sorrowing women who guard the site and seem to focus memory in grief held the dying light of day as military buglers sounded a last post. As I looked down into the valley, in the dwindling light, it seemed impossible that men had actually scaled the ridge and had lived to tell the tale.
The next morning dawned bright, and by midday the whole hillside was filled with Canadians—carrying flags, maps of the battle, bags packed with sandwiches and water, guidebooks, cameras and, most importantly, memories and fragments of history they had been told by parents, grandparents, old friends in the Legion Hall and their schoolteachers. As I walked among the crowd, we were not strangers to each other. Everybody wanted to talk about why they were there and what it meant to them. An old woman remembered a brother. An old man remembered a father. Occasionally someone would reach into a backpack and carefully pull out a picture: there he was, in his puttees and service cap, eager, young and now no more. Families had come from all over Canada. They told me that their tours had started with the Normandy beaches, with Juno, and then, if they were from Newfoundland, they had visited the graveyards at Beaumont-Hamel, where the 1st Battalion of the Newfoundland Regiment was cut down. At the base of the hill, men and women walked slowly through the gravestones, bending down, photographing, stopping, placing a flag, writing something down, pausing, then walking on. Always the dates stopped them in their tracks, 1895–1917, 1894–1917, 1900–1917—so horribly young. Beneath some stones without a name engraved upon them lay a shattered body whose identity was known only to God.
Later that afternoon, there were speeches by the prime minister of France, the prime minister of Canada, the Queen and Prince Philip. But I do not remember what they said. It is the crowd I remember, this Canadian crowd, swarming over the hill, searching, looking and affirming something about themselves.
In that crowd were several thousand high school students, mostly from Ontario towns, but some also from out West and down East. Some wore T-shirts imprinted with the picture of a soldier from the Great War. Others carried social studies notebooks with the research they had done on a single soldier who had died at Vimy. Their teachers had assigned Vimy as their winter history assignment, and they fanned out over the hill, disappearing into the network of tunnels and trenches that are still kept open to remind people what the Canadians faced as they came up the hill under fire.
The speeches and the ceremony were held in a field below the monument, and just before the events began, the students and their teachers came down the road that winds around the monument down to the field below. As they did so, we could hear them singing “O Canada!,” thousands of young voices all together, the sound echoing against the monument, filling the air and stilling every other voice. It was a moment of affirmation—these young Canadians marching around the monument, singing their country’s anthem—that would have made William Grant’s heart glad.
4
LAMENT FOR A
NATION
George Grant was sixteen when his father died. Within a year, the family had scattered: Alison to London, where she was to remain until 1945; Margaret to marriage and a young family with Geoffrey Andrew, a teacher at Upper Canada College; Charity to social work in Toronto; and their mother to a job as superintendent of the Royal Victoria College, a women’s college at McGill University in Montreal. As for George, he followed in his father’s footsteps to Queen’s University in Kingston.
At Upper Canada College, he had been the principal’s son. At Queen’s he was the grandson of Principal Grant. In his mother’s eyes, he was the longed-for bearer of the family lineage. Both lineages—the Grants and the Parkins—were forbidding inheritances for a bereaved teenager. From both sides of the family, he was told he must excel, he must prove himself worthy.
He always said that it was his mother who tightened the vise of family expectation, who imbued him with a sense that he had to measure up to the ancestors. He adored her and resented the pressure of her expectations in equal measure. All his life he remained astonishingly needy for Maude’s love, which he felt, despite all evidence to the contrary, she withheld. With surprising candour, he confessed in later life to an enduring, even monstrous, Oedipus complex.
George’s memories of his father were a complex blend of condescension and respect. He was condescending about his father’s temperament, seemingly so gentle and genial, while George himself was all passionate conviction, consequences be damned. At the same time, he respected his father’s judgment of people, his quietly scathing view of his brother-in-law, Vincent Massey, as an ambitious social climber, his view of Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King as a sentimental but ruthless mediocrity. George knew his father was a liberal, both small L and big L, who sometimes voted for the socialist CCF from sheer exasperation with King. But King was not the only embodiment of liberalism. George remembered listening with his father to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural speech in 1933 on the radio in Grant House, with that immortal phrase “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.” The speech deeply moved his father with its vindication not only of faith in the republic, but of faith in politics itself. Whatever hostility George later displayed toward American liberalism, whatever scorn he heaped on the Canadian variant, it was tempered by the memory of what Roosevelt had meant to his father.
George must also have heard his father’s Upper Canada chapel sermons, particularly those that dwelt on the futility of war and the need to turn away from war as an instrument of politics. George used to say that his father had been ruined by the war, although it would have been truer to say that it was in the war that Choppy found his way. The same would prove true of the son. Like his father, he found himself in London in wartime and, as for his father, this time proved decisive in the making of his view of Canada and of his role as a Canadian.
In 1939 George won the Rhodes Scholarship and chose his father’s old Oxford college, Balliol. One can imagine what this would have meant to a grandson of Sir George Parkin, the founding secretary of the scholarships and a Balliol man himself. His mother, Maude, took the twenty-year-old to New York, treated him to a performance of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and waved goodbye to him on the USS Manhattan, bound for Liverpool.
He reached Oxford a month after war was declared. Already at Queen’s George’s pacifist convictions, built on his father’s own disillusionment with the Great War, had taken root. Within weeks of arriving at Oxford, they had become the guiding principle of his actions. He fell in with a group of Christian and socialist pacifists who believed that no matter who won, the war would destroy Western civilization. Their consciences forbade them to take a life or share patriotic attachment to any country conceived as a community of sacrifice.
Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, George decided he would have no part in a war he regarded as an orgy of destructive mania let loose upon the world. Yet he knew that he could not return home to safety in Canada. He would either enlist in an ambulance brigade or serve as a fire warden.
His decision was a crucial break with a family tradition that had always welcomed service to king and country as the ultimate test of its Canadian patriotism. And it was a decision that sharply divided the family. Back home, his uncle Jim Macdonnell—who had fought at the Somme with George’s father—was furious. Mrs. Buck, a wealthy admirer of Sir George Parkin, who had once intimated that she would leave her fortune to George, now threatened to bar him from her mansion on the Welsh borders.
George’s uncle Vincent Massey was in London as Canada’s high commissioner. His wife, Alice—known as Aunt Lal—was his mother’s favourite sister. Their own sons, Hart and Lionel, had enlisted for service. The Masseys struggled to understand their nephew’s refusal to do so. George’s sister Alison tried to be sympathetic, but she had already made a diffe
rent choice by enrolling at an ambulance station and soon taking work at the British War Office. The man Alison was to marry—George Ignatieff— had abandoned his Rhodes Scholarship, sought to enlist in the British Army and was now working at Canada House as Vincent Massey’s assistant. His brother, Nicholas Ignatieff, was due to arrive shortly to work in the Russian section of British military intelligence. The brightest Canadian diplomats of their generation, Charles Ritchie and Lester “Mike” Pearson, both well known to George’s mother, were also serving in Canada House. Everyone whom George knew was on active duty or in military service.
Between the Dunkirk evacuation of May and June 1940 and the arrival of American soldiers and airmen in the spring of 1942, Canadians played a uniquely important role in the defence of Britain. The Canadian division commanded by General Andrew McNaughton was one of the largest military units left intact after the defeat and evacuation of the British Army from France. To aid the British war effort, munitions poured out of Canadian factories. Food from Canadian farms arrived by the shipload on the North Atlantic convoys. Canada had never been so important to the survival of the British Isles. Just as in World War I, Canada entered the war two years before the Americans. George himself commented on the significance of this in an essay in 1945:
We are a country of 1914 and 1939 rather than 1917 and 1941. Both times we were the first country of the American continent to take responsibility for the rest of the world. Both times the fact that we were taking such responsibility influenced the U.S.A.
For the young Canadians who lived through the Battle of Britain in London, the sense that Canada stood alone with Britain in its hour of need defined their view of Canada ever after. They came away with a vivid sense that Canada mattered in the world, but they also became starkly aware of the mother country’s vulnerability. They knew that Britain could not win without the Americans, and they fervently believed that Roosevelt would find a way to get America into the war soon. In the meantime, while they waited, they were bemused by some American reactions to the conflict. During the bombing of London, Alison Grant happened upon an old copy of The New York Times and found American sentimentality about the brave British under fire rather grating. There was, she wrote to a friend in Toronto, “a rather smug sense of admiration for us which exasperated me. There is nothing like the heroism we are showing to bring tears to the eyes of a lot of Americans.” In this context—Canada alone standing beside Britain, Canadian soldiers thronging the streets of London in uniform, every member of his family actively working for Allied victory—George’s decision to reject military service and to serve as an air raid warden took an almost perverse determination, certainly in someone barely twenty-one years of age. In the face of whispered disapproval, false pity and outright condemnation, George remained undeterred.
In September 1940, he moved to Bermondsey in south London. He knew the Oxford and Bermondsey Club in Tanner Street, near London Bridge Station, where, before the war, Oxford undergraduates had come down on vacations to work with the poor in the surrounding streets. The club provided a soup kitchen and a social club, as well as a medical mission. George lived in Bermondsey between September 1940 and August 1941, taking his meals at the soup kitchen, sleeping in the air raid shelters under the railway arches, serving as a shelter warden and then as a member of the local ARP, the air raid precautions service. During that time, Bermondsey was under almost continuous nightly bombardment from German aircraft targeting the London docks. Some of his letters to his mother were written while a “real rocker of a raid” was underway. George taught evening classes in the shelters and organized a boxing club for teenage boys. When the raids were over, he went out into the blazing streets and extinguished the fires from incendiary bombs with water and sand. He rescued families from bombed-out houses; he identified dead bodies and took them to the morgue. In a letter written in 1941, he looked back blankly:
I helped wounded people—I carried the dead—I evacuated shelters—I lost some good friends—I told people that their relatives were in hospital when I had just seen them taken to the morgue. I told others the truth. For myself I was up 36 hours on end and while it lasted was very near death. I put out innumerable incendiaries.
He lived the most intense months of his life in Bermondsey. At first, his dominant feeling was sheer exhilaration. For the first time in his life, he was nobody’s son or grandson. To his surprise, people accepted him for who he was. A woman in a shelter knitted him a sweater. Another woman, the wife of an airman, leaned against him in the shelter one night and whispered “Stay,” and he did. Working men bought him drinks in The Raven and The Sun pub or slipped him a pack of cigarettes. The cook at the Oxford and Bermondsey Club, Mrs. Lovett, a wild and amusing Irishwoman with an errant husband and seven children, was soon feeding George and looking after him. The people of Bermondsey took to George because, unlike most of the Oxford undergraduates who showed up at the Oxford and Bermondsey Club, he actually remained at their side through the bombardment. George was, for a time, in love with them all, with what they represented, the incarnation of England at its best. The sublime calm of some of the people he helped out of the rubble stayed with him forever. As he wrote his mother,
Granny Peck was just bombed out a second time. It was too much. She sat by the fire, but I knew she was dying; so I sent for the doctor. He got an ambulance and Granny put on her wonderful black bonnet & her cane & her bag of treasures—her whole life of wonderful things of all kinds. She walked down with me. We lifted her into the ambulance. I kissed her and said “Goodbye Gran.” All she said was “Don’t say goodbye; it’s just au revoir.” She looked so calm & lovely—and a week later she died.
In one letter home to his mother, he exclaimed, “God I have learned more about loving from these people than any others.” How his mother reacted to that wounding remark one can only imagine.
He lived a double life, as escape from Bermondsey was only a bus ride away. His aunt Lal remembered him showing up at her office in the Dorchester Hotel, “black in the face with smut and dirt of all the hours’ work he had gone through, wet boots, wet clothes.” He would shower and then return to Bermondsey. When once again he was too grimy, exhausted or shell-shocked to continue, he would take the bus across London to 231 Sussex Gardens, near Paddington Station, for a bath, a meal and bed at the flat his sister Alison shared with the Greey sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. Occasionally, Mary or Alison would visit him in Bermondsey and bring news of him to Uncle Vincent and Aunt Lal. Mike Pearson too went down to Bermondsey and reported to the Masseys that their nephew was doing a “marvellous job.” The word was passed back in Canada that no one should question George’s courage.
Uncle Jim, however, continued to do just that and Mrs. Buck maintained that his only salvation lay in immediate enlistment in the British Army. George countered by asking her to billet some Bermondsey evacuees on her estate. She refused, furthering his conviction that the patriotism around him was hypocritical and false.
In February 1941, he proudly showed Burgon Bickersteth, one of his mother’s oldest friends and warden of Hart House at the University of Toronto, around Stayners, the shelter where he worked under the arches of London Bridge Station. Hurricane lamps hung from the rafters, the shelter was crowded with sleeping families, and he and George spent the night there on the bunk beds, being wakened the next morning by Mrs. Lovett with a cup of tea.
On Monday, February 17, 1941, while George was away, Stayners Shelter sustained a direct hit. Hundreds of people were killed. George’s letter home five days later is still numb with the shock:
My railway arch was hit and most of my friends in Bermondsey were eliminated or in hospital; so there it is. I was out, but came back to find it after it had happened. I thought I had seen the worst, but this was the end.
Mrs. Lovett survived and helped him through the shock, but everyone noticed, in Aunt Lal’s words, that “he now began to pay the price.” He fell into a deepening crisis of what we would now recogn
ize as post-traumatic shock and depression. His letters home took on a bitter, even spiteful tone, sarcastically exclaiming how glad he was that Mike Pearson had told his family that he had been doing well. He complained that no one in the West End seemed to care about the East End, not even his sister Alison. He seemed to forget that she, too, had been bombed, had put out incendiaries, rescued belongings from the ruins of the bombed-out houses of friends. He believed that only he had borne the true brunt of the war and he could not get over what he had lived through. He wandered through the streets of Bermondsey, thinking here he had picked up the remains of Mr. Grey the newsagent, there was the place where the Peeneys’ house once stood, here he had caught a looter, there he had doused an incendiary. He meditated darkly in his letters about “the tiger-like violence” of the high explosive and wondered why he had been spared.
By June 1941, he was frequenting “revolutionary” cells in Bermondsey and grimly informing his mother that when the war was over, the old gentle liberal England she had known would be finished, too. Yet he did not throw in his lot with these left-wing groups. “I can see no brave new world coming from them,” he reported home. If anything, he began to repent of his earlier infatuation with the people of Bermondsey: “The working classes of this country are just as corrupt as the people above them.” Even the people of Bermondsey, he said, were filled with imperialist superiority toward so-called lesser peoples. If there was to be a future for Europe after the war, he wrote home, Europe would have to realize it was not “heaven-endowed to run the world.” The British war effort, he exclaimed, was built on a lie: “the giant defender of freedom maintaining the greatest and most barbaric of empires.”
True Patriot Love Page 9
