True Patriot Love (11 page)

The school must borrow from the French methods of language teaching he had admired in Paris. There must be less Latin and Greek, more science and mathematics, less empty exam writing, more sports, more current and world affairs, more scholarships for poor boys. His mind was teaming with ideas. The school must break with the idea that the only thing that mattered was the number of university candidates it graduated. “The boy in whom I take the deepest interest,” he said, “is the boy who leaves the school to enter business or industry.” He left the school in no doubt that he meant to lead. “I intend to be master in my own house; I intend to rule this school.” His goal, he concluded, was to create a school that would mould the men who ruled the nation. And what kind of nation did he dream of?

“A nation of prophets, sages and warriors.”

This vision, however overblown it may seem now, would not have seemed so to the boys and masters who listened in the school auditorium that December day. The colonial Canadians who had swept to the top of Vimy
Ridge had proved to the whole world that Canada was indeed a nation of warriors.

Everyone in that hall at his installation address in 1917 would also have known someone who had not returned from France. Some were seared in his own memory. “To ease my own heart,” Grant said, he repeated the names of each of his pupils who had perished in France. Of just over a thousand boys from the school who had served overseas, one hundred and fifty-eight had not come back. They must have their memorial, he said, and he proposed that the child of every family who had lost a son in battle must have a free education at the school.

The memory of the war influenced everything he did. If he made sports compulsory for all boys, it was because he believed it was “the sporting spirit which pulled the Empire through the war.” If he purchased new rifles and a machine gun for the school Rifle Company, it was because he believed that every boy should have the spit and polish of military drill instilled in him. At his very first address he told the boys the story of a young Canadian officer he knew who, at the Second Battle of Ypres, strode up and down the battle line urging his men out of the trenches with the cry “Come on for Canada! Come on for Canada!”

He was haunted—there is no other word to use—by the memory of the war and by the question of whether those like himself, lucky enough to have survived, were worthy of what they had done. War, he told his students,
was the “greatest thing in our experience, sometimes at the back of our minds, sometimes at the front, but always there, consciously or unconsciously shaping our thoughts and actions.” Every year he led the school in a memorial service for the fallen, complete with hymns, the trooping of the colours and the reading of the names of the fallen. His speeches to these gatherings were among the most deeply felt he ever delivered.

And so today, I ask you: What welcome shall we give our dead? When the rain patters on the roof, and we hear their crying amid the rain; when the hush falls in crowded church or chapel and their voices are soft in the silence; can we tell them that we have kept faith?

His entire career at Upper Canada can be seen as an attempt to keep the faith with the fallen. It was their example that made him such an impatient public foe of the narrowness of the Ontario high school examination system, such a determined supporter of Frontier College and Workers’ Education initiatives for working men in northern Ontario mines and lumber camps; it was why he invited men of the stature of Wilfred Grenfell of the Grenfell Mission in Labrador to lecture the boys on the important public duties that awaited them on graduation. It was why his
History of Canada
for Ontario schools—which went through ten editions in the 1920s and ’30s—concluded
with a paean to the men who took Vimy Ridge and proved Canada’s valour to the world. It was why, no matter what he achieved, there was always more to do. He boosted enrolment, eliminated the debt, enlarged buildings and still remained unsatisfied, remarking in his Prize Day address in 1924, “there is no better education being given in Canada today than that given at UCC—and it is atrocious!”

He chivvied his masters, drove on his pupils and charmed the board of governors to do better, and he knew moments of discouragement, even depression, when he was tempted to quit. But there is no disguising the fact that he had found, in late middle age, his true vocation. Schoolboys the world over have a genius for nicknames, and they gave their principal one that was to stick to him for the rest of his life. They called him Choppy. No one could remember why, but Choppy himself was happy with it.

He hired some extraordinary and eccentric masters: Jock de Marbois, Mauritius born Royal Navy captain and school ski instructor, married to a Russian countess; two music teachers, Ernest MacMillan, later Sir Ernest, and Ettore Mazzoleni, later principal of the Royal Conservatory of Music; and, last but not least, Nicholas Ignatieff, eldest son of a White Russian count, who taught history and politics, chaired the League of Nations club and every summer took boys out west to ride in the Alberta hills. The strategy of eccentricity—of opening an
elite school to the new immigration that was changing Canada—was deliberate. As Grant said,

I am not greatly concerned whether the boys of this school turn out High Tories or Red Tie Socialists; though on the whole I hope they will steer a middle course. I am greatly concerned that they shall not turn out conventional individualists, careful only of their own.

He himself astonished the boys by writing an article for the college magazine on “damn, the finest of expletives.” He was seen besting a fellow master at a swearing match. Robertson Davies, one of his pupils, remembered being taken on a walk around the running track with the memorable phrase, “Walk with me and I’ll tell you all about the Oscar Wilde scandal.” This he proceeded to do with a richness of detail and use of words that Robertson Davies thought only boys knew. He often led the boys in prayer on Sunday nights, and once, he burst out with a paraphrase of Martin Luther that Robertson Davies remembered all his life: “Live in the large! Dare greatly, and if you must sin—sin nobly!”

By now, Maude and William were living in a large house on the college grounds and the long-awaited son, George Parkin Grant, born right after the Armistice of 1918, was named for both his grandfathers. Soon that son was experiencing the special embarrassment of attending
his father’s school. George Parkin, now Sir George, died in 1922. Maude mourned her father and William completed a biography, begun by Sir John Willison but left unfinished at his death. The chapter on Parkin as headmaster of Upper Canada weaves a delicate path, respectful of his father-in-law’s greatness but delicately hinting that a lifetime of oratory in the pulpits of empire had turned his head.

As for the Grant girls, they were attending local schools and playing on the hockey rinks in front of the headmaster’s house on the school grounds. In the summers, William and Maude would take the children up to the cottage at Otter Lake, near Georgian Bay, and it was there that he would take them out at night to name the stars.

Deep inside him and then in public utterance, too, his view of the war changed. He now questioned the illusions that had filled his head in 1914. As he told the Upper Canada boys in one of his addresses, “What a world we were going to make! Once the legions of Germany and of her allies had been smashed, how we would go on to smash all the accumulated sins and futilities of the ages. How far away it all seems.”

As the Roaring Twenties took hold of Toronto, he now wondered whether the war had achieved anything more than great desolation, followed by heedless consumption and selfishness. He looked about him and saw “an age of easy money”—too many boys had too much of it—and he found it a struggle to hold on to the ideals that had led
men to heroic sacrifice. As early as 1919, he concluded a memorial service for the fallen with the words, “One last word, said from my heart. We honour these fallen men.… But let that not lead us to glory war.”

He became an outspoken champion of the returning war veterans, spending hours writing letters demanding compensation and medical help for those who came home wounded. He became a supporter of the League of Nations and this, rather than imperial federation, became the ruling cause of his later life. At the memorial address in 1924, he admonished his audience: “We must learn to think internationally and to quench the narrow predatory nationalism which masquerades as patriotism.”

He was revisiting and revising the furnace-hot emotions he had felt in August 1914. His son, George, now a teenager, remembered his father’s anguished revisions of earlier certainties, this struggle to honour the dead but also to reject war as an instrument of politics.

William carried the war with him in a more direct physical sense. The scarring of his lungs in August 1916 left him vulnerable to colds and infections. In the winter of 1930 and 1931 he came down with pneumonia, and in those days before penicillin and antibiotics, the only remedy the doctor could suggest was to escape the Toronto winter in the Bahamas.

He guided the school successfully through the Depression years and in his Prize Day address in 1934 asked, with characteristic earnestness, “Where are we going when we come out of the Depression? Do those who speak so mean there is good hope that in a few years we shall be repeating the orgy of unthinking prosperity of 1924 to 1929?”

He had been at the job for eighteen years and the college had been transformed: new buildings, facilities, courses, endowment, even a new pension plan for masters. He had taken it from the colonial Eton he had inherited from Parkin and had transformed it into a modern school for an industrial country. Everywhere he looked about him, he could see the monument to his achievement.

In January 1935, he gave a speech to the pupils and then came down with a cold, which quickly developed into pneumonia. On February 3, 1935, the day after his daughter Alison’s nineteenth birthday, he died in Toronto General Hospital. He was sixty-two. When they heard the news, the members of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario stood and observed a minute’s silence. He was buried in Cataraqui Cemetery in Kingston and shares the same gravestone as his father and mother.

His son, George Parkin Grant, often said that his father had been ruined by the First World War. The Protestant liberal pieties of the Victorian era had not survived the nightmare of the trenches. But this account—of
a gentle man living through the ruins of his beliefs and certainties—does not seem right. He was haunted by the war, but the war was also the making of him. It gave him his sense of Canadian vocation, to create a school and, through the school, a country worthy of the men left behind on the fields of France.

In this work, he played his part in the transformation of the myths that were to sustain the Canadian sense of identity in the twentieth century. For his father’s generation, the organizing myth had been the conquest of the West and the creation of a continental nation-state. The father lived to see the achievement of that dream in the 1880s, and the son lived to see the closing of the Canadian frontier. In 1918, just back from France, William took a train trip across the country, visiting with Upper Canada and Queen’s families who had lost their sons in France. The trip brought home to him that the West of his father’s time—the meandering cart tracks through the bush between Hudson’s Bay posts, the shale-covered zigzag trails up into the mountains, the Canada of Metis and Cree guides and trappers—had been replaced by a Canada of cities and railway hotels. On his journey, he read an old copy of
Ocean to Ocean
and he decided that he would bring out a new edition when he had a chance. He had his father’s book with him when the train stopped, one morning, at Craigellachie. He wrote to Maude that day,
“We both come of good blood, my dear; and it is something to be proud of.”

In the place of that common project—the settling and taming of the West—Canada had found, in the First World War, the shared enterprise of defending freedom in Europe and winning, through valour, the respect of the world. The son had played his part in the elaboration of that new myth, the myth that was to be consecrated a year after his death in the gigantic memorial at Vimy.

It is strange, at first sight, that the monument that epitomized Canada’s new image of itself in those years should be situated on a hillside in far-off France. But William Grant’s life helps to explain why it is not so strange after all. He had left the best of his friends there and struggled to find a meaning in their deaths, not just for himself, but for his country. He found it in an idea of Canada, a vision of the nation as a community of sacrifice. We do not live just for ourselves, but for others, he told his pupils, and there are times when a person has no choice but to fight for the sake for others.

Many Canadians, and not just in Quebec, never shared this vision of their country as a community of sacrifice. Many Canadians still do not. The Vimy ideal does not sit easily with that competing image of Canada as a community of peacemakers, as a country that can show the world how to make a unity of our manifold differences. William Grant’s own complex relation to this
wartime experience—commemorating the heroic dead, yet pleading with his pupils never to glorify war—testify to his own difficulty in controlling all the implications of Canada as a community of sacrifice. He died unsure not only that these implications could be mastered but also that the memory of Vimy would remain in the hearts of his descendants.

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.