True Patriot Love (12 page)

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.

G
eorge 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 different 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.