True Patriot Love (13 page)

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 recognize 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.”

With Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, the bombing of London ceased and George felt renewed pressure to enlist, now that his work as an ARP warden had come to an end. The pressure seems mostly to have come from inside himself. His cousin Lionel Massey had been captured in Greece and was now a prisoner of war in Germany. Hitler was marching toward Moscow. Though George continued to refer to the war as a “cauldron of folly and stupidity, pride and selfishness”—from which fastidious free thinkers should stand apart—it must have begun to seem self-deluding to think so.

At the end of August 1941, he wrote his mother that he had decided to enlist in the merchant marine, calling it
“one of the stupidest, most useless, basest actions of his life,” but one forced upon him by the sheer pressure of family expectation. By enlisting, he had in effect repudiated his pacifism. He added bitterly that he was a slave of his baptism.

In reality, he was the slave of no one. His family had been more than understanding of the position he had taken. It was his own demons that were propelling him now. He moved out of Bermondsey and into the Dorchester Hotel with the Masseys. In October 1941, he set off for Middlesbrough in the north of England to join a merchant ship. Before boarding he learned, in a routine medical exam, that he had a tubercular lesion on his lung and was unfit for service. In a panic, he vanished from sight, headed for Liverpool, tried to sign on to another ship, was rebuffed and instead worked in demolition on the docks. In late November he returned to the Oxford area and found a job working as a farm labourer near Aylesbury. All this time, his family went without news of him. On December 7, 1941, he woke to the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. For most people, especially his family, the fact that America would enter the war meant that victory was assured, however long it might take. For a pacifist like George, the news that the war he had opposed would now become a global struggle came as a disorienting blow. For four days, he later remembered, he felt close to suicide. Then, on December 11 or 12, riding
his bicycle along the narrow country roads outside of Aylesbury as the dawn rose, he stopped to unlock one of the gates placed across the road to stop cattle, and as he walked his bicycle through and closed the gate behind him, he knew, at once and for a certainty, that God existed and that all was well. This private epiphany—lasting an instant—proved to be the decisive event of his life.

The family had not heard from him for almost four months when he suddenly turned up one night in January 1942 at 54A Walton Street in Knightsbridge, the flat above a dairy where his sister Alison was living with another Canadian, Kay Moore. He was gaunt, dirty, badly dressed and both volatile and depressed. For the next month, he exhausted Kay’s and Alison’s patience with his lack of cleanliness, his overwhelming neediness and his aggressive bouts of self-justification. It was obvious he had to go home. In February he returned by Atlantic convoy to Canada. His mother took him in at the house she had inherited from Lady Parkin, at 7 Prince Arthur Avenue in Toronto. For the rest of 1942 and the first months of 1943, he remained at home with his mother, reading, grieving for the people he had lost in the raids on Bermondsey and trying to get his life back in order.

In 1943, he got a job with the Canadian Association of Adult Education and began a lifelong association with the CBC, preparing the Citizens’ Forum broadcasts hosted by Morley Callaghan. By early 1945 he was writing “Have
We a Canadian Nation?” which outlined, for the first time, the theory that Canada was a conservative nation, based on adherence to “sane and orthodox religions rooted in the past” together with British institutions. He saw Canada as a middle way between the liberal acquisitive individualism of the United States and the collective tyranny of the Soviet experiment. In early 1945, he published a pamphlet,
The Empire, Yes or No
, in which he maintained that Canada could survive as an independent state only within the British Commonwealth. Otherwise Canada could not maintain its identity beside the United States.

The Empire, Yes or No
also recanted his pacifism:

In 1940 we saw that it was not the pious talk of idealists that stopped fascism and the forces of evil, it was the practical co-operation of free nations of the British Commonwealth. Some always knew this lesson; some learned it very late (like this writer). But let us all remember it after the war, and never forget it.

While he recanted his stance on the war, pacifism continued to shape his attitude toward nuclear weapons. He was just returning to England in 1945 when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It remained for him the purest example of technological evil in the service of American imperialism. His opposition to American nuclear weapons
on Canadian soil—which inspired
Lament for a Nation
—can be traced back to his pacifism and to his encounter with the destructive power of high explosives in Bermondsey.

By way of contrast, the other Canadians in London drew a very different lesson from their experiences. In the autumn of 1940, Mike Pearson and George Ignatieff were fire-watching on the roof of Canada House as incendiaries landed on the roofs all around Trafalgar Square. As they stared out at London on fire, Ignatieff remembered Mike Pearson saying that this could not go on and that the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations would mean the end of civilization itself. There had to be a better way. After the war, he and Ignatieff threw themselves into the creation of the United Nations, and then, as the Cold War developed, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1956, they worked together for the deployment of the first UN peacekeepers in Sinai, for which Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In contrast to the Christian conservative pacifism of George Grant, they embraced a liberal anti-communist internationalism. In contrast to George, they believed in an essential difference, at once political and moral, between Stalinist tyranny and American imperial hegemony, while George continued to argue, right into the 1960s, that there was no real difference between Canadian subservience to the United States and the position of Soviet satellites such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

George’s sister Alison spent the entire war in London, moving from the War Office into MI5, British Military Intelligence. In late 1942 and early 1943, she came to know a young Canadian, Frank Pickersgill, who had been studying at the Sorbonne in Paris when war was declared. Like George, Frank had stood aside from the war and he had remained in France until the German invasion of 1940. He escaped occupied France in 1942, made his way to London and, after what he had seen of the Gestapo during internment, enrolled immediately in the Special Operations Executive for clandestine operations. While training as a saboteur, parachutist and signals operator, he and his fellow trainee, John Macalister, spent the weekends at 54A Walton Street with Kay Moore and Alison Grant. Alison fell in love with Frank. In June 1943, Frank and John were dropped by night into occupied France. They were captured within a week and imprisoned in France. Alison spent 1943 and 1944 hoping against hope that Pickersgill and Macalister would survive, only to learn in the summer of 1945 that they had been tortured and executed in the concentration camp at Buchenwald in late 1944. It was a shattering blow, but she never doubted that Frank had done the right thing or thought that she or anyone else could have stopped him from doing what he had to do. She taught her children to revere Frank’s example. George once wrote of Frank that courage such as Pickersgill’s was a virtue before which one can only bow.

In August 1945, George Grant returned to Oxford to resume his Rhodes Scholarship. He met up with Alison, then preparing to return home to Canada. He noticed that she seemed depressed and withdrawn, even angry with him for having left England three years earlier. He wrote his mother, urging her to treat her gently upon her return. He had no idea that she had just learned of Frank’s death.

The relationship between brother and sister never recovered from the war. George had made his choices. Alison had made hers, and in Frank’s example, she found the polar star of her ultimate allegiances.

When George told his mother that he was returning to Oxford not to study law or politics but to study theology, he remembered her exploding with all the pent-up frustration of a mother who had seen the son in whom she had placed all her hopes crack under the strain of war. “George, you have always been the poseur of the family, but this is the worst pose of all,” she raged.