George Grant. T.F. Rigelhof
in London, one of the things he’d done was to organize a boxing club for adolescent boys in the Bermondsley district, and the twelve- to fourteen-year-olds were the most eager to join. Their faces are frozen in time. Most of them died in a single bomb blast. Authorities had urged poor people to accept the shelter offered by the arches of railway bridges. They said arches were as safe as underground. They were trying to keep people in their own neighbourhoods and from overcrowding the London subway system. George had been required to organize such shelters for some of the people in his district. The one at Stayners Street took a direct hit from a bomb. It wasn’t safe and the government had known it wasn’t safe. Three hundred people – the people George knew best and had worked with most closely – all died. Among them was a young woman who meant a great deal to him. He had been with her and the rest of them in the shelter and then he’d had to go out and when he came back, the arch was flattened and they were dead. Or horribly injured. It had almost destroyed his sanity.
To keep from thinking about those three hundred people, their individual faces and their mass death, George often listens to classical music. Sometimes, alone in his car, even listening to the radio, he remembers the blast and its after-effects in every horrifying detail. He remembers it all but he doesn’t speak of it very often. When he does, he just says, “I saw a lot of people killed, I dragged people out. I saw this in detail. I was right at the heart of it.” Then he shifts to something else, talks about the Russians entering the war and the end of the daily bombing raids on London. Or he talks about developing tuberculosis and being invalided home to Canada. Even at the time, even in a letter to his mother written five days after it happened, he’d written only this,
Everything else there is to say seems to relate to only one thing and always to one thing. I have tried to keep it out, hut it just comes hack so insistently that nothing one can do will change it. My railway arch was hit and most of my friends 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 is the end… What I will do now is beyond me… The dead are dead, but the maimed remain and in a way worse than the maimed are the families of the lost. Some are so stricken that they are half dead.
He too was half dead. He’d written “eliminated” not “killed” – tried to make it more distant, less personal. And he didn’t mention the young woman. He kept that to himself, shared it only with a journal he started to keep months later. Then, when summer finally arrived and the worst of the bombing was over, he again wrote his mother,
One of the most fascinating speculations I know is the wondering at the way a bomb can descend & in the space of a second, destroy even the most intricate, delicately balanced human personality. Not only is the beautiful mechanism of the body torn, ripped, masticated by the tiger-like violence of the high explosive, but the existence of the person knitted with his thoughts, passions, ambitions, inhibitions is destroyed. For a long while the one possibility about the war I could not envisage was the destruction of my own self. It came from a belief that God just wouldn’t have the nerve to let my personality suffer that… now I feel much more objective.
Objective. Professor Grants objective on this sunny, safe morning in May 1967 is to get to the office on time to meet with the student who has made an appointment. Ever since that day when he wasn’t where the bomb was, he has tried to always be where he’s supposed to be at the time he’s supposed to be there.
The things that George had seen in the war, the death and destruction of innocent people, taught him just what horrible things human beings will do to one another when one nation, no matter how good the majority of its citizens might normally be, decides that its military power must be the mightiest in the world and its ways must be followed by all its neighbours. But he had learned something else in those dark moments – he’d also learned the value of resistance, of standing against the opinion of the majority and insisting on telling the truth. These were lessons that had turned him away from becoming a lawyer and a politician and a pessimist. He has lived his adult life with the awareness of what madness war is and what atomic weapons can do.
In 1967, he doesn’t know if we’re going to destroy ourselves in a nuclear war or slowly destroy the planet through pollution. But he can imagine something worse than either – a prosperous and peaceful society in which human beings have so lost their humanity that they worship the machines they have created and allow them to rule all of life. Such a society would be so disgusting that it should be destroyed. Addressing other thinking Canadians at the Lake Couchiching Conference in 1955, he’d said, “However, what is certain, beyond doubt, is that whether we live at the end of the world or at the dawn of a golden age or neither, it still counts absolutely to each one of us that in and through the beauty and the anguish, the good and evil of the world, we come in freedom upon the joy unspeakable.”
George Grant is physically massive – more than six feet, over two hundred and twenty pounds. He has thick grey-blond hair, penetrating blue eyes, rosy cheeks, a mischievous, boyish face. At McMaster, his office is located in University Hall, one of the original buildings of an old Baptist college that had been built to look as if it had always been there. University Hall is a stone building in the Gothic style. Vines grow on its walls and creep across the leaded glass panes of its windows. McMaster is undergoing a building boom, but Professor Grant’s office looks away from it and on to the older part of the campus – trees, lawns, and other stone buildings in the Gothic style. He sits in a large, overstuffed chair. A young man sits, stiff and nervous, on a wooden chair that’s almost too close. He’s the same age George was when he witnessed the bombing of London first hand, but he knows nothing of Professor Grant’s wartime experiences and very little about the rest of his life. What he does know, the thing that has brought him from elsewhere in Canada and led him to apply to McMaster to do a Master of Arts in the religion department, is that he wants to study with George Grant. He has just said this excitedly.
“Why would you want to do that?” Professor Grant asks.
Years later, when he’d become a teacher, he’ll tell his own students that he’d studied with George Grant because Grant was a man of learning – a man who lived what he knew – and that such teachers are much rarer and more difficult to understand than people who want to know about things just so that they can gain power over them and control them. But, at that moment, he doesn’t know quite what to say. He’s disconcerted by the question. He’s disconcerted by his closeness to a man whose books he’s read. The young man has not met many authors. And he’s a little disconcerted by the way George Grant smokes cigarettes. The cigarette never seems to leave his mouth. It just sort of sticks to his lower lip as he talks and scatters ashes on his clothes. When he’s silent, the ash grows longer and longer and then falls and sometimes it’s caught in the hand and sometimes it isn’t. And a fresh cigarette is lit from the butt of the one just smoked. The young man has known other chain smokers, knows that many men who went through the Second World War became deeply addicted to cigarettes because smoking deadened their noses to the stench of dead bodies. The young man is also a heavy smoker and doesn’t yet know – and most people in 1967 don’t know – how dangerous smoking is to health. But the young man has never known anyone so oblivious to the mess they’re making of their own clothes because they’re speaking and listening so carefully and are so lost in conversation. Not knowing what to say in answer to the question, the young man blurts out, “Because I don’t know what you know.”
“What do you think that is?” Professor Grant asks.
“If I knew, then I’d know and I don’t but I know it has something to do with finding peace within yourself when the world is at war.”
The meeting lasted another hour and a half, much longer than the young man had ever spent in conversation with any of his other teachers in the five years he’d spent at two other universities. At the end, the young man knew some of what he hadn’t known and how much more he needed to learn.
Sir George Parkin and his grandson, George Parkin