opinion. He has written a book about the ways in which Canada surrendered its independence to America during the Cold War – Lament for a Nation – which has made him a hero to many university students from one end of the country to the other, and he is now writing another – Technology & Empire – which will teach them how to think for themselves. He is also a fierce pacifist, a very outspoken critic of American involvement in Vietnam’s civil war.
George Grant has heard the sound of air raid sirens many, many times. Only a few were false alarms. When he was a twenty-two-year-old university student in England, he’d volunteered for civil defence work and gone to live in the southeast end of London near the warehouses and loading docks. That was in the autumn of 1940 and the early months of 1941 during the worst days of the Blitz, the period when the Luftwaffe – the German air force – was trying to bomb England into submission to the Third Reich. George had sailed to England a year earlier after he’d been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study law at Oxford University. When war broke out, he could have returned home to Toronto but he took first aid and ambulance training and then volunteered to serve as an Air Raid Precautions warden in one of the most dangerous sections of London. As an air raid warden, it had been his unpaid job to help people get settled under the brick arches of the railway bridges that served as air raid shelters for the poorest Londoners. Then, when the bombs hit, it was his job to put out small blazes set by fire bombs, summon emergency services, rescue people trapped in bombed buildings, provide first aid to the injured, and investigate unexploded bombs. Watching over the bombs with delayed action fuses that hadn’t yet gone off was the most dangerous part of his job because he had to guard them until the bomb disposal crews arrived.
Memories of that time crowd in on him at the sound of this siren. He can never forget the children. He’s a family man and his six children are an important part of his life. Like any parent – his youngest is eight years old, his eldest is nineteen – he feels the chill of fear. Today, it almost freezes him to the steering wheel. His son Robert, his third child, will turn fifteen in just a few days. When George was living 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
