develops his awareness of international issues, including Gandhi’s campaign on behalf of independence for India. His pacifism is shared by a few other boys and leads them to petition the headmaster for exemptions from the cadet corps. They argue their case successfully.
Out of the cadet corps, George is even more out of step with the majority of boys at the school. His inability to become just “one of the boys” is based not just on whose son he is and his politics and acting ability. He’s also clumsy and not good at team sports. His games are golf and tennis. He does have a few good friends, but his friendships are with the other UCC “outsiders,” boys who are interested in art, music, literature, and politics.
In the middle of his next-to-last year of high school, George loses his father. On February 3, 1935, William Grant dies of pneumonia complicated by the chest injuries he’d suffered in the war. He’s sixty-two. George is sixteen, a terrible age to lose the male model against which boys measure themselves. It’s a particularly hard blow for George: his father is dead, Upper Canada College will have to find a new principal, and his family has to leave its home at the end of the school year – three great losses all at once.
When his mother goes away to England to spend some time with her friends, George has to live in residence during his final year at UCC. George detests school life as a boarder, chafes under the restrictions imposed by the new headmaster, and feels abandoned by his family. After school ends in the summer of 1936, George sets about acquiring a good practical knowledge of the French language in Quebec by becoming the first student to take part in UCC’s Visites interprovinciales. He learns a great deal about language, customs, and the Roman Catholic religion of the Québécois by living with a wealthy and cultivated family on Rue St Urbain in Montreal. He has a very good time with the family he stays with, the Morins, who have daughters near his own age. He writes his mother,
I have never had such fun as I had on the last few days at the Morins. It was positive heaven. We went to two parties. I slept, painted and went on wonderful long walks. I had long talks with two of the girls who are definitely anti-Catholic, except as a religion to go to Church. One said, “If we only read that which we were allowed, we wouldn’t read very much.”
Living in a parish rectory with a Catholic priest at Saint-Basile-le-Grand isn’t as much fun. George does have an opportunity to discuss his father’s view of Quebec history with Monsieur le Curé, who finds William Grant’s knowledge accurate and point of view refreshingly free of English Canadian prejudices.
The events of George’s school days do not fade away. They remain fresh, often too fresh in his memory into middle age. They are emotionally damaging – too full of hurt – but the ability to speak the French of Quebec and the rarer ability to empathize with the people of Quebec never leaves him.
“Where in Heaven’s name did George come up with her?” Donald MacDonald asks. Even George’s best friend is surprised and disconcerted by the girl he brings as his date to the Arts Formal dance. She’s of mixed race, part African Canadian, very tall, stunning, exotic, and not a university girl. She can really dance and so can George. He’s one of the leading exponents on campus of the kind of Swing dancing called the Big Apple. Its one of the things at which he becomes an expert during his three years at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario – the college his grandfather George Monro Grant did so much to establish.
When he first arrives on campus, George is 1.88 metres or nearly six foot two inches tall, slim, and emotionally distressed. His father never pushed him to excel academically, but his mother is ambitious for him. For her, public success – including social success – is the measure of personal worth. Ambition is to be directed at the greater public good, the service of something bigger than oneself. She pushes George into the world of Queen’s as the grandson of its greatest Principal, the son of a former teacher, the nephew of James Macdonnell, who is chairman on the board of governors of Queen’s, and as Maude Grant’s boy.
Because Maude wrote her many friends in Kingston, a lot of doors opened to George. He was immediately a social success as a tennis and dance partner with the daughters of prominent families. This made it difficult for him to establish his own identity at Queen’s. He began to wonder if anyone could like him for himself. There were no men’s residences at Queen’s so George boarded in town. Although he found many of the students, especially his housemates, obsessed with girls and hockey, he did find them simpler and nicer than those he’d studied with at UCC. To create a world in which he could measure himself by his own standards, George set himself the academic challenge of doing the four-year Honours History program in three years.
In his first year at Queen’s, George suffered from loneliness and lack of money – the twin evils that beset most university students when they are first away from home and on their own. The loneliness was more acute in his case because his family and friends had all left UCC and there was no longer a home he could return to. His mother was once again visiting England and staying with friends. His sister Charity was in Europe studying German, his sister Alison was in London studying art, his eldest sister Margaret remained in Toronto, but she was on the verge of marrying one of the UCC teachers and establishing her own life. The Masseys, the uncle and aunt to whom he was closely attached, had left for London the previous year when Uncle Vincent was appointed Canada’s High Commissioner. It was his reward for helping bring the Liberals back to power in Ottawa under the leadership of Prime Minister Mackenzie King.
George’s best friends at UCC had scattered to different universities. It was the height of the Depression – a terrible period of mass unemployment, agricultural crop failures, and widespread poverty. When George’s father died, UCC granted his mother a pension of 30 per cent of what William’s salary had been. By the general standards of the time, George was well off as a university student but there was little money left over after he paid his fees, his board and lodging. He fought off loneliness by studying hard, joining drama and debating societies, taking an avid interest in international affairs – the abdication of the King, the Spanish Civil War – and by reading widely for pleasure. His relationship with his mother began to dominate his emotional life: he started writing lengthy letters to her every week.
Maude Grant comes back to Canada to take up the kind of job she’d done before her marriage. McGill’s Royal Victoria College in Montreal has appointed her dean of women. George joins his mother for a holiday in rural Quebec before taking up a summer job of his own as a reader for Professor McDougall, a University of Toronto historian, who was blinded in the Great War. The experience deepens his pacifism and increases his self-awareness. He writes to his mother,
I hope that I am passing through the supremely selfish stage which has been enveloping me and that this job which entails doing exactly as I am told very cheerfully will do me good.
During the second year at Queen’s, George is joined by one of his close friends from UCC school days. His circle of new friends grows, he begins to excel in the study of history. One of his great pleasures in the middle of much hard work is to listen to Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He also learns that freedom of speech and political action can not be taken for granted in Canada, especially when they conflict with the aims of Canadian industrialists. As political opinions become radicalized by the growing power of fascism in Spain and the increased military power of Germany under Hitler and of Italy under Mussolini, the Principal of Queen’s refuses to allow a student debate on Chamberlain’s peace policy and forbids
