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The Sound of a Siren

The siren wails. It’s very loud, difficult to ignore. The sound it makes is meant to awake and alarm and frighten people out of their normal routines and get them to take shelter in basements or, at least, under tables. Its wail is a warning that ICBMs – Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles – carrying nuclear warheads might just be on the way across the North Pole to attack and destroy major cities in North America. Thousands of such sirens are set up on public buildings from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island as part of Canada’s Civil Defence System. This particular one is mounted on the roof of a primary school on the edge of Hamilton at the head of Lake Ontario in the middle of Canada’s industrial heartland. And inside its classrooms, teachers have said, “Children, you know what you are supposed to do. Get under your desks, put your knees up, fold your arms over your knees, put your heads down on your arms, close your eyes. No peeking!”

“Miss! Miss!”

“Yes?”

“Is this a real air raid or just a pretend one?”

“Miss! Miss!”

“We’ll know in a few minutes! Just keep your eyes closed!”

On this sunny morning in May, it’s a false alarm. The year is 1967 – Canada’s Centennial Year – and there have been so many false alarms over the past few years that most people who hear it in the west end of Hamilton don’t take it very seriously. Indeed, for many Canadians the sound of the air raid sirens has become a joke – a very sick joke. Less than five years earlier, in October 1962, the Soviet Union began placing missiles in Cuba so that they would not have so far to travel to bomb North American cities. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over these missiles and their nuclear warheads was the closest the two countries came to starting a Third World War. The fate of millions literally hinged upon the ability of two men, President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, to reach a compromise. Until they did, the world was gripped by the Cuban Missile Crisis, which extended from October 18–29 but had a longlasting impact.

Everyone who lived through those days and paid attention to what the television commentators were saying learned that there were no safe places to shelter and hide. A nuclear war would kill most of us – either immediately from the blast or slowly through radiation poisoning. Only those sheltered far beneath the surface of the earth in government-built bunkers would be completely protected. That was something that a lot of people who weren’t schoolchildren wanted to shut their eyes to, ignore, and simply not think about. Within only a couple of years of the Crisis, many more preferred to think about smaller events, more easily comprehended things, like where they were on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. What they had felt on the days when President Kennedy just about got everybody killed was far too painful to remember. But there are exceptions. There are people who keep their eyes wide open and think about what is happening to them and the world around them no matter how hard it is to look an enemy in the face and how much easier it is to escape into television movies.

As he drives by the school where the siren is ringing on this day in 1967, George Grant is on his way from his home in the small town of Dundas to meet a young man who has made an appointment to see him at his office. George Grant is chairman of the department of religion at McMaster University in Hamilton. University professors have a reputation – especially among small-town people – for being eccentric, otherworldly and absent-minded. There’s much in George Grant that reinforces this impression in his neighbours. The house he lives in with his wife and six children at 80 South Street is a large brick house on a five-acre lot, but it’s not a suburban estate. The house is more than a hundred years old, has high ceilings and spacious rooms. Before the Grants bought it, it had been owned by the Anglican Church of Canada, and they’d allowed it fall into disrepair. As George’s wife Sheila put it, “This house would be pretentious if it wasn’t so run down.” Their automobile is slightly pretentious for a family man. When his mother died and he inherited a bit of money, George bought a dark-blue Chevrolet convertible, a car more suited to a California surfer than a Canadian academic with a handful of children. It’s slightly run down now but thoroughly reliable. Reliability is important to him. Professor Grant is not in the least absent-minded when it comes to keeping appointments. He’s always on time, so punctual that he makes students afraid of being late for classes and appointments. They do not want to annoy him. Some of them fear his sharp tongue, but many more feel so very privileged to study with him that they don’t want any classroom time to be lost or wasted. George Grant is neither rich nor powerful, but he has become famous as a man who is willing to think thoughts that fly in the face of popular 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 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 Grant, 1921. “You must learn to spell and write as soon as you can, so that you can write me letters. I shall be a proud grandfather when I get a note from George P. Grant.”