Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Munro has also said that in Lower Town “there was always a great sense of adventure, mainly because there were so many fights. Life was fairly dangerous.” She was herself subject to the violence, once being beaten by other kids who whacked her with shingles. And at the school, as in the area more generally, Munro writes, “religion … came out mostly in fights. People were Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants, honor-bound to molest each other. Many of the Protestants had been – or their families had been – Anglicans, Presbyterians. But they had got too poor to show up at these churches, so had veered off to the Salvation Army, the Pentecostals. Others had been total heathens until they were saved. Some were heathens yet, but Protestant in fights.”10

  As an adult Munro may speak of such happenings as “adventure,” and as an artist can recall them so as to create particular effects – that last sentence is a good example of her humour, which bubbles under so much of her writing. Yet there is no question but that Munro’s two years at the Lower Town school were extremely difficult for a shy, sensitive child who had been sheltered at home and who had had her parents to herself until the year before she started school. Munro has called her time at the Lower Town school “a tumultuous two years,” saying further that she cannot “remember a single class or book from those years.” Both socially and scholastically ambitious for her daughter, Anne Laidlaw saw to it that beginning with the fall of 1939, when Alice would be in Grade 4, she would attend school in Wingham. Munro recalls herself at school – both at Lower Town and in Wingham – as “just kind of a weird kid … being so nervous and so frightened, having no self-confidence.” At the same time, she remembers herself as having “a lot of lofty superiority.” Such feelings no doubt came from Munro’s vivid imagination and, once she had begun writing in her early adolescence, from her construction of imaginary worlds, but they also connected to her sense of separateness, a sense that was amplified by the move to the Wingham school. Not living in Wingham, walking just under three kilometres each way back and forth from home, Munro had ample reason to feel herself an outsider and to define herself as one. And by the time she entered high school in 1944, her mother’s Parkinson’s disease (though the family did not then know what her illness was) had begun to assert its symptoms. Needed to look after things at home, Munro often stayed home from school, though her performance did not slip. “I was happier at home because I could think my thoughts,” she recalled.11

  The onset of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s disease about 1943 was the harbinger of changes within the Laidlaw family. Notably, they suffered a significant decline in their economic circumstances brought on by the drop in fur prices during the last years of the war. And given the presence of a mother in the throes of illness in Munro’s writing, it is important to see Mrs. Laidlaw both before and after the disease gripped her. After the Laidlaws came to Lower Wingham, they settled in and the family grew – Alice was born in 1931, there was a miscarriage when she was about two, the other children came in 1936 and 1937. During this time, Anne Chamney Laidlaw was very much the same person who had striven to achieve an occupation for herself. While Munro describes her father as a “wonderful fitter-inner” who had “almost a different vocabulary for outside and inside the house,” her mother asserted her difference from her Lower Town neighbours and didn’t care about the consequences: “She deliberately used her correct school-teacher grammar, which set her speech apart from the rural accents of Huron county. She joined the Book-of-the-Month Club, and acquired a set of good dishes and some pieces of antique furniture.” When Anne became ill, Munro later wrote in a fragment, “this trouble was so rare as to seem my mother’s own special property. There was a feeling in our family, which we never put into words, that she had somehow chosen her own affliction, that she had done this on purpose. My grandmother, talking about my mother once in some other connection, said, ‘She never minded being the center of the stage.’ My grandmother said this in a dry and delicate voice, which pretended to be amused, but which I recognized as damning; nothing could be worse, in the opinion of my father’s family, who were full of pride and a great fear of being laughed at, or singled out in any way.”12

  “ ‘She never minded being the center of the stage.’ ” Much of the evidence of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s forthrightness comes out in her eldest daughter’s writing and commentary, but there are other indications as well. Anne’s description of her wedding, already seen, corroborates the assessment putatively offered by her mother-in-law (who had, Munro asserts, an “almost instant antipathy” toward her cousin); another piece of writing – probably by Anne Chamney Laidlaw – was her own mother’s obituary (“The late Mrs. Chamney was well known for her charitable works and was dearly beloved by old and young in every walk of life”). During the summer of 1941 she went to the Pine Tree Hotel in Muskoka to sell their best furs directly to American tourists; also during that period, ads for the Laidlaw Fur Farm, almost certainly written by her, appeared in the Wingham Advance-Times: “We had made specially for us beautiful silver fox muffs each with fully equipped purse inclosed. For the very special gift we think these have no rivals. Laidlaw Fur Farm” (December 12, 1940). During the war, the Laidlaws donated a fur raffled off for the benefit of the Red Cross: “The Laidlaw Fur Farm is again presenting a gift of fur to the Wingham Branch of the Red Cross. This year, it is a scarf of two Canadian mink skins, and is on exhibition in King Bros. Window” (April 1, 1943). As the war ended, “The Laidlaw Fur Farm has generously donated a scholarship,” a twenty-five-dollar cash prize awarded “To Pupil With Highest Entrance Standing At Wingham Entrance Centre” (May 31, 1945). All this was Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s doing.13

  Mrs. Laidlaw also participated in the Wingham Women’s Institute, a group that had intellectual and educational interests. In April 1939, she presided over the elections of new officers and was herself selected as the convenor of the standing committee on Agriculture and Canadian Industries. At that same meeting, someone read a paper titled “Our Women in Parliament,” someone tap danced and another person sang, and there was another presentation on the history of the Women’s Institute. Munro has said that her mother “loved the work with the Institute. The only things that were really open to women were church societies, which my grandmother belonged to, the Women’s Missionary Society, and the Women’s Institute, which embraced all religions and was ‘For God and Country’ but not too much God. And Mother loved it. She did papers, she prepared papers on … industries and they’d be on history or anything she could do – she just loved a job like that. And they were always admired.… She was good at public speaking; she enjoyed it.” At the same time, Mrs. Laidlaw’s involvement in the institute was something her mother-in-law disapproved of – the institute, Sadie Code Laidlaw thought, “had a lot of kind of show-offy women in it.… They were sort of getting out and talking about things that were maybe none of their business.” Her grandmother, Munro says, was a “lively but conventional woman; she didn’t approve of any attempt to show off or distinguish oneself, and that’s what the Institute was because they weren’t raising money for a mission.” By contrast, her daughter-in-law was a quite unconventional woman.14

  Both Mary Ross and Audrey Boe, who was Munro’s high school English teacher in Grades 10 and 11, recall Mrs. Laidlaw as a person who would stop people on the street when she had a question or had something on her mind. Most often, Boe said, she had some concern connected with Alice or she would call to see how Alice was doing in school. If Alice was with her mother, Boe recalls, she would stand slightly back from the conversation. Mrs. Laidlaw was given to calling Stanley Hall, the high school principal, regularly to the same purpose. An example of Anne Laidlaw’s forthrightness occurred when Munro was seven years old, in her second year at the Lower Town school. A large group of Wingham schoolchildren took the train to Stratford on June 6 to see the King and Queen pass through during their 1939 Royal Visit. The trouble was, students had to be eight in order to go, and Munro’s birthday was not until the next m
onth. Recalling this, Munro said, “I was a big, big fan of the little princesses and the King and Queen, and already knew some of the history. And I made such a fuss at home that my mother did go to bat for me and persuaded the teacher to take me along. And then I heard the teacher talking to another teacher when we were down there – saying, ‘I got this one wished on me.’ ” Although Munro did get to go (and Gerry Fremlin, then in high school, was there too), the children did not actually see the royal couple – their train sped through the Stratford station and the King and Queen were not in evidence. “That was the first major disappointment in my life,” Munro said. During the winter of 1940–41, when Alice was nine, her mother rented a house in town and lived there with her children – the arrangement in Lives of Girls and Women – in order to give them “a town experience.” Munro still remembers that winter fondly.

  In a draft of “Changes and Ceremonies” in Lives, Munro offered this characterization that was most certainly based on her mother:

  My mother thinks you can solve anything by writing a letter to the principal. Or going to see him. She dresses up in a big hat and walks through the school hall talking in a voice that is not so much loud as it is carrying, a ringing voice. She used to be a teacher herself. Margaret Thomas said to me, “Who does your mother think she is, a Duchess? The duchess of Jubilee.” Once she called to me on the schoolground, “Come along, don’t delay,” and afterwards kids would imitate the way she said it, Come-along-Del-don’t delay, like someone who really enjoys the sound of her own voice. All she needed to say was, “Del” if she wanted me to come.15

  Disappointments notwithstanding, and even though she felt herself an outsider in Wingham as she attended school there, Munro’s childhood was one that most would call conventional. As well as attending school, Munro participated in local activities. On the local radio station, CKNX, for example, there was a Saturday morning show for children, and Munro, along with all the other Wingham children, was on it. They sang songs, people played the piano, others tap danced – on the radio. Munro did recitations, “mostly comic poems from the Saturday Evening Post, from their humour page.” The children were paid with vouchers, worth five cents, and Munro still remembers buying an ice cream cone with one. This “was a big deal, you didn’t have ice cream cones that often.” On the way home, she dropped the ice cream on the railway tracks and still remembers her anguish; “you almost will it back into the cone. You just don’t think this can have happened.” Munro was on the children’s show several times and, when she was a bit older, appeared on Sunday School of the Air, a scripted program conducted by the United Church minister, Mr. Beecroft. The children would ask questions, Mr. Beecroft would explain, and the children would respond, Munro says, with lines like “That was smart of Jesus!”16

  Such activities were usual, especially before Anne Laidlaw became ill when Munro was twelve or thirteen. Speaking again of her grandmother, Munro has said that “she didn’t approve of Mother going out of the house when we were little children,” but “Mother always had a maid. We had maids until I was eight or nine – we didn’t have indoor plumbing but we had girls, some of them from Lower Town.… Had Mother been doing it all herself with no one to look after us, she would have been penned in all the time, and she had decided not to be that.” As this suggests, the Laidlaws were relatively better off in the 1930s – “We were selling furs.” This continued into the war.

  The Laidlaws owned a car, though it was often in questionable repair. Munro now sees this as indicative of her parents’ ambitions, since most people in similar economic circumstances in those days did without. In their car the Laidlaws would make an annual trip to the beach on Lake Huron at Goderich. Munro wrote a short essay for a 1983 Ontario bicentennial volume called “Going to the Lake” in which her characteristic geographical detail is readily evident; reading its first paragraphs, one can trace the route on a map of Huron County:

  We start out once a summer, on a Sunday morning, probably in July, on Highway 86, which we leave at Lucknow, or Whitechurch, or even at Zetland. We zigzag south-west, to Goderich, over the back roads, “keeping our car out of the traffic.” The jolting it gets on these roads is apparently less damaging to its constitution than the reckless, competitive company of its own kind.

  St. Augustine. Dungannon. A village called Nile on the map but always referred to as “the Nile.” Places later easily accessible, which seem buried then, in the deep country of hills not cut up for gravel, swamps not drained, narrow dirt roads and one-lane iron bridges. Trees arch across the road and sometimes scrape the car.

  The day is always hot, hot enough to make the backs of your legs slick with sweat, to make you long for a drink from a farmhouse pump. There will be dust on the roadside leaves and on the tough plantains that still grow in some places between the wheel-tracks, and a jellifying heat shimmer over the fields that makes the air look as if you could scoop it up with a spoon. Then the look of the sky, to the west, seems to change, to contain a promise of the Lake. Can we really see a difference? Do we imagine it? The subject will come up for discussion – unless my mother feels too sick, or my father too worried, or we in the back seat have been put under a disheartening rule of silence, due to a fight. Even then, we cry out, when we top a certain hill, from which you can see – at last, expectedly, and yet amazingly – the Lake. No piddling pond in the rocks and pines but a grand freshwater sea, with a foreign country invisible on the other side. There all the time – unchanging. Bountiful Lake Huron that spreads a blessing on the day. Behind the farms and fences and swamp and bush and roads and highways and brick towns.

  This essay continues to detail the scene at the Goderich beach, describing the remembered scene there before returning to herself and a conclusion: “I skid past” the people on the beach, “eager to separate, get as lost as I can, plunge alone in the crowded trough of risky pleasures.”17

  Like this essay, which also exists in other versions in Munro’s papers at the University of Calgary, unpublished fragments reveal that she made repeated use of childhood memories, memories born of her family’s doings. One begins “I spent most of the summer of 1939 with my grandparents, in Devlin, Ontario, I slept in the bedroom over the kitchen. My window faced east, and the sun woke me early in the morning, shining past the modest steeple of the Catholic church.” The east-facing bedroom window of William and Sadie Laidlaw’s house on Drummond Street in Blyth, not surprisingly, looks toward the Catholic church two lots away. “My grandfather was dying then, and I suppose everybody knew that, but the process was gradual and not marked by any crisis that I could see.” Like the description of the family’s trip to the beach, this fragment is based on Munro’s childhood, for she did spend time at her grandparents’ house in Blyth – they had moved there after they had sold the farm – and she was there during the summer of William Laidlaw’s final illness, although that was 1938, not 1939.

  About that time too – owing to her sister Sheila’s illness when she was about two – Munro stayed with her aunt Maud and uncle Alex Porter field in Marnoch, southwest of Wingham and just east of Belgrave. Having no children of their own, the Porterfields welcomed Alice just as, when Bob Laidlaw was young, they had welcomed him. This helped Anne and Bob Laidlaw and also gave young Alice a break from the Lower Town school – there were only ten children at the local school. “They had never seen anybody like me before,” Munro has said. “I would organize concerts and … went wild with power.… I had wonderful fun.” Munro’s uncle Alex Porterfield was the clerk of East Wawanosh Township, having taken over the job from his father on his death in 1907; father and son eventually served for seventy-three consecutive years. Alex Porterfield served also as the prototype for Uncle Craig in Lives of Girls and Women; when he died in 1944, his funeral was the first time she had seen a dead person whom she knew. During another extended visit to Marnoch, probably in 1941, Munro remembers sitting on the Porterfields’ porch “with some kind of a bull horn and yelling at cars, ‘Buy Victory Bon
ds,’ because he was the Victory Bond salesman for the township. Of course, I’d only get about one car an hour and it would be the neighbours laughing at me.” This was before she had decided to take up writing – her first ambition at the age of eight was to be a movie star.18

  As Munro remembered her childhood visits to her grandparents’ place in Blyth and to the Porterfields’, she commented that her father as a boy used to stay with Maud and Alex and wrote about his experiences there along the Maitland River at Marnoch. Robert Laidlaw’s memoir, “The Boyhood Summer of 1912,” was published in 1974 and was one of several such pieces that appeared in a supplement to the Blyth newspaper, the Citizen, before he wrote his novel, The McGregors. Likewise, the Advance-Times notes visits made back and forth between Blyth and Wingham by the Laidlaw family. Sadie Code Laidlaw made a number of such visits after her husband died in 1938 and before she moved to Wingham in 1944.

  Taken together, the specific details of Munro’s childhood reveal connections that sustained her as both an individual and a member of a family and a community. “Connection,” Munro would come to write in the first part of “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “That was what it was all about. The cousins were a show in themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the real, and prodigal, and dangerous, world.”19 So it was for Alice Laidlaw herself, growing up in Lower Town, yet connected to a web of relations, immersed in the culture and being of her home place – a wide-ranging community spreading beyond Wingham.