Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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 fromthose 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 theBook-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