Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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 onJune 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 month. 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