Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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 asattending 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,