Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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, getas 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    Like this essay, which also exists in other versions in Munro’s papers at the University of Calgary, unpublished fragments reveal that she made repeated use of childhood memories, memories born of her family’s doings.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 Bonds,’ because he was the VictoryBond 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