Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

shoved into it. The notes were all written on the board, and I couldn’t finish, and then when three boards were finished he would go back – this was the Grade 5 teacher – and rub off the first board and begin writing more. I wouldn’t have finished it yet, and so I would just give up, putting the paper in my desk.” One of her teachers called her “Uncle Wiggly” because her handwriting wiggled so. Remembering this period, Munro says she was “always in trouble, always in trouble.” When she was in Grade 5, Munro got a terrible report card that she hid and considered signing herself – “Mother had to go for a conference at the school and she was upset because she wanted me to do well and she thought it was pure wilfulness that I wasn’t doing well.” This trouble continued as Munro took home economics and had to learn to crochet – she was not adept at either. But Grade 7 was a bit better and, in Grade 8, when Munro was twelve, she “suddenly shone, because we had a man who didn’t care if you were untidy, and who recognized if you liked the stuff he was teaching,” a consideration “which had never come into it before.” Munro realized that her interest in her studies would be “the way in which I could actually shine.” 22 So it proved to be.
    Her walks to and from school were not the only walks she took. The road leading north from her family’s farm – then without a name but now called West Street – was where, she says, “I always went on my walks. I loved this road.” That road led up past the Cruikshanks’abandoned first house, vacant for years, a place Munro liked to visit with her girlfriends. When she was in Grade 7, “I found a book of Tennyson’s poems there. One of the Cruikshanks had been a high school English teacher and there was a book.” Having found it, Munro took it home. “That was so marvellous. They were all those long poems by Tennyson, like ‘Enoch Arden’ and ‘The Princess’ and
Idylls of the King
, and ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ You know how the rhythm of Tennyson goes, it was so enrapturing when you’re beginning to read poetry. Oh God, I just went crazy about it. It was a true treasure. I still know lines from those poems.” About the same time that Munro discovered Tennyson, she also became aware of her potential as a student. She maintains, though, that her subsequent excellence in school was not a matter of being gifted: “I absorbed history naturally because I loved it and, in English, I soared beyond all possible requirements. But at everything else, I had to work at it – I wasn’t a natural.” 23
    The summer before she moved to the Wingham school, while she was still seven years old, Munro read Dickens’s
A Child’s History of England
. It was, she asserted in a 1962 essay, “the first book I ever read.… When I say that this was the first book I ever read, I don’t mean to give the impression that I was dipping into English history at four and a half, or anything like that. I mean it was the first real book, and also the first book I ever
read
, in the sense that I had a private vision of what I was reading about – unexpected, incommunicable, painfully exciting.” She had had whooping cough and so could not pursue her usual activities: “So I swung in my swing until I got dizzy and then for no reason in particular I took the
Child’s History
out of the bookcase in the front room, and sat down on the floor and started to read.” Most of her essay, “Remember Roger Mortimer,” traces and comments on Dickens’s handling of the kings and queens of England, the intrigue surrounding them, and her understanding of just what the author was doing; but it is especially significant in the way it offers an extended image of an Ontario child, reading, within her family:
    Not until I was grown up did I discover that it came there because it had been my father’s, and that it had been the first book
he
had ever read, too. I was ignorant of this because nobody asked me what I was reading, and I never told anybody; reading in our family was a private activity and there was nothing particularly commendable about it. It was a pesky sort of infirmity, like hay fever, to which we might be expected to succumb; anyone who managed to stay clear of it would have been the one to be congratulated. But once the addiction was established, nobody thought of interfering with it. A couple of years later, when I had turned into the sort of child who