Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

too seriously at the time. Because the business failed, Dad had to go to work at the foundry job, which they had never anticipated.
    Although she felt separate from the family circumstances, Munro could also see their downward direction and recognized her position as the oldest daughter.
    Thinking her thoughts, imagining her stories, self-protected, walking back and forth from school, beginning her writing, Munro says she “took over the housework and I was very proud of keeping the house clean, keeping our standard of living from sinking, when Mother couldn’t do it. I ironed all the clothes, I ironed everybody’s pajamas … it amazes me now that I was so … but it was part of keeping our respectability – of living up to a middle-class level, that was important to me.” 31 As this comment suggests, Anne Laidlaw’s ambitions were not lost on her eldest daughter, who acted on them during her high school years.
    After the death of her great-uncle Alex Porterfield in January 1944, her great-aunt Maud and her grandmother Sadie Laidlaw bought a house on Leopold Street in Wingham and moved there to be close to, and to help, the Laidlaw family. The two sisters became a regular partof Munro’s high school years and, as she remembered them later in her writing, became figures in “The Peace of Utrecht” and “Winter Wind.” The latter story offers, Munro says, her most precise characterization of the two women living in Wingham during her high school years.
“Red Dress – 1946”: High School
    The April 6, 1944, issue of the Wingham
Advance-Times
carried a headline reading “Capacity Crowd at School Concert,” “Three Act Operetta Well Presented” over a story that describes the two performances of the annual town hall concert given by the pupils of the Wingham Public School: “A capacity house enjoyed the entertainment which seems to be better each year.” The school “presented ‘The Operetta,’ ‘The Magic Piper’ … based on the old familiar story of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, where the piper comes to the rescue of the citizens of Hamelin, who are plagued with rats and with his ‘Magic Pipe’ takes the rats to the river where they are all drowned.” The story continues and, in the way of small towns and local papers, details the production and names all the performers. Toward the end of the story, just after the listing of the clown rat and his accompanying rats are the “Town’s Folk Dancers,” two of whom are Mary Ross and Alice Laidlaw, then in Grade 8. When Munro came to detail this experience herself in
Lives of Girls and Women
– there the operetta is
The Pied Piper
and Del Jordan, though initially passed over, is eventually cast as a peasant dancer – she writes that “the operetta was the only thing at school, now. Just as during the war you could not imagine what people thought about, worried about, what the news was about, before the war, so now it was impossible to remember what school had been like before the excitement, the disruption and tension, of the operetta.” 32
    Between 1944 and 1949, the
Advance-Times
includes regular mentions of Alice Munro’s public life as a high school student in Wingham. A few months after the account of the operetta, her name is listed among those students from Wingham who had passed the high school Entrance; though students from other towns are listed there as havingpassed the test with honours, no student from Wingham is so designated. In March of 1945, when Munro was in Grade 9, she is listed as having participated in the high school’s “Easter Literary.”
O Canada!
was sung, two students sang a duet entitled “Marching to the Rhythm of the Boogie Woogie Beat,” and “Alice Laidlaw then gave a reading of ‘Civilization Smashes Up’ by the American humorist, Ellis Parker Butler.” There were other performances, Mary Ross was a member of the cast in a “French playlet entitled ‘Pour Acheter un Chapeau,’ ” there were “critics remarks” given by one of the teachers, and the “meeting closed with the singing of
God Save the King
.” 33 Remembering this, Munro said that she “once gave a reading and nearly died of fear, my heart was just really pounding. I was sick with nerves, and I was like that all through my adolescence.” Her reactions were such that this was her last appearance in a literary event. Nor was she elected a society officer. Part of this was her shyness, though her long walk home and her