Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Munro’s sharp familiarity with the people she saw along the way, she came to know and understand both parts of her town. In 1994, when Peter Gzowski asked her how she could create the interior of a bootlegger’s place so realistically in “Spaceships Have Landed,” she replied that she had been in one before she was eighteen. She might also have said that she had been walking by one twice a day since she was eight.
    During the winter Munro would sometimes be caught in town by bad weather – Wingham, close to Lake Huron, is prone to massive lake-effect snows – and would have to stay overnight there at her grandmother and aunt’s house on Leopold Street or with the Beecrofts, the United Church minister and his wife. She once wrote that “the storms that come on this country are momentous productions, they bury the roads and fences, and curl drifts up to the porch eaves, and whip the bare trees around and howl across the open fields; they will rattle and blind you.” During the spring, too, there would be floods, so Munro would sometimes be cut off by water, or unable to get into town because of the high water surrounding the Laidlaws’ place. (The 1947 and 1948 floods when Munro was in Grades 11 and 12 remain legendary – publications that chronicle the town’s history are filled with pictures of “The Flood.” Munro has recalled those years: “I remember seeing people out in their boats to feed their chickens that were roosting on top of the hen house.It was quite dramatic.”) When the way home was clear, Munro always had work to do to maintain the household – when she was in high school her brother and sister were still young, so basic housework was her responsibility. Mary Ross has observed that she and their friends were aware that Alice Ann had to do things at home that they did not but that Alice Ann never talked about it, either out of embarrassment or a certain secretiveness owing to Mrs. Laidlaw’s situation.
    Given this, Munro did not much participate in the dances held at the high school and, on special occasions, at the Wingham Armory, where the high school held its gym classes. The circumstances detailed in “Red Dress – 1946” – everyone getting dressed up, girls going to the dance with other girls, boys with boys, the pairing up – were just as the dances were conducted then. Mary Ross remembers regularly encouraging Alice Ann to plan to stay at her house in town, to go together to the dance, but says that Munro did so only a few times.
    Generally, social life among the students did not involve much dating. Munro was included in a mixed social group at the high school – though because of distance and responsibilities at home she was on its fringes – that regularly did things together: movies, skating parties, and the like. In any case, Munro was not involved in any dating during these years. When she published
Dance of the Happy Shades
her father commented to one of Munro’s high school teachers that he had not been aware that she had even had a boyfriend. The story that led to his observation may well have been “Red Dress – 1946,” although “An Ounce of Cure” would also qualify. Munro did have a boyfriend the summer she was sixteen, in 1947, but that was in the Ottawa Valley; she won a prize at school that gave her some money and she used it to visit her relatives in Scotch Corners. There she connected with and spent time with the hired man (really a boy a few years older) from the farm across the road from the Chamneys.
    During the summer of 1948, the year Munro turned seventeen, she worked away from home as a maid for a well-to-do family that had a home in Forest Hill, in Toronto, and a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay, near Pointe au Baril. This experience occasioned her first visit to downtown Toronto, on a day off from the family’s home,and inspired two stories: “Sunday Afternoon,” which first appeared in the
Canadian Forum
in 1957 and subsequently in
Dance of the Happy Shades;
and “Hired Girl,” which was in the
New Yorker
in 1994 and has not been reprinted.
    The latter story offers the circumstances of Munro’s employment, pretty much as it occurred; her employer, Mrs. Montjoy, “had picked me up at the station in Pointe au Baril and brought me to the island. I had got the job through the woman in the Pointe au Baril store, an old friend of my mother’s – they had taught school together. Mrs. Montjoy had asked this woman if she knew of a