Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

– Alice Ann.” She was named after her mother’s dearest friend, Alice Mary Thompson, from the Ottawa Valley. In the fall, the Laidlaws had their daughter christened at the United Church in Wingham. As Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Munro’s first biographer, has observed, she initially “lived the life of a sheltered, cherished only child.” Munro’s brother, William George, was born a few months before her fifth birthday, on March 13, 1936, and their sister, Sheila Jane, arrived the year after that, on April 1. Munro recalls wondering if news of her sister’s birth was her father’s April Fool’s joke – it seemed to her that her brother had only just turned up. 2
    Munro’s first memories derive from this time as the only child, for she remembers a trip she made with her mother to Scotch Corners sometime in 1934, when she was about three. This was one of two tripsthe two made there when Munro was very young. When she was about a year old, George Chamney had visited the Laidlaws in Wingham, without his wife, probably because he was ill – it was the last time he saw his daughter. He died in March 1934. By then Bertha Stanley Chamney had for some time been suffering from cancer; she was gone in less than a year after her husband’s death. Visiting Scotch Corners in 1934, Munro had shared a bed with her grandmother there; more precisely, she recalls being with and watching her uncle Joe Chamney feed pigs: “I remember standing – I was too small to look over the wall of the pig-pen, but I had climbed up on the boards, and I was peering over, watching my uncle feed the pigs.” 3
    And in “Home” Munro uses another memory from about this time, one occurring in the barn in Lower Wingham, a memory that she fictionalizes as “
the setting of the first scene I can establish as a true memory in my life. There is a flight of wooden steps going up to the loft
.…” This passage is in italics as Munro’s authorial comment on what she had written in the story proper. She continues:
    In the scene I remember I am sitting on one of the bottom steps watching my father milk the black and white cow. That is how I can always date the scene. The black and white cow died of pneumonia in the bad winter, which was nineteen thirty-five; such an expensive loss is not hard to remember. And since in my memory I am wearing warm clothes, something like a woolen coat and leggings, and there is a lantern hanging on a nail beside the stall, it is probably the fall, late fall or early winter of that year
.
    The lantern hangs on the nail. The black and white cow seems remarkably large and shiny, at least in comparison with the red cow, a very muddy red cow, her survivor, in the next stall. My father sits on a three-legged milking stool, in the cow’s shadow. I can get the rhythm of the milk going into the pail, but not quite the sound: something hard and light, like hailstones. Outside the small area of the stable lit by a lantern are the shaggy walls of stored hay, cobwebs, brutal tools hanging out of reach. Outside that, the dark of these country nights which I am always now surprised to rediscover, and
the cold which even then must have been building into the cold of that extraordinary winter, which killed all the chestnut trees, and many orchards. 4
    In “Home,” which among other things is another meditation on her father, Munro unites herself with him in a single image she imaginatively calls
“the setting of the first scene I can establish as a true memory in my life.”
Thus, she suggests the way her parents – father and mother each – moved through her memory and, eventually, through her fiction. With occasional exceptions such as “Boys and Girls” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Munro has largely left her siblings out of her fictionalized memories, yet Anne and Bob Laidlaw, and the family life they made in Wingham after their marriage in 1927, became presences to whom Munro returned again and again.
    In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” one of the three stories Munro wrote over the winter of 1967–1968 in response to her Ryerson editor’s request for three more stories to round out
Dance of the Happy Shades
, she offers parents probably based to some considerable degree on the differing personalities of Bob and Anne Laidlaw. Although Ben Jordan’s circumstances in the story are largely invented, there is no doubt that his casual demeanour with his children owes a great deal to Bob Laidlaw. More pointedly, Munro