Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the field to the east, they grew hay: “We had to have hay for the animals.” Inside, Bob Laidlaw built the fireplace in the living room and, for her part, Anne painted the floors and, Munro has said, even painted the linoleum to look like a rug, which they could not afford. 7 Remembering this house, or one very much like it, in “Home,” Munro writes:
    Now that I am living a hundred miles away I come home every two months or so. Before that, for a long time, throughout my marriage, I lived thousands of miles away and would go without seeing this house for years at a time. I thought of it as a place I might never see again. I was greatly moved by the memory of it. I would walk through its rooms in my mind. All the rooms are small, and as usual in farmhouses, they are not designed to take advantage of the out-of-doors, but if possible to ignore it. People who worked in the fields all day may have sensibly decided that at other times they did not want to look at them.
    In my mind, then I could see the kitchen ceiling made of narrow, smoke-stained, tongue-and-groove boards, and the frame of one of the kitchen windows gnawed by a dog that had been shut in all night, before my time. The wallpaper in the front rooms was palely splotched by a leaky chimney. The floors were of wide boards which my mother painted green or brown or yellow every spring; the middle was a square of linoleum, tacks and a tin strip holding it down.
    Summing up, Munro calls it “a poor man’s house, always, with the stairs going up between the walls” – that is, built in the simplest way. “A house where people have lived close to the bone for a hundred years.” 8
    Along with her first memories, Munro made one of her earliest friends when she was three: Mary Ross, who was just about the same age. Her father, Dr. George Ross, was one of Wingham’s three dentists. She lived in town and the two mothers got Alice and Mary together to play, both at Mary’s house and at Alice’s. Ross remembers going to the Laidlaws’ home and finding it a delight – with the land, the fox pens, and the river, there were lots of attractions to explore. For her part, Alice Ann, a name Ross still uses, delighted in the sidewalks in the town since she could ride a tricycle on them, something she could not do at home. Even when she was very young, Ross recalls, Munro could recite from memory successive verses of the traditional folk song “Barbara Allen,” and she sees this as evidence of Anne Laidlaw’s frequent reading to her daughter. Because Munro began her schooling at the Lower Town school, the two were not in classes together until Grade 4, after each had skipped a grade; once Munro had moved to the Wingham school, though, they went all through school together and when they were in high school, they were the top two students. In 1948, Alice and Mary shared a scholarship for middle-school French. Throughout their years together, Mary Ross was the only other Wingham student to do as well as Munro, and sometimes scored slightly better. Remembering their early connection and Alice’s move from the Lower Town school to the Wingham school, Ross has said that “Mrs. Laidlaw wanted the best education possible for her children,”and so “decided to send them uptown where she felt, rightly or wrongly, there were more opportunities.” 9
    For the first two years of school, 1937 to 1939, Munro attended the Lower Town school – she completed Grades 1 and 3 there, skipping Grade 2 – “I still have trouble with subtraction,” she says today. Originally the first Baptist church dating from the 1860s, the Lower Town school was, in youthful microcosm, a reflection of Lower Wingham itself. About fifty children were pupils there. The geography of West Hanratty in
Who Do You Think You Are?
– the school “which was not very far” from Flo’s store – reflects that of Lower Wingham and, as Munro has frequently said, the details of the school in “Privilege” in that book come from her time at the Lower Town school: “The school … is the school I went to. It’s the most autobiographical thing in the book. One of the more autobiographical things I have written. But that’s exactly how it was.”
    Munro has also said that in Lower Town “there was always a great sense of adventure, mainly because there were so many fights. Life was fairly dangerous.” She was herself subject to the violence, once being beaten by other kids who whacked her with