Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

creates in the mother a character who closely resembles Anne Laidlaw.
    Once they had settled into their new home in Lower Town, with the fur farm established there and growing, Anne Laidlaw set about achieving the middle-class life to which she aspired. Having been born in self-respecting rural poverty in Scotch Corners, having through her own “desperate efforts” moved away and become a teacher, both in Lanark County and in Alberta, Anne Laidlaw naturally aspired toward Wingham and away from Lower Town. Thus Munro characterizes the narrator’s mother in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” in terms that owe much to her own experience as her mother’s child: “She walks serenely like a lady shopping, like a
lady
shopping, past the housewives in loose beltless dresses torn under the arms. With me her creation, wretched curls and flaunting hair bow, scrubbed knees and white socks – all I donot want to be.” Recalling her years as the only child, Munro has said she was “the object of my mother’s care in a role” that her brother and sister were not. “And her care was in shaping a person. Not the person that I wanted to be. I think that was always the conflict between us.… She wanted me to be smart, but a good person and the kind of person who was both socially and intellectually successful and was nice.” 5
    Heading from their house to Wingham, or even to the grocery in Lower Wingham, the two would have had a walk of about a kilometre, past most of Lower Town’s houses, which were more numerous closer to the river and the bridge to town. The grocery, then called the Lower Town Store, was located by the river and near the Turnberry agricultural grounds. “Uptown” Wingham – the area along Josephine Street where most of its stores were – was about twice as far from the Laidlaws’. Once Munro started school, this was the same route she walked to school and back, first to the Lower Town School by the store and the river and then, after two years there, across the bridge to Wingham to first its public and then its high school.
    The Laidlaws’ house was built in the 1870s when Lower Wingham and Wingham were still competing as local centres. It is made of brick and is still occupied now, over 130 years later. When the Laidlaws lived there it had two bedrooms upstairs, the stairs running up between the walls from a landing two steps up from the dining room; the dining room was on the house’s north side, the living room on the south, to the right as you approached the front door. Behind the living and dining rooms was the kitchen. There was no indoor plumbing until the mid-1940s, when a bathroom was added upstairs.
    The farm itself was something of an island, set off by itself between the end of the Lower Town road and the river. The road was north of the house; to the east was a large open field; to the south was the river, a river flat, and a high bank above; to the west, the direction in which the house faces, was “such a wonderful view of the landscape.” Munro has said, “You saw the hills. Some were treed, some were bare, and you couldn’t see another building except Roly Grain’s farmhouse,” off in the distance. To the south of the house was a barn, “toward the river, but the way the river is there’s a river flat – this was because there was aspillway and then there’s the bank of the river, which is quite pronounced.” Between the barn and river, the fox pens were built on the ridge running parallel to the river, behind them a sharp drop of about thirty metres down to the river flat, and “all that land down there was pasture for whatever horses we were keeping and the cow.” The fox pens were quite extensive, housing upwards of two hundred animals at various times, a world to itself with its own sounds and smells. 6 The closest neighbours were the Cruikshanks, who lived across the Lower Town road, now called Turnberry Street.
    Once Anne and Bob Laidlaw took possession in 1927, they set about making it their own, working toward the prosperity asserted in their wedding announcement. Bob built the fox pens. He planted walnut trees between the house and the barn (“the walnuts drop, the muskrats swim in the creek”), and pine trees to the west as a windbreak – “Dad planted it and it’s in the old pictures when they were just new and I’m a baby, so I think they were planted the same year I was born.” They cultivated a vegetable garden between the house and the road and, in