Lower Town, a scattering of houses spaced by empty lots and bush, was once home mostly to poor folk and outcasts, including prostitutes and bootleggers (Wingham was dry from 1914 to 1961). Because the river ran so high and the flatlands sat so low, floods were routine. The high ground spared the Laidlaws soaked floors, but on certain spring days Alice would have needed a boat to escape the property.
At first, her walk to elementary school was only a kilometre along the road. But her mother, aware that respectable children attended classes across the river at Wingham Public School, orchestrated a transfer, and the girl was soon crossing the Maitland at a spot where two branches met — climbing up, as Robert Thacker puts it, “the social strata” of Presbyterian Ontario.
She came to know everyone who lived along Lower Town, and then learned to register wider class differences block by block. Once over the bridge, she would have passed by the grand houses of upstanding citizens who looked down, literally and morally, on Lower Town, even though they occasionally partook of its pleasures. On Leopold Street stood the house of a great-aunt, with whom Alice stayed when the weather turned bad. “In a lot of ways, the Laidlaw farm was an island,” Robert Thacker says as I describe the property to him over the phone. Wingham, too, prey to massive snowfalls due to the lake effect, experienced spring floods, and during the worst of them the town was virtually cut off. That had to feed a novice storyteller as well: Wingham as a world unto itself, all other places vague and conjectural. “The nature of her imagination was and is organic and instinctive,” her biographer notes.
The lengthy daily walk took her from the touchable natural world to the observable human one. There, of course, lay the real complexities, and cruelties. Who did the smart, aloof Laidlaw girl think she was? “The nastiness that turns up in her fiction was real,” Thacker remarks, recalling his own sometimes chippy encounters with locals who recalled neither Alice Laidlaw nor Alice Munro fondly. “All of it fits together into shaping a sensibility of the person who used that place as a cultural specificity,” he says. The guided tour of Wingham includes the old Laidlaw farm on its secondary driving itinerary. But walking to and from it all these decades later affords a minor revelation: the setting for a literary imagination and a literary landscape in embryo.
Before departing Wingham to begin Thacker’s second excursion, I visit with several townspeople, looking, perhaps, for those familiar faces and intonations from the books. At the museum, I meet Ross Proctor, a farmer who grew up, and continues to live, ten kilometres south of town. The jovial Proctor once worked the rich land with his two brothers. “A good farmer,” he says, “leaves the land better than he found it.” As a boy, he biked those miles to school, or else stayed with relatives; like Alice Munro, whom he has known most of his life, he endured the status of hayseed. “Lower Town had its good people, and its interesting people,” Proctor remembers. He also recalls Saturday-afternoon matinees at the Lyceum Theatre on Josephine Street, and watching Doc Cruikshank, who founded Wingham’s TV and radio station, CKNX, operate the projector. Cruikshank passed away, but the theatre, long closed, remains on its original site. The station is scheduled to be shut down this month after surviving for decades as an unlikely network affiliate. Alice Laidlaw read her high school compositions on the radio there.
Alice Munro’s early stories offended certain sensibilities when they were first published in the 1950s and ’60s. In some cases, it was no more than her mentioning such open town secrets as the bootleggers and prostitutes that set people off. Other times, it was the retelling of a private family sorrow — a child scalded by a pot of water, for instance — in a fictional setting. Proctor believes the anti-Munro sentiment was exaggerated, and he later helped raise money to build the literary garden at the museum, convincing his old schoolmate to attend a series of fundraisers on his farm, which he called “AM in the PM.” Munro drove up from Clinton for the events. “She’s a regular gal,” he says approvingly. Jodi Jerome, a local historian who hails, as she jokes, from “away” — Kincardine, in Bruce County, fifty kilometres to the northwest — was curator of the museum at the time. The lingering animosities toward Munro led organizers to add a cautionary police presence to the garden’s opening ceremony. Nothing came of the worry, and Jerome believes time is slowly resolving the matter. “They’re not around any longer,” she says of certain people, and their resentments.
Jerome, who has met Munro twice, once at a reading, the other time at the museum, approves of her low-key presence in the county. “You live up here,” she says, “it’s what you do. You don’t get given, or go looking for, kudos.” A young intern at the museum admits that, were Munro to visit the room dedicated to her life and work, she might not recognize the author.
Verna Steffler, president of the Wingham and District Horticultural Society, tells a story about visitors’ desire to find the writer amid the landscape. Steffler first came to the town from the Sarnia area to work as a nurse; one of her early patients was Anne Laidlaw, Munro’s mother, who died of Parkinson’s in 1959. Steffler was working in the garden with another volunteer one day when she noticed a literary pilgrim from Pittsburgh staring at her co-worker, a tall woman with grey hair. “Are you Alice Munro?” the American finally asked. Steffler ended up driving the disappointed admirer to the Laidlaw farm to begin her tour.
The notion that Alice Munro might be found tending her own literary garden isn’t so crazy. Munro once told the Globe and Mail about a time she volunteered as a waitress during the Blyth Theatre festival. When a customer asked her if a glamorous-looking woman seated at another table might be the famous local author, Munro happily confirmed his suspicion. Last year, by contrast, when the festival mounted a production based on one of her stories, she declined to attend. She was willing to be in Blyth as a country woman helping serve meals, but not as a famous author accepting accolades. The unwritten Huron County code of behaving like regular folk probably informed her decision. She seems to need to be at once embedded in the landscape, working the garden she has been growing since her first book, 1968’s Dance of the Happy Shades, and invisible.
On my way south on Highway 4, past the hamlet of Belgrave, near Ross Proctor’s farm and a cemetery containing Laidlaw ancestors, and then down into Blyth, a thought continually recurs: if a walk in Wingham enriches a reader’s appreciation of Munro’s imaginative sensibility, then a drive along this country highway may speak to the defining qualities of her prose — its flintiness and deliberate plain-speech, the cadences steady regardless of the often abrupt tonal shifts from light to dark. Or better: if an Alice Munro paragraph could be rendered into a landscape, it might look like these country roads. The lonely farmhouses, some happy, some unhappy, spaced by flat, dark fields. The oversized churches reduced to a single service per week. Historical landmarks for villages long ago rendered ghosts. A footbridge marker for the Black Hole, at Piper’s Dam, and private roadside pleas that Abortion Stops a Beating Heart. The Maitland River, meandering like a persistent, inescapable theme.
Many of the stories in Munro’s new collection begin and end in old age, arcing back to a defining incident from childhood. “I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am,” the protagonist in “Some Women” declares at the start. “I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio and leukemia.” After unravelling a devastating tale — still another open secret of small-town life — the story repeats its mantra: “I grew up, and old.” The pattern is evident elsewhere in the collection, and indeed throughout her recent books. Often, too, the occurrence from the past has greater narrative urgency than present-day events. Nearly always, that past belongs to Huron County.
