Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker Read Free Book Online

didn’t care if you were untidy, and who recognized if you liked the stuff he was teaching,” a consideration “which had never come into it before.” Munro realized that her interest in her studies would be “the way in which I could actually shine.” 22 So it proved to be.
    Her walks to and from school were not the only walks she took. The road leading north from her family’s farm – then without a name but now called West Street – was where, she says, “I always went on my walks. I loved this road.” That road led up past the Cruikshanks’abandoned first house, vacant for years, a place Munro liked to visit with her girlfriends. When she was in Grade 7, “I found a book of Tennyson’s poems there. One of the Cruikshanks had been a high school English teacher and there was a book.” Having found it, Munro took it home. “That was so marvellous. They were all those long poems by Tennyson, like ‘Enoch Arden’ and ‘The Princess’ and
Idylls of the King
, and ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ You know how the rhythm of Tennyson goes, it was so enrapturing when you’re beginning to read poetry. Oh God, I just went crazy about it. It was a true treasure. I still know lines from those poems.” About the same time that Munro discovered Tennyson, she also became aware of her potential as a student. She maintains, though, that her subsequent excellence in school was not a matter of being gifted: “I absorbed history naturally because I loved it and, in English, I soared beyond all possible requirements. But at everything else, I had to work at it – I wasn’t a natural.” 23
    The summer before she moved to the Wingham school, while she was still seven years old, Munro read Dickens’s
A Child’s History of England
. It was, she asserted in a 1962 essay, “the first book I ever read.… When I say that this was the first book I ever read, I don’t mean to give the impression that I was dipping into English history at four and a half, or anything like that. I mean it was the first real book, and also the first book I ever
read
, in the sense that I had a private vision of what I was reading about – unexpected, incommunicable, painfully exciting.” She had had whooping cough and so could not pursue her usual activities: “So I swung in my swing until I got dizzy and then for no reason in particular I took the
Child’s History
out of the bookcase in the front room, and sat down on the floor and started to read.” Most of her essay, “Remember Roger Mortimer,” traces and comments on Dickens’s handling of the kings and queens of England, the intrigue surrounding them, and her understanding of just what the author was doing; but it is especially significant in the way it offers an extended image of an Ontario child, reading, within her family:
    Not until I was grown up did I discover that it came there because it had been my father’s, and that it had been the first book
he
had ever read, too. I was ignorant of this because nobody asked me what I was reading, and I never told anybody; reading in our family was a private activity and there was nothing particularly commendable about it. It was a pesky sort of infirmity, like hay fever, to which we might be expected to succumb; anyone who managed to stay clear of it would have been the one to be congratulated. But once the addiction was established, nobody thought of interfering with it. A couple of years later, when I had turned into the sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes, my mother pointed me out to some visiting aunts with a fatalistic gesture – “Another Emma McClure!” Emma McClure was a relative of ours who lived somewhere deep in the country, where she had been reading day and night for thirty-five years, with no time to get married, learn the names of her nephews and nieces, or comb her hair when she came in to town. They all looked at me pessimistically, but nobody took my book