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conducted by the United Church minister, Mr. Beecroft. The children would ask questions, Mr. Beecroft would explain, and the children would respond, Munro says, with lines like “That was smart of Jesus!” 16
    Such activities were usual, especially before Anne Laidlaw became ill when Munro was twelve or thirteen. Speaking again of her grandmother, Munro has said that “she didn’t approve of Mother going out of the house when we were little children,” but “Mother always had a maid. We had maids until I was eight or nine – we didn’t have indoor plumbing but we had girls, some of them from Lower Town.… Had Mother been doing it all herself with no one to look after us, she would have been penned in all the time, and she had decided not to be that.” As this suggests, the Laidlaws were relatively better off in the 1930s – “We were selling furs.” This continued into the war.
    The Laidlaws owned a car, though it was often in questionable repair. Munro now sees this as indicative of her parents’ ambitions, since most people in similar economic circumstances in those days did without. In their car the Laidlaws would make an annual trip to the beach on Lake Huron at Goderich. Munro wrote a short essay for a 1983 Ontario bicentennial volume called “Going to the Lake” in which her characteristic geographical detail is readily evident; reading its first paragraphs, one can trace the route on a map of Huron County:
    We start out once a summer, on a Sunday morning, probably in July, on Highway 86, which we leave at Lucknow, or Whitechurch, or even at Zetland. We zigzag south-west, to Goderich, over the back roads, “keeping our car out of the traffic.” The jolting it gets on these roads is apparently less damaging to its constitution than the reckless, competitive company of its own kind.
    St. Augustine. Dungannon. A village called Nile on the map but always referred to as “the Nile.” Places later easily accessible, which seem buried then, in the deep country of hills not cut up for gravel, swamps not drained, narrow dirt roads and one-lane iron bridges. Trees arch across the road and sometimes scrape the car.
    The day is always hot, hot enough to make the backs of your legs slick with sweat, to make you long for a drink from a farmhouse pump. There will be dust on the roadside leaves and on the tough plantains that still grow in some places between the wheel-tracks, and a jellifying heat shimmer over the fields that makes the air look as if you could scoop it up with a spoon. Then the look of the sky, to the west, seems to change, to contain a promise of the Lake. Can we really see a difference? Do we imagine it? The subject will come up for discussion – unless my mother feels too sick, or my father too worried, or we in the back seat have been put under a disheartening rule of silence, due to a fight. Even then, we cry out, when we top a certain hill, from which you can see – at last, expectedly, and yet amazingly – the Lake. No piddling pond in the rocks and pines but a grand freshwater sea, with a foreign country invisible on the other side. There all the time – unchanging. Bountiful Lake Huron that spreads a blessing on the day. Behind the farms and fences and swamp and bush and roads and highways and brick towns.
    This essay continues to detail the scene at the Goderich beach, describing the remembered scene there before returning to herself and a conclusion: “I skid past” the people on the beach, “eager to separate, getas lost as I can, plunge alone in the crowded trough of risky pleasures.” 17
    Like this essay, which also exists in other versions in Munro’s papers at the University of Calgary, unpublished fragments reveal that she made repeated use of childhood memories, memories born of her family’s doings. One begins “I spent most of the summer of 1939 with my grandparents, in Devlin, Ontario, I slept in the bedroom over the kitchen. My window faced east, and the sun woke me