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early in the morning, shining past the modest steeple of the Catholic church.” The east-facing bedroom window of William and Sadie Laidlaw’s house on Drummond Street in Blyth, not surprisingly, looks toward the Catholic church two lots away. “My grandfather was dying then, and I suppose everybody knew that, but the process was gradual and not marked by any crisis that I could see.” Like the description of the family’s trip to the beach, this fragment is based on Munro’s childhood, for she did spend time at her grandparents’ house in Blyth – they had moved there after they had sold the farm – and she was there during the summer of William Laidlaw’s final illness, although that was 1938, not 1939.
    About that time too – owing to her sister Sheila’s illness when she was about two – Munro stayed with her aunt Maud and uncle Alex Porter field in Marnoch, southwest of Wingham and just east of Belgrave. Having no children of their own, the Porterfields welcomed Alice just as, when Bob Laidlaw was young, they had welcomed him. This helped Anne and Bob Laidlaw and also gave young Alice a break from the Lower Town school – there were only ten children at the local school. “They had never seen anybody like me before,” Munro has said. “I would organize concerts and … went wild with power.… I had wonderful fun.” Munro’s uncle Alex Porterfield was the clerk of East Wawanosh Township, having taken over the job from his father on his death in 1907; father and son eventually served for seventy-three consecutive years. Alex Porterfield served also as the prototype for Uncle Craig in
Lives of Girls and Women;
when he died in 1944, his funeral was the first time she had seen a dead person whom she knew. During another extended visit to Marnoch, probably in 1941, Munro remembers sitting on the Porterfields’ porch “with some kind of a bull horn and yelling at cars, ‘Buy Victory Bonds,’ because he was the VictoryBond salesman for the township. Of course, I’d only get about one car an hour and it would be the neighbours laughing at me.” This was before she had decided to take up writing – her first ambition at the age of eight was to be a movie star. 18
    As Munro remembered her childhood visits to her grandparents’ place in Blyth and to the Porterfields’, she commented that her father as a boy used to stay with Maud and Alex and wrote about his experiences there along the Maitland River at Marnoch. Robert Laidlaw’s memoir, “The Boyhood Summer of 1912,” was published in 1974 and was one of several such pieces that appeared in a supplement to the Blyth newspaper, the
Citizen
, before he wrote his novel,
The McGregors
. Likewise, the
Advance-Times
notes visits made back and forth between Blyth and Wingham by the Laidlaw family. Sadie Code Laidlaw made a number of such visits after her husband died in 1938 and before she moved to Wingham in 1944.
    Taken together, the specific details of Munro’s childhood reveal connections that sustained her as both an individual and a member of a family and a community. “Connection,” Munro would come to write in the first part of “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “That was what it was all about. The cousins were a show in themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the real, and prodigal, and dangerous, world.” 19 So it was for Alice Laidlaw herself, growing up in Lower Town, yet connected to a web of relations, immersed in the culture and being of her home place – a wide-ranging community spreading beyond Wingham.
“Writing as a Way of Surviving as Herself”:
The Beginnings of a Writer in Wingham
    In November 1939, when Munro was eight and had just begun Grade 4 in Wingham, Lucy Maud Montgomery paid a visit and spoke at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church there. According to the
Advance-Times
, Montgomery attracted a large audience to an evening program in which she both talked about her literary career and recited “one