Alice Munro, at the age of two or three, in her home town of Wingham, Ontario. Photograph courtesy Alice Munro

I lived when I was young at the end of a long road, or a road that seemed long to me. Behind me, as I walked home from primary school, and then from high school, was the real town with its activity and its sidewalks and its streetlights for after dark. Marking the end of town were two bridges over the Maitland River: one narrow iron bridge, where cars sometimes got into trouble over which one should pull off and wait for the other, and a wooden walkway, which occasionally had a plank missing, so that you could look right down into the bright, hurrying water. I liked that, but somebody always came and replaced the plank eventually.

Then there was a slight hollow, a couple of rickety houses that got flooded every spring, but that people—different people—always came and lived in anyway. And then another bridge, over the mill race, which was narrow but deep enough to drown you. After that, the road divided, one part of it going south up a hill and over the river again to become a genuine highway, and the other jogging around the old fairgrounds to turn west.

That westward road was mine.

There was also a road heading north, which had a brief but real sidewalk and several houses close together, as if they were in town. One of them had a sign in the window that said “Salada Tea,” evidence that groceries had once been for sale there. Then there was a school, which I had attended for two years of my life and never wished to see again. After those years, my mother had made my father buy an old shed in town, so that he would be paying town taxes and I could go to the town school. As it turned out, she hadn’t needed to do that, because in the year, in the very month, that I started school in town war was declared with Germany and, as if by magic, the old school, where bullies had taken away my lunch and threatened to beat me up and nobody had seemed to learn anything in the midst of the uproar, was cut in half, with only one room and one teacher, who probably did not lock the doors at recess. It appeared that the same boys who’d always asked me rhetorically and alarmingly if I wanted to fuck were just as eager to get jobs as their older brothers were to go into the Army. I don’t know if the school toilets had improved by then or not, but they had been the worst thing. It was not as if we didn’t resort to an outhouse at home, but it was clean and even had a linoleum floor. At that school, for reasons of contempt or whatever, nobody seemed to bother to aim for the hole. In many ways it wasn’t easy for me in town, either, because everybody else had been together since grade one, and there were many things that I hadn’t learned yet, but it was a comfort to see my new school’s unsoiled seats and to hear the noble urban sound of its flush toilets.

During my time at the first school, I did make one friend. A girl whom I’ll call Diane arrived partway through my second year. She was about my age, and she lived in one of those houses with a sidewalk. She asked me one day if I could do the Highland fling, and when I said no she offered to teach me. With this in mind, we went to her place after school. Her mother had died and she had come to live with her grandparents. To dance the Highland fling, she told me, you needed clicking shoes, which she had and, of course, I didn’t, but our feet were nearly the same size, so we could trade while she tried to teach me. Eventually, we got thirsty and her grandmother gave us a drink of water, but it was horrid water from a dug well, just like at school. I explained about the superior water we got from a drilled well at home, and the grandmother said, without taking any sort of offense, that she wished they had that, too.

But then, too soon, my mother was outside, having gone to the school and discovered my whereabouts. She honked the car horn to summon me and didn’t even respond to the grandmother’s friendly wave. My mother did not drive often, and when she did there was a nervous solemnity to the occasion. On the way home, I was told that I was never to enter that house again. (This proved not to be difficult, because Diane stopped appearing at school a few days later—she had been sent away somewhere.) I told my mother that Diane’s mother was dead and she said yes, she knew. I told her about the Highland fling, and she said that I might learn it properly sometime, but not in that house.

I did not find out then that the mother had been a prostitute and died of some ailment that it seems prostitutes caught. She’d wanted to be buried at home, and the minister of our own church had done the service. There was controversy over what he’d said. Some people thought he should have left it out, but my mother believed that he had done the right thing.

The wages of sin is death.

She told me this a long time later, or what seemed a long time later, when I was at the stage of hating a great many things she said, particularly when she used that voice of shuddering, even thrilled, conviction, with a tremor that seemed to be there more and more regularly, whether deliberate or not.

I ran into the grandmother now and again. She always had a little crinkly smile for me. She said it was wonderful that I kept going to school, and she reported on Diane, who also continued for a notable time, wherever she was—though not for as long as I did. According to her grandmother, she then got a job in a restaurant in Toronto, where she wore an outfit with sequins on it. I was old enough at that point, and mean enough, to assume that it was a place where you also took the sequin outfit off.

Diane’s grandmother wasn’t the only one who thought I was taking a long time at school. Along my road, there were a number of houses that were set farther apart than they would have been in town but still didn’t have much in the way of property. One of them, on a small hill, belonged to Waitey Streets, a one-armed veteran of the First World War. He kept some sheep and had a wife, whom I saw only once, when she was filling the drinking pail at the pump. Waitey liked to joke about the number of years I had been at school and how it was a pity that I could never pass my exams and be done with it. And I joked back, pretending that was true. I was not sure what he really believed. This was the way you knew people on the road, and they knew you. You’d say hello, and they’d say hello and something about the weather, and if they had a car and you were walking they would give you a ride. It wasn’t like the real country, where people usually knew the insides of one another’s houses and everybody had more or less the same way of making a living.