Margaret McAloren, ‘The Wild Freshness of Morning’

Abstract

Margaret McAloren was born in 1902 to poor Irish Catholic parents in Silvertown, North Woolwich, a place she describes in her unpublished autobiography, written in 1978, as ‘not a slum but definitely a working-class district’. Reviewing the first 30 years of her life, she briskly chronicles her experiences of war, work and relationships, as well as the many comings and goings in her ‘slap-dash poor Irish home’. The following extract comes from Chapter 4, in which she briefly recollects her involvement with the Gaelic League and her brush with militant Irish nationalism in London in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising. McAloren’s early life was dominated by family tragedy: her father died suddenly when she was three, two of her older sisters died within months of each other during the First World War, and four of her brothers succumbed to illness and disease during the 1920s. Her grief was compounded by the loss of her fiancé Harry, who died on her twenty-fifth birthday in 1927. Recalling the death of her brother John on New Year’s Day 1929, she pithily remarks: ‘Nobody first-footed us — only Death!’ Bereavement is therefore the keynote of McAloren’s autobiography, which takes its title from Tom Moore’s ‘I Saw From the Beach’ and is written in an animated conversational style that effectively reproduces the cadence of her speaking voice. Yet for all her losses, she never succumbs to self-pity: ‘Writing this — and I’m seventy-six now — I wonder how the hell we lived through it all. We just seemed to make the best of what we had. Once somebody said to me that we were a very “tragic” family, which made me indignant: I think we were a very happy family, and losing one after another of them only made the others more precious.’

Unpublished typescript. 92pp.; pp. 47–9; 52–3.