Margiad’s Story
“She continues to inspire generations of her family, and others, today.”
Jim, Margiad’s nephew
Jim has shared the story of his aunt, Margiad Evans, who died from brain cancer in 1958. She continues to inspire generations of her family, and others, today.
“…without mental effort I can become as the wind, as the very light, entering the barn doors and the crannies in the stones, learning how things are in the hibernating insect world….”.This is how my aunt, the Anglo-Welsh Border poet and writer Margiad Evans describes herself at the age of 34 in 1943 writing from Potacre, her hilltop wartime home in Herefordshire.
Writing was her be-all and her by-all. She wrote, “before I knew all the shapes of the letters – long before I cared to read”, and every day she committed to paper something. As did her sister to the age of 99. Margiad published her first book Country Dance at the age of 23. When her husband returned after active service, she planned, a biography of Emliy Brontë. Instead, on May 11 1950, while composing a sonnet, she experienced her first epileptic fit, alone in her cottage in Elkstone. She was 41, and pregnant. Epilepsy was confirmed by Professor Frederick Golla at the Burden Institute in Bristol and medication provided remission that allowed her to give birth normally and to write an account of her illness, for the benefit of others, which opened up her inner thoughts to public scrutiny in her ground-breaking A Ray of Darkness, reckoned to be the first full personal account of an epileptic by a sufferer of that socially destructive disease.
Six years later the cause was established as a glioma in her right parietal lobe, classed as inoperable by Mr Wylie McKissock at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, London.
Shortly after that revelation, and its implications became known to her, she wrote this poem, The Terror, which has only just been found in the USA. It seems to me to be a positive affirmation about the need for others’ lives to continue. Hers, alas, came to an end two years later on her 49th birthday.
Note A Ray of Darkness and its sequel The Nightingale Silenced are now available from the publisher HONNO.