Dylan Thomas’ ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’

Veronica (Ronnie) Cunningham performs Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ holiday memory, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales.’

‘One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

‘All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen. …’

Ronnie has been been reading aloud since she can remember beginning to read. She began story-telling in Housatonic at In Words Out Words (IWOW) in 2002 on the first Tuesday of each month. She’s performed two large shows, in words and song, based on her childhood at the Stockbridge Congregational Church which raised funds for the restoration of the organ.

Born 1938 in Bristol, England, of Welsh parents, Ronnie lived in Bristol until 1946 when her brother Michael and she were sent to London to live with their Dad and her stepmother. She attended Montem Street Elementary School and, after taking the 11 plus exam, went on to Highbury Hill High School in Islington for grammar school.

She came to the United States in1963 for a nurses’ training program. While working for Harvard Libraries for 12 years she put herself through library school, and eventually to a post-graduate program at Columbia University, becoming a preservation librarian.

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