THESE THINGS I WISH

In the Lyric Feature on Sunday 9th June 2024, at 6 pm on RTÉ lyric fm, Bairbre O'Hogan presents These Things I Wish, on the life and work of the writer Winifred M. Letts.

Below, Bairbre tells us how she first got to know Winifred Letts and became interested in her work.

Each time I pass Beech Cottage on Ballinclea Road in Killiney, Co. Dublin, I think back to Friday mornings of primary school holidays in the late 1960s. The shopping had been done and packed into the boot of the car. I sat with my mother and her great, but very elderly, friend, Winifred Verschoyle, in the Johnson, Mooney and O'Brien café in Dún Laoghaire, where they drank milky coffee and I drank fresh orange juice. I usually had a Viennese finger biscuit, too, all courtesy of Mrs V., as we called her.

I would half-listen in on their conversation, on the plans for the following week – did something need to be brought for repair, or was a medical appointment scheduled, or was a friend to call? But I preferred to think ahead to dropping her home to Beech Cottage where, while my mother unpacked the groceries for her, I could browse the bookcase in the hall – the shelves full of books, some such as Knockmaroon and Naughty Sophia written by herself, others written by friends, including Patricia Lynch, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge. Above the bookcase were framed Cuala Press prints of her poems, one of which I also had in my bedroom.

I knew Mrs Verschoyle had used her maiden name, Letts, when writing. I had read quite a few of her children’s books and I had read, of course, the essay, "Demeter’s Children", in which she described my mother as 'strange and fairylike, a little cousin to the Pied Piper … sister to the reeds and meadowsweet and loosestrife by the river’, but I didn’t know anyone outside of our family who had read her works – or even who knew of her. Nor did I know then that she had described herself, in a 1957 interview, as ‘a period piece, a has been, totally unknown to this generation’. Despite the fact that her plays were performed in the Abbey Theatre and Gate Theatre, that she wrote beautiful lyrical poetry and groundbreaking war poetry, that many of her poems were set to music and sung by the likes of Kathleen Ferrier and Harry Plunket Greene, that her children’s novels were broadcast and re-broadcast over a period of three decades, and that Cuala Press sent illustrated prints of her poems worldwide, it is unlikely that more than a handful of people nowadays could name a poem, or a book, or a play by her.

But, through libraries and the internet, it has been possible to find lots of her published works. A family archive has lovingly preserved many of her papers, and those of us who knew her personally are keen to share her talents with new readers. The RTÉ lyric fm programme These Things I Wish, presented by me and produced by Claire Cunningham, will re-introduce us to the writer Winifred M. Letts, who was born in Manchester, but spent most of her life in Dublin. She attended Alexandra College, trained as a masseuse (nowadays called a physiotherapist) in Baggot St Hospital, worked in WWI military hospitals, and at the age of 44, married William Verschoyle, a widower who was 23 years older than her. Having spent childhood summers at her mother’s home at Knockmaroon, near the Phoenix Park, in complete contrast to the smoke-blackened Manchester suburb she knew, she relished the natural world - wild flowers, all animals, and country living, particularly on their farm at Kilberry, Co. Kildare. And now, when the rain ‘drips, drips, drips’ on ‘a soft day’, W.M Letts’s wonderful words and lyricism await a whole new generation.

These Things I Wish, presented by Bairbre O'Hogan, is the Lyric Feature on Sunday 9th June at 6 pm on RTÉ lyric fm, and will be available after broadcast as a Lyric Feature podcast.

The programme is produced by Claire Cunningham and is a Rockfinch production for RTÉ lyric fm.