My writings.
The Richard in me.
The Richard in Me
By Jamie Richard Smith.
Last night, I sat in front of my television enthralled, watching scenes from my past as the film, and the years slipped away. Memories of climbing heather curbed paths and jumping down steep mountain tracks. Grey Welsh miner’s houses rising one above the other as they clung to the valley slopes; red bricked schools; Black smoke belching collieries and iron works that sapped the strength of South Wales’s young men. A place where Spitfires and barrage balloons controlled the skies, the year was 1942 and in that same year I had seen the same scenes as they unfolded in the Welsh valleys.
The film was about a young schoolboy named Richard Walter Jenkins, a boy who lived in Port Talbot. He was from a broken family with little more expectancy in life than to finish school and to spend the rest of his life, black faced and red lipped as a miner or ashen faced at some other poorly paid job on the surface. Either way normally led to the bottle to drown the circumstances and the fears associated with them.
I said, I was enthralled as I watched, this was because I had spent part of my early youth with the same dim prospects. I actually lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare, but my father was away from home, serving in the Royal Air Force. My mother was ill, so I was sent to spend a lot of my early life in South Wales with my grandparents. In that same year of 1942, I had stood in Swansea looking out to sea and watched the barrage balloons as they drifted high in the sky over the town. I had also roamed those green mountain tops that I now saw depicted in the film.
As the story of the young Richard developed, I saw him develop from a naughty, inattentive, schoolboy to a youngster with an interest in the written word, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and others. The written word developed into an interest in the acting of those descriptive, written words. His teacher took an interest in him, and started to teach him the acting skills that he needed to fulfil his dreams; he, that is the teacher, was eventually to adopt him, but the misunderstandings of youth led to arguments and a tragic breakup. A breakup only to be repaired in later, more mature, years.
As the story developed, Richard became friendly with a young girl. They would climb up high on the mountain slopes or just sit in the sand dunes, making love and then sit together quietly as they gazed out to sea. At the age of twelve, I, in the same manner, was to fall in love with soft-skinned Betty Jones, we would sit in her mother’s kitchen, in number ten, Winsor Road, there was a little snogging and confiding of our secrets to one another; but, unfortunately, she never to allowed me to take her to the mountain slopes.
For young Richard the seeds of life had been planted, the young Jenkins, now with his adopted guardian’s name, fought the fights of adolescence with his adopted father and moved away from the greyness of South Wales. He was to receive a commission in the Royal Air Force, from there a scholarship to Oxford, all orchestrated from a distance by his adopted father. And all the while he followed his own interests in the written word and the acting profession.
For my part, although my mother was still ill, my father, with the war over, had been demobbed and returned home; and so, I was also to return home and settle down to finish my schooling in Stratford before leaving school in 1949, to train as a commis chef.
In 1951, I obtained a position as a chef in the kitchens of the Royal Shakespeare Memorial Theatre on the banks of the River Avon. The kitchen I worked in was on the third floor overlooking the river. Because the two main meals of the day were lunch and a pre-performance dinner I was free every afternoon. On fine days, I would go down to the river and feed the swans, or I just walked along the river bank. Sometimes, I even walked over the old tram bridge and after gazing down the river at the beauty of the red bricked theatre and distant grey spire of the Holy Trinity church where Shakespeare was buried, I would spend a few hours in the recreation park.
On wet days, which even in summer were many, I would go to the floor above the kitchen, make my way through the deserted bar and sit in the auditorium, gazing down from the gods at the most famous stage in the world; a stage that my father had trodden with the best actors of his day. That stage was where I first saw the young Richard, rehearsing for his leading parts in that season of Shakespeare’s plays. I don’t want to be clever and say I remember which parts he played, after all these years memories are blurred, but if the film was correct, I watched him rehearsing for his part as Prince Hal in ‘King Henry IV Part I’. I do remember he was being directed by Peter Hall, and I do remember Sir Micheal Redgrave and Antony Quayle rehearsing with him.
Around the new year, that would be 1951-52, the theatre gave a staff party where the staff and the actors mixed freely. I hadn’t been at that party long when the young Richard brought his pencil slim girlfriend over to meet me; I vividly remember her and her brown clinging dress which was complimented by shiny, dangling earrings. And yes, maybe I was being reminded of Betty Jones.
Why he came over to me, I have no idea, other than that he may have recognized me as one of his main admirers who regularly appeared up in the gods to watch him rehearse, I don’t even know if his beautiful girlfriend was his girlfriend from Port Talbot or one of the actresses. What I do know is that I was in the presence of the subject of the film that I was watching last night, for he was Richard Walter Jenkins, later to be known to the world as the actor… Richard Burton.