Furious Love by Sam Kashner Page B

November 10, 1925 in the mining-and-smelting town of Pontrhydyfen in South Wales. His mother, Edith Thomas, had married Jenkins at sixteen and raised her large brood with resourcefulness and hard work, taking in washing, making and selling sweets and nonalcoholic beer, and making sure her children were well fed and attended church regularly. All but Graham, Richard’s youngest brother, would toil long hours in the coal pits. As Hilda Jenkins Owens, one of Richard’s sisters, recalled, “the seven boys born to Dic and Edith between 1901 and 1927 survived. They grew tall like their mother, rugged and strong like their father, and the first five went down to the mines like their ancestors before them.”
    Robert Hardy, who knew several of Burton’s siblings, described the Jenkinses as “remarkable. Each and every one of them had an extraordinary ability about them, a sort of ancient dignity. That was wonderfully true of the eldest brother, Thomas, who had been a miner all his life. His face was pocked with all these little blue marks, and he was the gentlest and most dignified, charming, and easy man.” Yet they were tough. “To have Dadi Ni’s boys against you was something to shy away from,” Hilda recalled. Richard himself had to earn his place among his six brothers. They would sometimes walk along the highest ledge of the bridge that gave Pontrhydyfen its name, a terrifying height. “I did it, even though I was frightened,” Burton recalled. “After all, I had to prove I was a full-fledged member of the Jenkins family.”
    Dic Jenkins often worked from six thirty a.m. to seven thirty p.m. six days a week, which meant he saw daylight only on Sundays. Burton’s brother Verdun lost half of his foot in a mining accident. Besides the long hours in the pits and the hard poverty of the 1920s and 1930s, there were also the twin perils of malnutrition and tuberculosis. Pontrhydyfen means “bridge over the ford across two rivers,” but very few sons of the valley crossed those rivers into the greater world. (Of Burton’s era and just after, the Welshmen who crossed over included the poet Dylan Thomas, the playwright Emlyn Williams, the pop singer Tom Jones, and the actors Stanley Baker, Thomas Owen Jones, and Anthony Hopkins.) This Welsh valley of roughly two thousand souls was sustained by three enterprises: the mines, the pubs, and the churches. The women of Pontrhydyfen would habitually climb to the top of the mines each payday, waiting for the men to surface so they could pluck the paychecks out of their hands before the local pubs took it all.
    Nonetheless, Richard—and Hilda and Graham—looked back on their hardscrabble early years as happy ones. “It was our parents who had the hard time, not us,” Graham Jenkins wrote in his memoir, Richard Burton , My Brother. “We ate plentifully and with great gusto. The main diet was fresh fish but there was a joint once a week and on Saturday we had cockles and lava bread—a huge treat.” Burton, in fact, never developed a sophisticated palate and never lost his taste for lava bread, a Welsh dish consisting of the froth of boiled seaweed plunked down on the plate “like a cow pat,” or for a dish called siencyn , a “delicious mush” made from pieces of fried bread, bacon, and cheese, with sugared tea poured over it. Graham may have put too cheerful a spin on his memories, as another chronicler reported that Edith Jenkins often fed her family “by dribbling [two] eggs over fourteen slices of bread, particularly when the bread had turned moldy,” as it often did in the clammy Welsh air. All the family meals were washed down by gallons of hot, sweetened tea.
    Graham remembers his father as a man who drank no more than other miners, and who was never cruel nor violent while drunk. Others recall a more prodigious appetite: “Dic was a real sweet man.No harm in him at