I did not think I was the luckiest six-year-old in the world when, at the start of one week in Switzerland with the family, I broke my leg for a Christmas present.

My ski pass already purchased I wrecked my leg before even getting on the slopes. I had nothing to do except learn how to get around on the snow on crutches. For company I would have to spend my time with the new boyfriend of my mother as he was not much of an athlete and did not ski, although as an actor under contract he may have claimed this for professional reasons. According to my mother he was an alcoholic with a smoking habit, two issues she hoped to curtail and she enlisted both me and my sister in her schemes.

To fill the days the old actor and I sat in the restaurant of the hotel, a large room with a roaring fireplace and we played endless games of hangman. He told me stories, like how he hated acting and only wanted to be an English professor and that he was from Wales and hated to be confused with being British. Meanwhile I monitored his intake of alcohol and cigarettes, as per my mother’s instruction. I was her little spy, her Black Hand. No doubt he saw right through my sophomoric efforts. The best I could do was delay him from his drink, at the end of each game he would pick up his wine, fingertips on the round ass of the glass, and swig it all. Then we would play another game of hangman and he would order another glass of wine. It just so happened this man loved kids, and I soon learned to love him.

In the middle of the day the two of us would wobble carefully over to the gondola and travel up to the top of the mountain and join for lunch the avid athletic family members, all of them bristling with suntanned skin and exuberance.

I don’t know if I realized it at the time but I was the luckiest six-year-old in the world. What a Christmas present I had to enjoy Richard Burton for a nanny for a week. Merry holidays one and all. I doff my cap to you my friends and RIP Richard Burton and to the many other long gone friends who lit my childhood with bursts of fireworks.

Image by Amy Badass©

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