by Ed Sikov
There were, of course, moments when Peter found joy in the work of entertainers. One act in particular contributed greatly to young Peter’s appreciation of the absurd. He loved Fred Roper’s Midgets. They played with trained dogs and jumped through hoops and were the same size as Pete, despite the fact that they had deep voices and smoked cigars. The midget act’s merry idiocy spoke to him.
Tragedy provided Pete’s salvation from the stinking backstages. Ma Ray died in 1932, and the company quickly slid. Bill and Peg and the uncles were forced to take work with other troupes, and Pete got to stay home a bit more with one or the other of his parents.
• • •
Peter Sellers had just turned six years old in September 1931, when Britain went off the gold standard; by 1932, his cast-adrift parents had discovered a new way of making money. They called it “golding.” It was, in essence, a scam. Bill, Peg, and Peg’s brother Bert would climb into Bert’s car with little Pete in tow; they’d drive out of London to some remote village or other and go house to house convincing the näıve locals that they represented the London Gold Refiners Company, Ltd., a flimflam firm that paid equally fictitious prices for gold. The locals had no idea what their jewelry was worth; Peg did, and she profited. The only “refined” aspect of the company was the phony accents Pete’s mother assumed as she relieved people of their bracelets and chains. Although Pete was kept out of sight in the car during these glorified shakedowns, he still claimed as an adult to remember hearing his mother’s performances in the gold trade. Even at the time the boy considered them to be a step up from what he had heard her do onstage.
Bill, meanwhile, formed a ukulele duo with a man named Lewis, which meant that he was often on the road. With the already spectral Bill vanishing completely when he went out on tour, Pete was left entirely in his mother’s care. The Sellers family’s life was made even more transitory by the fact that they kept changing apartments; moving was easier than paying the rent. “I had the constant feeling I was a mole on the lam,” Sellers recalled. “I kept longing for another more glamorous existence—for a different me, you might say. Maybe that was the beginning of my capacity for really becoming somebody else.”
Still, the Sellerses cut a particular swath as they chased around London: They kept entirely to the north side of the city. The family’s locus classicus, established by Ma Ray, was Hackney. Ma lived with Peg and Bill in Islington, East Finchley, and Highgate; after she died the Sellerses moved around in Camden Town. Apart from brute geography, what linked these neighborhoods was their increasing Jewishness. Whitechapel, the East London neighborhood in which Daniel Mendoza lived, was still the center of Jewish life in the city (to the point of being considered a ghetto as late as 1900), but the North London neighborhoods in which the Sellerses housed themselves were attracting more Jews by the year.
All the stranger, then, that it was to St. Mark’s Kindergarten that Peg Sellers sent her son. When Pete outgrew St. Mark’s, she packed him off to St. Aloysius, a prep school run by the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy. It wasn’t simple convenience that drove Peg to pick St. Aloysius, and in fact she moved to a small house in Muswell Hill Road, Highgate, specifically to give Peter close access to that particular Catholic school. A telling aspect about all of these shifts in residence is that family and friends—and Peter himself—consistently attributed the decision-making to Peg: Peg choosing the school, Peg moving with Peter, Peg, Peg, Peg. Even when Bill was there he wasn’t there. Indeed, according to Peter’s son, Michael, while Peg and Peter lived at Muswell Hill, Bill lived separately at Holloway.
On still another occasion, Bill disappeared entirely, and Pete had no idea what had precipitated the departure. After a good deal of time had passed, Peg put Pete in a car, drove to Leicester Square, found Bill standing on the sidewalk as obviously promised, and took him back, leaving Pete utterly baffled.
Pete was not a stupid boy, but he was very much an uneducated one, Peg never having stressed learning as a virtue. Originally enrolled in Form II at St. Aloysius, he was quickly sent back to Form I, an experience he found humiliating. One of his teachers, Brother Hugh, remembered that Pete was upset at his demotion, especially because he was not only older but substantially larger than any of the other boys in his new class. At that point he was almost five feet tall and fairly fat, with coarsening features, dark hair, and all the natural grace and poise of an expanding eleven-year-old. Brother Cornelius recalled that Pete looked as though he was four or five years older than he actually was, a fact that, combined with his educational underachievement, exacerbated his embarrassment.
The most striking feature of Peter Sellers’s schooldays is the fact that practically nobody remembered him. As Brother Cornelius said, “One always remembers the troublemakers. But Peter, we didn’t notice him at all.” Scouring the many profiles, interviews, memoirs, surveys, studies, and incidental trivia about the life of Peter Sellers—and in England there are libraries’ worth—one finds reference to only one schoolmate who has ever had anything to say. And what he says is rather weird.
Bryan Connon, turned up by the deft entertainment writer Alexander Walker, appears to have been Pete’s only chum at school. “He wasn’t much liked,” Connon told Walker. But that wasn’t a big problem, Connon continued, because “he seemed to have no need of friends. The retreat home to Peg was always open to him—it was the one he preferred to take.” Peg’s son had to go to school, and so he might make a friend there, but Pete’s friendship with Bryan Connon stopped precisely at her front gate. He never got as far as her doorstep.
Sellers himself reflected on the loneliness of his childhood: “Sometimes I felt glad not to be too close to people. I might have been happier, I suppose. On the other hand, I never had much luck with people over the years.”
• • •
Pete was not the only non-Catholic at St. Aloysius, though he was probably the only Jew, and the brothers maintained a liberal policy of accommodation: non-Catholic boys were excused from prayers at their parents’ request. The strange thing is that Peg never requested it. And so Peter Sellers learned his catechism. In fact, he mastered not only its language but its cadence and pitch, all in perfect imitation of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy chanting in chapel. This skill prompted Brother Cornelius to scold Pete’s recalcitrant classmates: “The Jewish boy knows his catechism better than the rest of you!” The problem was, of course, that it wasn’t his catechism.
One of the few constants, apart from his mother, was the BBC.
The loyal electromagnetic friend of lonely boys, the radio carried more than simple entertainment into the restricted world within which Peg had barricaded her son. There was nothing radical on the BBC’s airwaves, but the middlebrow comedians and variety acts that formed, along with news and sports, the backbone of British broadcasting showed Peter Sellers a way out of his mother’s tight domestic trap. However little he understood it at the time (or ever), the blandly funny Misters Muddlecombe, Murgatroyd, and Winterbottom, the stately bands, the hours of forgettable patter—all were a subtly defiant rejection of Peg and her otherwise incessant grip.
He particularly loved the variety show Monday Night at Seven. (The title and time were later changed to Monday Night at Eight.) Pete listened to it every week, as did Bryan Connon, though always in separate houses. On Tuesdays they’d discuss it in exacting detail on their walk home from school, with Peter tossing off all the best comedy bits against Bryan’s straight-man backboard. “He had a gift for improvising dialogue,” Connon remembers. “I’d be the ‘straight’ man, the ‘feed,’ and all the way up Archway Road I’d cue Peter and he’d do all the radio personalities and chuck in a few voices of his own invention as well.” The fun would last only as long as the walk, though, for once they reached Peg’s gate it was all over. Pete said good-bye and that was the end of that.
• • •
With its heavy quotient of solitude and an awkwardness both physical and social, Peter Sellers’s youth might neces
sarily have carried along a third component: sexual immaturity. But no. Describing his adolescence to Alexander Walker, Sellers described his own youthful randiness: “I found out how much I liked girls and how much they liked me—or said they did.”
It started early. Not coincidentally, his entrance into school marked the first opportunity Pete had to spend a few hours away from Peg—and with girls his own age. It was in kindergarten that he fell for a child he nicknamed Sky Blue. She rejected him, but instead of the expected retreat into despair, Pete pressed forward. In fact, Pete kept after Sky Blue all the way into his twenties. It was all to no avail, and yet he persisted on this doomed quest for at least fifteen years, through several changes of school and neighborhood.
Pete’s passion for Sky Blue led him to a dawning awareness of how belittling his mother’s treatment of him was. Specifically, Peg was still dressing him in shorts, and he hated them. Not wishing to be regarded as a toddler by Sky Blue, he begged his mother for a pair of boy-worthy trousers to wear to Sky Blue’s for tea, and since Peg couldn’t bear to say no, she gave them to him. This is the kind of family contradiction that ties boys and girls in knots: Peter Sellers’s mother protected, controlled, and belittled him, and she refused him nothing—except normal maturation.
As for the outfit Peg chose for Pete’s date, it took the ridiculous form of white ducks—formal, starchy things that humiliatingly made him resemble a tiny aristocrat or waiter. Pete wore the ducks to tea and quickly pissed them in a nervous attack. Since white ducks tend to be rather less impressive with a fresh yellow stain spreading around the crotch, the date was a fiasco.
Even this severe disgrace failed to dampen Peter Sellers’s affections, which in itself indicates an unusual psyche for a boy. A less single-minded kid might have given up and moved on, his love turned self-protectively to hate. But Pete was either impervious to punishment or, more likely, a glutton for it, and pressed forward. This time he used performance as his chief means of seduction. In this way Sky Blue became Peter Sellers’s first audience—apart, of course, from his devoted mother.
“I found that Sky Blue had a movie hero, Errol Flynn,” he recalled. “I’d seen him in Dawn Patrol and that was good enough. The next day I put on his voice, his accent, his mannerisms. I even threw in a background of airplane and machine-gun noises for good measure. All to impress Sky Blue.” But the girl was a tough audience; the performance wasn’t a hit. “She’d switched her affections. Now she was a fan of Robert Donat’s. So I went to any Donat films I could find playing—fortunately for me he was a prolific actor—and went through the whole act again with his voice. No luck this time, either.”
Rainer Werner Fassbinder once remarked that Steven Spielberg always wanted to be a little boy when he grew up. With Peter Sellers, it was neither a matter of choice nor desire. Consider his formative years: Peg’s incessant doting and catering to his every whim; his parents’ nomadic existence throughout his childhood; the school shuffle and subsequent demotion at St. Aloysius, which effectively made it impossible to bond with anyone his own age and size; the lack of any religious identity (or, better, the abundance of religions at his disposal); the absent father, both figuratively and literally; the obsessive pursuit of a girl who didn’t want him. With whatever degree of intent, Peg and Bill Sellers did a splendid job of creating an emotionally spoiled, spiritually amoebic mama’s boy, whose innate and fierce talent for mimicry allowed him not only to perpetuate but to depend on and enjoy his own evacuated personality.
• • •
While the dreariness of Peter Sellers’s childhood paved the way only to the awkward joylessness of being the big fat Jew of St. Aloysius, the gray chill of his prep school years yielded, thanks to international politics in the late 1930s, to a dawning awareness of his own potential annihilation. He had just turned thirteen when thoughts of mass suffocation drifted into his head as well as everyone else’s in the kingdom. World War II was beginning.
In the last week of September 1938, with Hitler on the brink of attacking Czechoslovakia and the skies of London increasingly dotted with blimps, the government bestowed 38 million gas masks on the British people. Men, women, and children got them; babies, too young to know the difference, were written off.
The historian Angus Calder describes the British people’s mood as they tried on their new headgear at the dawn of the new era: “Fitting on these grotesque combinations of pig-snout and death’s-head, sniffing the gas-like odour of rubber and disinfectant inside them, millions imagined the dangers ahead more clearly. Symptoms of panic appeared.” The imaginative Briton, Calder writes, “saw in his mind’s eye not the noble if heart-rending scenes of 1915, not the flower of the nation marching away to fight in a foreign land, but his own living-room smashed, his mother crushed, his children maimed, corpses in familiar streets, a sky black with bombers, the air itself poisoned with gas.”
Pete’s fourteenth birthday occurred at the end of the week in which Great Britain declared war on Germany. Along with millions of other Englishmen, the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy ran for cover to the countryside as St. Aloysius was evacuated to a town in Cambridgeshire. Peg, who had opened a Highgate trinket shop at the time, claimed to be unable to move to Cambridgeshire on such short notice.
Perhaps it ought to go without saying, but Peg was unwilling to send her son so far away (two and a half hours by train) without her. So she immediately yanked him out of school, and that was the end of Peter Sellers’s education.
She was assisted, however unintentionally, by the government. September 1, 1939, had been set as the date on which children would be required to remain in school to the age of fifteen rather than fourteen, but the war necessitated a postponement. Had it not been for World War II, Peter Sellers might have received at least one more year’s worth of education.
But no matter. Peg was very pleased to have him by her side all day long, and that was what counted.
• • •
In September 1939, when the Nazis attacked Poland and England declared war on Germany, the government issued gas masks, mobilized troops, and evacuated nearly 4 million British citizens out of the cities and into the countryside. On the BBC, the immensely popular radio comedian Tommy Handley turned the onrushing catastrophe into an absurd extended joke. Handley’s new show, It’s That Man Again, featured a series of recurring characters with funny voices, a taste for puns, and a brand of humor that would have fallen flat to any audience but the English. In one routine, Handley played the Minister of Aggravation, a joint venture between Agriculture and Information:
HANDLEY: To all concerned in the Office of Twerps! Take notice that from today, September the twenty-tooth, I, the Minister of Aggravation, have power to confiscate, complicate, and commandeer—
ASSISTANT: How do you spell commandeer, Mr. Hanwell?
HANDLEY: Commandeer—let me see. (Singing:) Comm-on-and-ear, comm-on-and-eer, Tommy Handley’s wag-time band! Comm-on-and-eer . . . ! Er, where were we? “I have the power to seize anything on sight!”
ASSISTANT: Oh, Mr. Handpump! And me sitting so close to you!
Fun, filth, and playing to the crowd: Pete was inspired.
England was profoundly rattled by the war, but by and large the British people didn’t go berserk at the prospect, their mood at the start of this international catastrophe an improvement over the previous generation’s histrionic reaction to the so-called Great War. (The declaration of war on Germany in August 1914 is said to have sparked the stoning of hapless dachshunds in the streets.) In fact, because there was so little combat at first, British wags took to calling it “the Bore War.”
Pete helped his mum in her shop. His only friend, Bryan Connon from St. Aloysius, was now his former only friend, having been dispatched along with the other schoolboys to Cambridgeshire. Connon never heard from Sellers again. With no contact with boys his own age, nor any men except his always-in-the-background father—even the celibate monks of St. Aloysius were more spirited role models�
�Pete’s social world now consisted essentially of his mother and the BBC. Together in their North London flat, Pete with his radio and Peg with her trinkets, they endured the coldest winter London had weathered in forty-five years.
And the blackouts. Once a night, for a few minutes at least, everyone in London had to tack thick curtains or dark paper over their windows or face the chastisement of police or patrolling air raid wardens. Blackouts were a matter of national security, of course; lights provided targets for Nazi bombers. But in the Sellers household, blackout curtains served as the physical manifestation of Peg’s goal as a mother—they sealed her son away with her. The outside world could never love him as much as she did, so he had to be kept from it in isolation.
As particular as Pete’s situation was, however, his countrymen were also experiencing a deep and sometimes morbidly comical sense of disconnection. Plunged into blackness every night, not only were the British people forced to sequester themselves behind dark curtains at home, but the enforced murk of London streets at night led to pratfalls. All told, an astounding one in five people injured themselves during the blackouts—walking headlong into trees and lampposts, bumping against fat people, even just losing their way in the dark chaos of an otherwise familiar lane and tumbling off the curb. Nightlife had suddenly turned into a series of goofily scary and nonsensical comedy routines.
The Bore War, or “funny war” as it was also known, grew less boring in May 1940 when the Nazis’ seemingly unstoppable march to the French coast forced the humiliating evacuation of 220,000 British soldiers from the beaches near Dunkirk. The boredom ended absolutely on Saturday, September 7—the day before Pete’s fifteenth birthday—when German war planes destroyed London’s East End. Other London neighborhoods saw the day’s cataclysm as predictive of their own fates. The blitz lasted a full two-and-a-half months, and German ships began massing off the coast of France. The possibility of an outright invasion of England became a much less abstract notion.
