• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

• • •

When a swing band turned up at the theater for a weeklong gig, Pete discovered a new talent. He’d heard drums before, of course, but he’d never had the chance to create all that rhythmic racket himself, so one afternoon, when he found a set of drums onstage for Joe Daniels and His Hot Shots, Pete let loose. The bandleader/drummer caught him mid-act. Daniels wasn’t angry. Appreciating the teenager’s enthusiasm and nascent talent, he ended up giving Pete pointers for the rest of the week, after which Pete begged his parents for drums and steady lessons. Unable to resist his whims let alone his wants, they came through.

Drumming suited him. Banging in time, Pete could envelope himself in a world of near-total abstraction, all in the context of a great deal of noise. What aggression he felt as an awkward fat kid could be expelled, at least in part, by methodically hitting things, all in a socially respectable and even artistic manner—one that might eventually pay off at that, though drummers’ lowly status in the music world tended to be fodder for jokes. (Did you hear about the drummer who graduated from high school? Me neither.)

Jokes aside, Peg was pleased by Pete’s enthusiasm for a performing art. Bill went along.

• • •

At the time, whole city blocks across Britain were turning to dust. In a single ten-hour period in mid-November 1940, German warplanes dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on the medieval city-center of Coventry, effectively flattening it. The Germans coined a new verb: to Coventrate, meaning to devastate the psychological as well as the physical heart of a population. London was so immense that despite hundreds of thousands of bombs raining down on its head it could not be thoroughly obliterated, at least not with the technology available at the time. But Bristol could—and was. (Bristol is about eighty miles away from Ilfracombe as the crow, or German warplane, flies.) So were Birmingham and Southampton. By the beginning of 1941, the people of Britain were taking a sustained hit of the sort that Americans had never experienced in their own land, and the aftershocks of their direct experience of war continued to rumble in the British psyche for many years to come.

Relatively safe in Ilfracombe, Pete turned sixteen in September 1941. In addition to girls, he was developing an interest in communication with the dead. He began turning to the clairvoyant mother of a friend for cheer and solace when the radio wasn’t enough. For whatever reasons, disembodied voices spoke to Pete as meaningfully as those that were attached to people close at hand, if not more so. He believed in them.

Meanwhile, the radio show It’s That Man Again (ITMA for short) had become an even bigger hit, and even more exciting to Peter. One writer has gone so far as to claim that Tommy Handley was “probably the most popular man in the country after Churchill.” (“That Man,” by the way, wasn’t Handley; it was Hitler.) Along with Monday Night at Eight, ITMA was the BBC’s attempt to infuse its more steadfast offerings with fast-paced, American-style patter. According to the historian Asa Briggs, “ITMA was vox mundi, rich in all the sounds of war and with more invented characters than Walt Disney.” Pete Sellers of Ilfracombe found it inspiring.

• • •

Given his bedrock peculiarities, one of the most unexpected aspects of Peter Sellers’s life is his extraordinary talent for sexual seduction. It began in earnest in Ilfracombe. His scores weren’t just the bravado of a deficient adult embellishing his youthful conquests. That Sellers went on to enjoy a rampant sex life with some of the world’s most gorgeous women suggests that he really did have something going for him and that women responded to it. Still, even he admitted that his early dates were the product of desperate pretense. Believing that the real Peter Sellers wasn’t much of anything, Pete told the girls that he was a talent agent who’d dropped in on Ilfracombe