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As far as the chaperoning of Peter was concerned, David Lodge turned out to be a corrupt nanny. He and Pete were males in their twenties; they liked to cat around. In fact, in Cannes they managed to procure some champagne to go with a couple of girls, and everyone got so plastered that the boys creatively talked the girls into crawling around the floor pretending to be feline.

In Toulon, Lodge took it upon himself to rescue Peter from an especially low-life prostititute. Peter had had too much to drink and disappeared. Lodge managed to trace him to a seedy apartment in a bad part of town and burst in to find Peter trying to remove his pants. Fearing for his friend’s safety, he grabbed the disappointed Sellers and sped him away.

Women, says Lodge, were particularly easy in Germany. Much to his retrospective shame, the pretty young German girls were helpfully starving, which led the two randy young men to use cookies as bait. (“It was really pathetic,” Lodge mutters.) Lodge was—and remains—especially disgusted by Pete’s voraciousness with one particular girl, describing her as “desperate” and Sellers himself as “animalistic.” There was a comical retribution, though, when Pete got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and chose the wrong door in the dark. Wearing nothing but his RAF underwear, he plunged directly out into the street. The door locked behind him, and he had to pound on it furiously to be let back in.

Lodge remembers spending Christmas 1945 with Sellers on the Champs-Elysees. It was a merry time. The war was over, the Allied soldiers were gleeful, and all was right with the world, except that Pete, always on the needy side, had grown a little too dependent on his best friend. When they had to part, having been sent on different entertainment tours, Sellers fell into lonely despair. “I left him in Germany on the Danish border,” says Lodge. “He was crying.”

• • •

Sellers was back in London working at the Air Ministry on Sloane Square and killing time at the Gang Show headquarters on Houghton Street when his term of service with the RAF ended. He had already returned home to his mother, who somehow managed to reward his survival with a big, new, shiny black American car.

Peg was always adept at pulling money out of a hat, but it took special skill to produce any car, let alone a huge American model. It was easy for Peter to park the gleaming heap on any reduced-scale London lane because, apart from the strict gasoline rationing that was still in force, the deprivations of postwar England meant that there were precious few competitors for spots. It was in this car-poor context that Graham Stark, a Gang Show sergeant, arrived at the entertainment unit’s headquarters on slim, curving Houghton Street one day and was flabbergasted to see a lowly airman methodically polishing a car so big that it appeared to be a limousine. “The whole thing had an air of a sequence from a Hitchcock movie,” Stark writes, “the empty street, the incongruous car, the lone airman silently polishing.”

Curious, Stark struck up a conversation with the airman, who boasted that it “only does fourteen to the gallon, but you’ve got to admit it’s a right beauty.” (“No concern with petrol rationing, no concern that I was a sergeant,” Stark notes. “He just wasn’t impressed.”) They ended up going out for some tea and war stories, including tales of Peter’s life in the theater, after which Peter inquired about the state of his new friend’s lodgings. Stark had to confess that he was staying in a one-shilling-a-night flophouse. Peter was appalled.

After a quick call to Peg, he put Stark in the newly polished car and sped him back to East Finchley, where Sellers brought the family’s initially skeptical landlady nearly to tears by a torrent of melodramatic pleas. (Poor young officer, served his nation so bravely, jungles of Burma, orphan needing roof. . . .) She immediately offered Stark the empty one-room flat on the floor below Peter, Peg, and