Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [18]
London itself wasn’t itself. The destruction of whole stretches of the city forced many newly homeless residents to become squatters in empty buildings and still-occupied army camps. Mourning was standard, the sullen knowledge still sinking in that the war’s dead were not just stragglers on a late steamer from Colombo. There were severe shortages, and therefore strict rationing, of basic foods and supplies. The British people’s meat allowance hovered around thirteen ounces per person per week; milk at two pints; cheese at one and one half ounces. They got “sweetie coupons” for candy, and they didn’t get many of them. Everybody won a single egg every seven days.
During the winter of 1946, London, never the brightest of cities, was particularly dreary. It scarcely helped that the battery of fierce blizzards and freezing temperatures that season was followed in quick succession by floods during a bleak London spring and a relentlessly gray and rainy summer.
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At the Sellers residence, the inevitable business cards were printed: “Peter Sellers, Drums and Impressions.” Peter took work where he could find it, which is to say that he didn’t work very much and was supported almost entirely by Bill and Peg.
In his off hours, which appear to have been many, he pursued a girl. He did so with such drive and determination that the words clinical and obsession come to mind. Pretty, blond Hilda Parkin met Peter in 1946 at a Christmastime ball at the Grosvenor House in London. The Parkin family had been longtime friends of the Sellerses and Rays; it was Hilda’s much-older brother, Stanley, who owned the theater in Ilfracombe. “It was a big thing to go to the Grosvenor House,” Hilda recalls. “One of the first times we’d been able to go to a big ball for a long time. Peter was really my nephew’s friend; my nephew was about my age. And when he told Peter his aunt was coming I don’t think he was very pleased. Until we met. And then we had great fun together.”
Hilda, who was living in Norfolk at the time, has kept to this day the many letters Peter Sellers wrote to her during their three-year relationship. “I’ve got 109 letters from Peter, with three proposals of marriage and threats to commit suicide if I broke up with him. Some of the letters were sixteen pages long, and he’d already written one in the morning, and he was writing one now, and he’d just posted one.”
From one letter: “Hilda, will you marry me next year? We will both be 22.”
From another: “Dearest Hilda—If you ever took it in your mind to pack me in, I’d go completely round the bend.”
Another describes the view from his parents’ flat on Finchley High Road: “From the window, I can see the backs of rows of dreary looking houses. An overcast sky looks down upon the tax- and cup-tortured England. When I get to the top I’ll get you a Rolls Royce! Throw in a few butlers for luck.” (By “tax- and cup-tortured England,” Sellers is referring to the fact that in the postwar years taxes were as high as food supplies were low. He railed against Britain’s new Labor government in other letters, even going so far as to blame Labor for the frigid winter.)
“He was a little fat boy, not that it meant anything,” Hilda notes. “I was a trained dancer and acrobat, and I taught him to dance. Peter got on very well with it. He was always kidding, impersonating. . . . We had a thousand laughs. We made some records together, Peter and I [in novelty booths where people could cut their own vinyl]. He used to impersonate me.”
He also enjoyed other impersonations: “Often, his letters would arrive with photographs, and in one of them he was dressed up like his mother.” This was not done behind Peg’s back. She took the picture. “In another he was pretending to be his nonexistent sister.”
Toward the end of their relationship, Peter paid Hilda a visit in Norwich, where