Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [5]
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.”
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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