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By Root 1462 0

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.

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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