Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [8]
HANDLEY: To all concerned in the Office of Twerps! Take notice that from today, September the twenty-tooth, I, the Minister of Aggravation, have power to confiscate, complicate, and commandeer—
ASSISTANT: How do you spell commandeer, Mr. Hanwell?
HANDLEY: Commandeer—let me see. (Singing:) Comm-on-and-ear, comm-on-and-eer, Tommy Handley’s wag-time band! Comm-on-and-eer . . . ! Er, where were we? “I have the power to seize anything on sight!”
ASSISTANT: Oh, Mr. Handpump! And me sitting so close to you!
Fun, filth, and playing to the crowd: Pete was inspired.
England was profoundly rattled by the war, but by and large the British people didn’t go berserk at the prospect, their mood at the start of this international catastrophe an improvement over the previous generation’s histrionic reaction to the so-called Great War. (The declaration of war on Germany in August 1914 is said to have sparked the stoning of hapless dachshunds in the streets.) In fact, because there was so little combat at first, British wags took to calling it “the Bore War.”
Pete helped his mum in her shop. His only friend, Bryan Connon from St. Aloysius, was now his former only friend, having been dispatched along with the other schoolboys to Cambridgeshire. Connon never heard from Sellers again. With no contact with boys his own age, nor any men except his always-in-the-background father—even the celibate monks of St. Aloysius were more spirited role models—Pete’s social world now consisted essentially of his mother and the BBC. Together in their North London flat, Pete with his radio and Peg with her trinkets, they endured the coldest winter London had weathered in forty-five years.
And the blackouts. Once a night, for a few minutes at least, everyone in London had to tack thick curtains or dark paper over their windows or face the chastisement of police or patrolling air raid wardens. Blackouts were a matter of national security, of course; lights provided targets for Nazi bombers. But in the Sellers household, blackout curtains served as the physical manifestation of Peg’s goal as a mother—they sealed her son away with her. The outside world could never love him as much as she did, so he had to be kept from it in isolation.
As particular as Pete’s situation was, however, his countrymen were also experiencing a deep and sometimes morbidly comical sense of disconnection. Plunged into blackness every night, not only were the British people forced to sequester themselves behind dark curtains at home, but the enforced murk of London streets at night led to pratfalls. All told, an astounding one in five people injured themselves during the blackouts—walking headlong into trees and lampposts, bumping against fat people, even just losing their way in the dark chaos of an otherwise familiar lane and tumbling off the curb. Nightlife had suddenly turned into a series of goofily scary and nonsensical comedy routines.
The Bore War, or “funny war” as it was also known, grew less boring in May 1940 when the Nazis’ seemingly unstoppable march to the French coast forced the humiliating evacuation of 220,000 British soldiers from the beaches near Dunkirk. The boredom ended absolutely on Saturday, September 7—the day before Pete’s fifteenth birthday—when German war planes destroyed London’s East End. Other London neighborhoods saw the day’s cataclysm as predictive of their own fates. The blitz lasted a full two-and-a-half months, and German ships began massing off the coast of France. The possibility of an outright invasion of England became a much less abstract notion.
When the bombing began, Peg and Pete ran, along with countless other terrified Londoners, to the nearest underground station, which in their case happened to be Highgate. A few weeks later, the Sellers’s flat suffered a bit of damage during a bombing raid. The apartment was certainly inhabitable and the shop could have survived, but it was a close enough call to convince Peg to shut the business, pack the trinkets and all the