“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Robert Altman

The more Peter spoke on tape about his life, the more I realised that he hadn’t been honest about his childhood, or indeed most of his life before the war. It left me with a dilemma.

Do I continue to encourage him to speak frankly on the record about his life, knowing that I’m helping to create a testimony that, if published, would shock and possibly devastate many of his friends and family, as well as change people’s perceptions of Peter Shure forever?

Or should I advise Peter as his personal assistant, his agent, and as his friend, to forget about telling the unvarnished truth, destroy the tapes we had made so far, and stick with the fiction that he had been rehearsing for the best part of 40 years?

As these excerpts from my forthcoming official autobiography ‘The Sleeping Agent’ demonstrate, Peter and I decided to keep going. His only condition was that the content of the tapes should not become known until after his death. I kept to that condition and went further, surrendering a copy of the full unedited transcription of all the tapes to Peter’s family before publication, so they could come to terms with the revelations contained within.

When we started the recordings, I suspect themes of false identity and impostership were looming large for Peter, having just completed a small sleeping role in ‘The Return of Martin Guerre’.

It was clear Peter was re-evaluating things and was regretting some of his more telling fictions. I did start to wonder how many men of his generation had done the same thing: got back home in ‘45 or ’46 and decided to wipe the slate clean, reinvent themselves and basically erase and redraw the family tree.

He’d also, at this time, been having long phone conversations about children and 'the generation gap' with Robert Altman, who had seen ‘The Body in the Woods’ and wanted Peter to have another shot at playing in a teen movie, perhaps with his son Chris again. As we all know ‘The Body in the Woods’ had not been a success for either father or son, but family – particularly the fate of his son – was weighing on Peter’s mind and he still had ambitions at this point to help Chris in any way he could. Peter does appear in an Altman movie, by the way. Look carefully and you’ll spot him playing a ‘wino’ in the ill-fated ‘O.C. and Stiggs’. There was no part for Christopher.

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TAPE 042 150582

When did you end up going to boarding school?

I was eight. So that’s 1927. Must have been September 1927.

But I remember you telling me that you grew up on the streets of London and hardly ever went to school.

I did, didn’t I? Well, that wasn’t strictly true.

[Peter takes a drink]

Why... why did you lie about that?

I… I don’t know really. I’m not sure. I suppose I didn’t want people to think of me as too posh. I mean, it’s quite a boring existence at a boarding school. Nothing much happens to you outside of the daily regimen. And all the other actors around me after the war had such interesting lives. Donald and I had been cooped up in a POW camp for quite a while, and I’m not saying it was like a boarding school because it was a bit rougher than that, but it wasn’t active service. And the years before the war, a lot of chaps had really struggled their way through the Depression and unemployment and wot not, whilst I’d really had quite a comfortable life, getting through prep school and then a couple of years at Lincoln Technical College trying to get my head round electrical engineering, helping out my uncle up at Skeggie.

Skeggie doesn’t sound that posh.

No, it doesn’t, does it? But it was quite an easy life, and I suppose I wanted people to think I was a bit tougher than I was, and that life had been rougher than it was. My dream at the time was to get to Cranwell, down the road. And eventually when everyone with any brain could see war was coming, I did get taken on and worked my way up quite quickly in the RAF.

You’re doing it again, Peter – jumping ahead.

Sorry.

[Peter takes another drink]

So what was your boarding school like?

School? Well fairly typical I suppose. In the middle of nowhere. A big old school house and outbuildings with lots of dormitories, changing rooms, assembly hall, a central feeding area, library that kind of thing. And quite big sports fields – rugger pitches, cricket squares and so on. And a river! I remember the river at the bottom of the grounds. We were allowed to swim in it in summer. I practically drowned there once!

You nearly drowned?

Oh yes! There was really very little supervision by the teachers outside of the class room, you know. In the summer at the weekends we would all pile on down to the river in our games shorts and plimsolls. And we’d all dive-bomb each other off a wooden jetty. And eventually there was just a big scrum of us in the water. It was shallow enough to stand up, but very muddy, very squidgy, and also quite weedy.

Sounds like a health and safety nightmare, Peter!

It was just one of those moments when a group of rowdy boys get over-excited and we all tried to duck each other under the water – just plant your hands on someone else’s shoulders and jump right up and then press down on them to push them right under.

I remember everyone laughing and shouting. And then some bigger boy – Hamish Mcsomething I think it was - put his hands on me and shoves me down and I’m fully trapped. I manage to wriggle free of his hands, but then the melee of boys has me pinned down and I’m trying to rise up but there’s no gap and there are just too many bodies crowded close together and I’m getting entangled in their legs and bums and knees.

I’m trying not to panic and hold my breath, but I’m getting scared now and I’m thrashing about like a fat carp and desperately wanting to gasp and shout, but I’m mindful enough to know I need to hold my breath.

My chest is starting to hurt and I can feel the pressure building up and the blood’s thumping. I can’t hold my breath for much longer. I know I’ve got to fight now and push and shove, but I’m still being shoved back down in return by a mass of bouncing, wrestling wriggling boys, and I can feel the sloppiness of the mud churning around me and the weed wrapping around me in clumps. And I open my mouth and taste the silty gritty water. And I fight and fight with all my might not to breath in and I think my lungs are going to burst.

And I'm just at the point where I really start to think I might die, when I find my footing on something solid rather than the mud and the weed and I push up my legs and knees with all my might, and I break the surface, suck in air blisfully, along with a huge slosh of water, and I cough and cough and cough and push my way towards the jetty.

I remember having enough strength in my arms to pull myself up and I just lay on the timbers there for a while, spluttering and breathing heavily and spitting out bits of weeds. And do you know? I don’t think anyone even noticed!

It's obviously a vivid memory for you.

Oh yes. But not horrible.

[Peter takes a drink]

It’s something I go back to often when I'm lying in bed about to drift off to sleep. It doesn’t panic me. It’s actually a rather relaxing memory of being under the water, pushing and shoving, being quite frantic and then surfacing and sucking in the air. I suppose it’s something like a birthing memory. Writhing around in muddy water, then rising up and sucking in the sweet air and removing the pain from one's lungs - I sometimes think I'm like the first fish that decided to leave the water and become a land animal. I'm on the way to becoming human.

You’ve said before you have particular memories you use to help you sleep.

Yes, that started at school, in fact.

You haven’t mentioned that before.

Well no. But I had trouble settling down when I first got there. Couldn’t sleep. So I’d get up at night and wander about a bit. An obviously the teachers didn’t like that.

So this was when you were eight?

Yes, eight and then nine.

Wandering about in the dark on your own.

Yes. I supposed I was trying to work up the courage to run away, but I never did. I think most of the chaps there had a sense early on that they were on their own; our parents had rather left us in the lurch and each of us worked out our own reaction to that. I don’t mean that tommy-rot of feeling unloved and abandoned. I can’t think of anyone I knew at school who thought their parents didn’t love them. We just all knew a certain kind of loving was over and we had to sort ourselves out - because nobody else was going to do it for us. So I would say my night walks were my way of developing a bit of self -reliance and independence - and also to show I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t stupid. I knew if I got a reputation for that kind of thing, most people wouldn’t think me weak and would steer clear, if you know what I mean.

[Peter takes a drink]

But, of course, when it all came out what I was up to, they packed me off to some child expert who was supposed to help me get off to sleep and stay put in my dorm.

So you had sleeping lessons?

Ha! Yes you could say that. Sleeping lessons, that’s a good one.

And did they work?

Oh yes. Very much so. It was a good trick. The idea was to go for the same walk around the school, but just do it in your head and do it in some detail, take you time sort of thing. And then he’d suggest I could do a walk around my childhood home and garden instead – or some other place that I knew quite well, a walk from my past I’d taken repeatedly. So I'd often go back to being three or four and trying to walk around the perimeter of the family garden without being seen or 'caught' by anyone.

And this chap - the shrink - he’d ask me at first to close my eyes and narrate out loud  whichever walk I was undertaking, and do it rather slowly. He’d ask me questions about what I was seeing and which way I was choosing to go.

Then we got on to me simply closing my eyes and imagining the walk in silence. Occasionally he’d whisperingly ask me where I was, what I was noticing, where I was going next, but after half a dozen sessions he didn’t even have to do that. Within a few minutes I was gone, off to the land of the Nod. I’d never actually get round the whole of the school or the garden or the beachfront before I was asleep. It was a neat trick, I have to say.

And it always worked?

Oh yes, I still use it now. I still walk around that school in my mind’s eye, and very quickly I can nod off.

And do you still remember it as clearly as you did all those years ago?

Oh yes, of course. I don’t think anyone who goes to boarding school ever forgets the place, do they? They may want to, but I’m pretty sure they don’t. I’m rather blessed though. Other people will tell you about shivering and crying in their beds, or getting slippered by prefects or monstered in the changing room or eating disgusting food, but I just have this rather calm walk.

But you still chose not to tell anyone that you went to the school.

Yes, that’s true. But maybe I needed to keep it to myself. If I’d told anyone else about it, it wouldn’t be my walk any more, would it? And it might not have the power to relax me.

And what would be the point of sharing anyway? I don’t remember my parents telling me much about their childhood. They didn’t want to trouble me with it, I suppose. And frankly it probably would have bored me to tears. I imagine it’s the same for my children. They aren’t that interested. And they shouldn’t be really. It’s a bit like the war, isn't it? Is there much benefit to be had in telling people about the terrible things one experienced? I don’t think so. That stuff’s just for me really. Best it stays in my head.

[Silence. P:eter takes another drink]

Bloody hell. This is just like going to the shrink, Martin! Switch it off, for Pete’s sake!