I can sleep anywhere.

Of Peter Shure’s parentage we are unsure. Born in 1919, and with no birth certificate or other family records to be found, we only have Peter’s word for who his mother and father were.

His story, told in fragments over many years across many interviews, appears to be that his father was a Canadian soldier. Research shows a number of Shure families in Quebec at this time, and almost certainly some of the young men from those families would have enlisted at the beginning of the Great War and found their way to London. But without DNA evidence it's hard to pin down a particular soldier.

In one interview, Peter revels in an anecdote about his father being arrested outside what he calls ‘the Y’ (presumably the YMCA) for playing dice on the street. Peter claims this led to a sizable riot between US and Canadian soldiers and the British police. Peter would have only just been born at this point, so where he got this story from is unclear. The insinuation is that quite soon after this incident his father abandoned his mother and went back to Canada never to be seen again.

Peter’s mother is no less elusive. A maternal uncle is mentioned as being some kind of father figure to Peter during his teens, with the surname Hayter. But we find no record of a woman called Hayter giving birth in 1919.

Peter sometimes refers to his mother as a ‘traveller’ who took to working on itinerant fairgrounds once her husband had left her. Peter regularly asserts he has no memory of travelling with his mother, and would often claim he was largely left to fend for himself on the streets of London from the age of about five. Who cared for him at this point is not clear. The suggestion is that the Hayter family may have been an extended clan across south and east London that Peter could feel safe with. Certainly he has strong memories of helping to run stalls and concessions at various fairgrounds and circuses throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. Another favourite anecdote Peter could pull out at the drop of a hat is his claim to have helped run the first fairground stall to be stocked with dozens of empty fishbowls, which one could attempt to throw a ball into and thus win a goldfish.

Quite how Peter learned to read and write and generally acquire an education is, again, unclear. Certainly he was a keen reader. During his internment in a POW camp during WW2, he claimed to have read every book that ever came into the camp - which his fellow ‘Kriegies’ can attest to. In childhood, he tells us he liked to visit libraries (possibly true) and read every Dickens novel in order (unlikely). His facility for maths, he claimed, came from the stalls – working out what to charge, what change to give, what to pay for a concession and so on. There were obviously some attempts to send him to school, and a couple of times it seems the authorities picked him up and sent him to some kind of workhouse or reform school in South London. But he would regularly run away from these institutions and disappear back into the fairground world.

He makes no reference to having any friends throughout this time and certainly no siblings. The sense is that he was either wandering the streets of London making his own entertainment, or working on fairground stalls when he badly needed to eat and find a place to sleep. He rarely saw his mother except when she returned to London after each tour of the provinces. During various interviews and conversation in his later years, Peter is often tempted to wonder if she was his mother at all, or could have been a sister, an aunt or a niece for all he knew. He certainly asserts strongly throughout his life that he felt no real connection to his mother and, perhaps, as his own life became more prosperous and sophisticated, he felt a certain amount of snobbish antipathy towards her. Certainly he developed his own narrative about why he never tried to reconnect with his mother or track her down after WW2.

"When I returned from the war I considered myself to be an orphan. I went to the part of East London where my mother’s family came from, and it had been completely flattened by German bombs – not a single building had survived on the terrace I might have called home. And everyone who had lived there had either perished or moved away with no forwarding address.

I made some basic efforts to find out what happened to my mother, but it seems the records relating to her existence also perished during the Blitz. She may have survived. I don't know. But did she really want me to find her? I don’t think so. I was filled with the idea that I could start again after the war and re-invent myself. So why wouldn’t she feel the same? I like to think she did exactly that. She let her traveller heritage rule her, perhaps, and went forever roaming. I think that’s a rather lovely thought, and great way to think of my mother out there on the road, feeling free and in control of her life. It’s a better memory than the more likely scenario, of her being trapped, perhaps maimed, in a basement after a bomb blast with the mains water rising all around her."

Peter had already more or less said goodbye to his mother much earlier than 1946  when, at the age of 15, he takes off to Skegness with his uncle in order to work full time at the Butlins fairground and newly launched holiday camp.

Peter clearly loved this time of his life. It was in Skegness that he discovered his facility for electrical engineering and generally tinkering with machinery. By the age of 17 he was in charge of maintaining the dodgems and making sure the lights stayed on across the park. There is a sense that he was protected at this point by his uncle and the sense of security that came from that helped Peter to thrive.

If there’s one place that Peter Shure might think of as home, it would be Skegness. And if the war hadn’t come, it’s likely Peter would have made his way up the management chain at Butlins to become a site manager or head of department overseeing several Butlins camps. [insert research about Skegness in 1936...]

But the war did come and Peter saw it coming earlier than most. At least, he decided he wanted to be part of the action and in 1938, a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday, he applied to join the RAF. His practical engineering  and organisational skills made it easy for him to get in. And having joined more than a year before the war started, he was one of the few working class kids to get the opportunity to fast track into the officer programme.

He became known within his squadron as a quiet but rather tough man, who remained quite distant from most other people but was reliable in a jam, always on time and prepared, and notably brave. Obviously, a life on the streets must have toughened him up and perhaps desensitised him to anything going on around him. One can only imagine some the violence and deprivation he must have witnessed at a very young age. He boldly claimed that he’d seen many dead people on the streets of London before the Second World War that helped him cope with seeing people die around him whilst he was in the RAF, and again when interned in the camp in Germany.

It's also his rough childhood that, in part, allowed him to develop one of his oft-repeated catchphrases: “I can sleep anywhere.”

Peter’s journey, therefore, was one of impressive self-reliance, resilience and self-improvement. To travel from being a London street urchin to an officer in the RAF in just 15 years tells you something about Peter’s abilities and ambition.  It mirrors, in part, the childhood of one of his great heroes, Charlie Chaplin, and it’s certain that Chaplin’s life progression always convinced Peter there would always be a way up and forward, through consistent optimism, energy and self-education. Perhaps also in the back of his mind, Shure was also thinking of a way to ultimately end up in the film business like Chaplin.

That must have felt like a very distance dream whilst servicing a grubby bumper car in a high North sea wind in 1937 on the edge of the world at Skegness. How could he foresee that a chance friendship in that German POW camp would lead to his first role in a film just eleven years later, two years after the war had ended?