Loitering with Intent: The Child

One of stage and screen's most charismatic, best-loved actors demonstrates in Loitering with Intent that he is also a splendidly gifted writer whose prose sparkles with the same passion, wit, and intensity that characterize his best performances.
"Up on my old Pop's shoulders when my age was five or so and the world was young. My legs about his neck and dangling down his nattily suited chest, my ankles in his fists, my hands gripping the rim of his billycock bowler hat, and we stalked on..." Pop was Captain Pat O'Toole, itinerant bookie, one of the three people who definitively influenced the young Peter. The other two were his mother, Constance Jane Ferguson, of the quick eyes and wavy black hair, and Adolf Hitler, whose onscreen image created in the boy an early and intense interest that only deepened as he discovered that in wartime England he would have no childhood: "I went straight from infancy to youth. Childhood meant war, barbed wire, and sandbags."
Despite the unhappiness of the war years, the overall impression left by this "vivid, bubbly torrent of a book" (Literary Review) is one of the ebullience and rakish charm of the young man who makes his way to London to live the life of a "scholar Bohemian" and auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art almost by accident. A recitation of Professor Higgins's speech to Eliza Doolittle in the second act of Shaw's Pygmalion launches his career.
The infectious energy and storytelling panache exhibited on these pages capture brilliantly the sheer joyful abandon of a life always lived to the full.