Later, his family moved to Headingley and he attended Leeds Modern School for five years and then began his working life, first spending a year in the Royal Navy as an Artificer Apprentice and then, after buying his freedom, working as a Library Assistant, Box Clerk at the Labour Exchange, Plumber’s Labourer, Labourer in a Shoddy Mill in Morley, Weighbridge Clerk for Leeds Public Cleansing Department, Reception Clerk at St. James’s Hospital A&E Department, and a Despatch Clerk in a Stationery Warehouse. He then tried Teaching for several years, as there was a desperate shortage of teachers in the 60s and 70s. Throughout this time he was dependent on prescription drugs, first Stelazine, a psychotropic drug and then a succession of Benzodiazepines. His teaching career came to an end in 1971 when a Psychiatrist at Lancaster General Hospital’s Outpatients Department prescribed Serenid D. He moved to London, where he spent the next ten years recovering from the side effects of Serenid D, and worked for Industrial Agencies (Industrial Overload, Catch 22), on the building site for the present YMCA, as a Supply Teacher, a Clerical Officer with the DHSS and as a Night Telephonist at the Elizabeth Garret Anderson Hospital for Women and Camden Town Hall, both in the Euston Road. He also managed to complete a BA Degree in English Literature at Birkbeck College.

 

In 1984 he took The Actors Institute Foundation and Samurai Courses and this was something of a turning point. He then trained as an actor at Drama Studio, London and after acting for a few years started to write plays, taking playwriting lessons with Stuart Browne and David Moffat. His first play was SWITCHBOARD and was inspired by a case at the Garret Anderson Hospital in the 50s when a Night Telephonist used his custodianship of the Dangerous Drugs Cupboard to overpower a young night porter with chloroform and rape him, thereby reducing him to a Permanent Vegetative State. Other plays soon followed: DANELAW, a play about British Nazis and again inspired by actual events, when Combat 18, a far-right group murdered their accountant in a car park in North London; THE REAPPEARANCE OF CHRIST IN THE EAST END about a Religious Education teacher and set in an East London comprehensive; SKARA BRAE, about a girl who turns into a seal; BRIDLINGTON, about a woman in a psychiatric hospital in Bridlington, who is obsessed with Wuthering Heights; BLUE which deals with an architect who wants to build the Third Temple of Jerusalem, but in Glastonbury, and EXILE, in which a Driving Instructor in Romford becomes enamoured of ancient Chinese ‘wilderness’ poetry form the 8th Century.

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After many years reading Gurdjieff, Alice A. Bailey, and other authors of the New Age Peter is now a Roman Catholic and lives in Mile End with his wife, artist Susie Hamilton.