Pete Townshend - (who he?) - 6 through 12

These chapters take us from September 1951 through the summer of the following year and detail, as much as Pete could discover, of his time with his mad Grandmother Denny.

Denny seems like a character from Dickens or Charlotte Bronte. Who would have played her in the 1940's movie version? Margaret Hamilton? Judith Anderson? Agnes Moorehead?

As I noted in a reply on Pete's site, there also is an echo of Chaplin's My Autobiography here. Chaplin's mother went insane (tertiary syphilis as it turns out). Of course Pete didn't end up in a Victorian orphanage as Charlie did. Otherwise we would have "that tramp sure plays a mean pinball."

After the Denny incident Pete goes into his mother's affair at that time. He doesn't talk about how it affected his own view of marriage. Pete, by his own account, fought hard for his marriage and it was probably the primary reason for retiring from The Who in 1983. The ending of the Tommy musical has Tommy rejected because he quits the rock star game to spend more time with his family; a re-write of the ending that was meant to reflect Pete's last attempt to maintain his marriage with Karen. Did he see himself in his father, inviting infidelity by remaining on the road? Did he feel that his children would be threatened by his absence as he had been by his father's?