Pinter's father, Hyman (Jack) Pinter, was a ladies' tailor who worked twelve-hour days making clothes in his shop, but he eventually lost the business and went to work for someone else. Pinter's mother, Frances Mann Pinter, he says, "was a marvelous cook, as she still is." At the outbreak of the war in 1939 Pinter and a group of other boys were evacuated to a castle in Cornwall, where he claims he became a "morose little boy" and returned home after a year or so.
From 1941 to 1947 Pinter attended the Hackney Downs Grammar School, acting in school productions (he played Macbeth and Romeo) and writing essays and poetry. He recalled that the school was "pretty awful," but he had kind words for his English master, Joseph Brearley, "a very brilliant man" with an obsession for the theater who directed him in the Shakespeare roles. It was during this period that Pinter directly experienced the war that was threatening to envelop England. "There were times when I would open our back door and find our garden in flames. Our house never burned, but we had to evacuate several times." On leaving grammar school, he applied for and received a grant to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
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