would reduce pocket money for minor mishaps. Grant attributed her behavior to overprotectiveness, fearing that she would lose him as she did John. When Grant was nine years old, his father placed his mother in Glenside Hospital, a mental institution, and told him that she had gone away on a "long holiday"; he later declared that she had died. Grant grew up resenting his mother, particularly after she left the family. After she was gone, Grant and his father moved into his grandmother's home in Bristol. When Grant was ten, his father remarried and started a new family, and Grant did not learn that his mother was still alive until he was 31; his father confessed to the lie shortly before his own death. Grant made arrangements for his mother to leave the institution in June 1935, shortly after he learned of her whereabouts. He visited her in October 1938 after filming was completed for Gunga Din. Grant enjoyed the theater, particularly pantomimes at Christmas, which he attended with his father. He befriended a troupe of acrobatic dancers known as "The Penders" or the "Bob Pender Stage Troupe". He subsequently trained as a stilt walker and began touring with them. Jesse Lasky was a Broadway producer at the time and saw Grant performing at the Wintergarten theater in Berlin around 1914. In 1915, Grant won a scholarship to attend Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol, although his father could barely afford to pay for the uniform. He was quite capable in most academic subjects, but he excelled at sports, particularly fives, and his good looks and acrobatic talents made him a popular figure. He developed a reputation for mischief, and frequently refused to do his homework. A former classmate referred to him as a "scruffy little boy", while an old teacher remembered "the naughty little boy who was always making a noise in the back row and would never do his homework". He spent his evenings working backstage in Bristol theaters, and was responsible for the lighting for magician David Devant at the Bristol Empire in 1917 at the age of 13. He began hanging around backstage at the theater at every opportunity, and volunteered for work in the summer as a messenger boy and guide at the military docks in Southampton, to escape the unhappiness of his home life. The time spent at Southampton strengthened his desire to travel; he