Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (3 page)

Earth tremors are coming up the legs and annoying the groins but nothing falls off. Naples is in a state of high anxiety; church bells ringing, Ities praying, dogs barking, alarmed birds chirping flitting from tree to tree; some of the camp loonies are also chirping and flitting from tree to tree.

Diary: March 21

V
ery dark morning, heavy rumblings. Is it Vesuvius? No, it’s Jock. It was my day off. I hitched a ride to Naples and the Garrison Theatre to see Gracie Fields in ‘Sing As We Go’. Having never sung as I’d been, I was keen to see how it was done. It was terrible, so terrible that I thought that at any moment she would sing the bloody awful Warsaw Concerto. She was on to her hundredth ‘Eee bai gum’ when the shit hit the fan. The whole theatre shook, accompanied by labyrinthine rumblings. Vesuvius had blown its top. The audience became a porridge of screams and shouts of “What the fuck was that?” all the while hurtling towards the exit. It coincided with Gracie Fields, followed by spanner-clutching extras, marching towards the screen singing ‘Sing As We Go’. It looked as if the screaming mass were trying to escape from her. I alone was in hysterics. Outside was no laughing matter — the sky was black with ash, and Vesuvius roaring like a giant monster.

Rivulets of lava, like burst veins, were rolling down the seaward side. The streets were full of people walking fast with the shits.

I thumbed a lift. “Torre Del Greco?”

“You must be bleedin’ mad,” said a driver.

I assured him I was.

“That’s where all the bloody lava’s going.”

“Yes,” I said, “lava come back to me.” Not much of a joke in 1985, but at the time I was an amateur soldier, not a professional comic, and it wasn’t a bad joke for an earthquake.

No lifts, so I walk; it starts to rain a mixture of ash and water, bringing with it lumps of pumice the size of marbles. So this is what Dystopia was like. I trudge wearily down the road to Pompeii. But wait! This was the very road trod by Augustus, Nero, Tiberius, even the great Julius Caesar, and I thought ‘Fuck ‘em’ and was well pleased. All the while people are running in and out of their homes like those Swiss weather clocks.

A black American driver pulls up: “Wanna lift?”

I don’t need a lift, I need a lorry and he has one. Yes, he’s going to ‘Torrey Del Greckoe’. He offers me a cigarette, then gum, then chocolate. I wait for money but nothing comes. The fall of ash has turned his hair grey. He looked every bit like Uncle Tom. I stopped short of asking how little Eva was, or how big Eva was now. When we arrived at the Loony Camp it was pitch-black and so was he. “Goodbye,” said his teeth.

The camp was in a state of ‘chassis’. Half the loonies had bolted, and the Ities were looting the camp. Captain Peters has organized the sane, issued them with pickaxe handles, and they were somewhere up the slopes belting the life out of thieving Ities. The guard were alerted and roaming the perimeter with loaded rifles.

“Captain Peters told us to shoot on sight,” they said.

“Shoot what on sight?” I said.

“Oh, he didn’t go into details,” they said.

There was nothing for it but to lie back and enjoy it. What am I waiting for? — there is the jeep unoccupied. I put it in gear and drive off, headlights full on to penetrate the viscous gloom. I stop to purchase two bottles of Lachryma Christi, and on to the gates of Pompeii Veccia, La Scavi! A short walk to the Porta Marina, down the Via Marina, the Via Abbondanza, then square on in the Strada Stabiana and there at the end pulsates Vesuvius! I swig the wine. It’s all heady stuff. I’m in a time warp, this is AD 79. The streets are rippling with fleeing Pompeiians, except, I recall, the plaster cast of the couple screwing. What courage, banging away with red hot cinders bouncing off your bum. What courage, the first case of someone coming and going at the same time. The roar of the mountain is blanketing the countryside. More wine. I make my way to the house of Meander, the wall frescos dancing in the fibrillating light, Fauns, Nymphs, more wine, Leda, Bacchus, more wine, Ariadne, Lily Dunford, Betty Grable, someone with big boobs. I finish the wine and it finished me. What a night! For three hours I had been Pliny. I had also been pissed. I drove back to the camp in great humour. The camp guard is Polish. He gets it all wrong.

“Health my friend! What goes on there?”

“The green swan of the East meets the grey bear,” I said.

“Pass it up,” he said.

I’m told that Captain Peters has gone to the Portici to ‘An Officers’ Dance’. “What is it?” I said. “Firewalking?”

I fell asleep knowing I’d never have another day like that.

I was wrong. I awoke and it
was
another day just like that.

The cooks had ‘buggered off’. We raided the cookhouse and made breakfast, porridge and volcanic ash. The grey powdery fall-out was everywhere. It looked like a plague of dandruff.

Captain Peters approaches, waving his stick and cracking his shin in the process. “Ah! Milligan, I’m putting you and phnut! Rogers in charge.” Why? There isn’t anybody else. “I’m off to the Town Major’s. If any of the cooks come back, phnut! put them under arrest.”

“Is that for cooking or deserting?”

The eruption reached its zenith that day, and then all was quiet; but the breakdown of all organization at the camp must have reached the ear of someone who decided that loonies need peace and tranquillity to recover, and so it came to pass.

Map showing Baiano

“We are moving to a place called Baiano.” The Guardsman has spoken. The farming village of Baiano lay N-E of Naples, by about twenty kilometres, on a bad day thirty (see map).

“I will, phnut, drive,” said Captain Peters, talking to the steering wheel of the jeep. A dry sunny day, the Captain dons dust goggles, thinks he’s Biggies. “Hold tight,” he shouts, and with the engine roaring, engages every gear and stalls.

We lurch away, our bodies rocketing back and forth like hiccuping drunks. Simple single-storey buildings line our route, in clusters, then occasional spaces like missing teeth.

Now and then an affluent neo-classical villa. Dust has us putting handkerchiefs round our faces; we look like an armed posse after Billy the Kid. Midday, we reach Nola, a dusty working/middle-class city.

“We’ll stop here for phnut! refreshments,” says the Captain, pulling up outside a trattoria. We sit at an outside table, sipping coffee and brandy. The lass who served us, Oh! help me! she’s lush, dark, boobs, buttocks, a smile like a piano keyboard, eyes like Bambi, and oh! those dimples on the back of her knees. A line of Shermans on tank transporters rumble and clank through the Piazza. There was still a war on.

“I suppose some of those will become coffins for some poor bastards,” says Sergeant Arnolds, himself an ex-tank man.

Having unwound his neck from staring at the waitress, Captain Peters says: “This used to be a phnut! Roman garrison town.” This remark brought forth absolutely no response, in fact the silence became positively an embarrassment. I tried to help.

“That was very nice of you to tell us that this was a Roman garrison town.”

“Oh,” he said, smilingly, “think nothing of it.” In fact we didn’t think anything of it.

The bill. Captain Peters carries out a vigorous patting of his pockets, the best display of overacting I’ve ever seen. “Damn,” he says, “I’ve come out without any money.” He was a known mean bastard. On pay day, before his money even saw the light of day, it was into an envelope on its way ‘To the little woman who needs it’. He would have had us believe it was an impoverished female dwarf.

Revenge is sweet, but not fattening. After the war I was about to open an account at Lloyds of Lewisham and I was to meet the manager. My God, it was Captain Peters. “Milligan,” he said joyfully.

Hurriedly I started patting my pockets. “Damn,” I said, “I’ve come out without any money, the little woman needs it.” To my lasting joy I still have an unpaid overdraft there — ten shillings since 1949.

Early afternoon, and we arrived at the little village of Baiano with its paved grid-orientated streets lined with two- storeyed buildings. The affluent lived in the outskirts in cool villas. Set in flat farming country with a range of low hills running east-west along the north side. The main street had shops cheek by jowl with goods on show outside — sacks of lentils, grain, beans, flour. The butcher displayed miserable bits of meat, but fish was plentiful — squid, octopus, prawns, mussels — and occasionally the monger throws a bucket of water to freshen them up and drown the flies. There’s an old-fashioned pharmacy with large glass jars of red and green water; more anon.

BAIANO

The Baiano Rehabilitation Camp

T
he camp is half a mile outside the town adjacent to a cemetery. The entrance is flanked by two Nissen huts, one the general office, the other the Captain’s office. A whitewashed logo of stones spells out
REINFORCEMENT REALLOCATION AND TRAINING CENTRE
. It’s laid out on a tented grid system and the camp centre has a large dining tent. Across the road in a light green villa is the new ‘Officers’ Wing’, made necessary by the increasing number of bomb-happy officers. “It would be demoralizing, phnut, for the officers to be bomb-happy in front of the phnut! ORs,” says Peters, who is bomb-happy in front of us all the time.

The setting was very tranquil, away from noise, war and volcanoes. “You see,” said my Scots prophet, Rogers, “we’ll never be bloody heard of again.”

WHITEHALL 1952

The Scene:

CHURCHILL lays on a couch being massaged with brandy by a GENERAL.

ALANBROOKE:

Isn’t it time we brought them home?

CHURCHILL:

No, they’re loonies — they’ll vote Labour.

ALANBROOKE:

We’ve had letters from Milligan’s mother and father.

CHURCHILL:

It’s more than he has.

ALANBROOKE:

They want to thank you for keeping him out there, and to announce a room to let with gas ring and kipper fork, twelve shillings per week.

CHURCHILL:

Tell General de Gaulle we’ve found him an embassy.

Orginisateum

A
complete office and service staff have arrived, including Private Dick Shepherd, a medical orderly from Rochdale. His knowledge of medicine goes like this: “Soldiers laying down are sick ones.” A clerk in the form of Private ‘Bronx’ Weddon of the Berkshires, both misnomers — he had been neither to the Bronx nor Berkshire. He was from Brighton, but you couldn’t go around saying: “I’m Brighton Weddon.” He said he was ‘A journalist who worked for Marley Tiles’. I didn’t get the drift. Another addition was the Camp ‘Runner’, Private Andrews; that is, at the mention of work he started to run. He had an accent like three Billy Connollys, he hated the army, he hated the job, he hated the world and all the planets adjacent.

“Luk herrre, Spike, no fuckerrr everrr got anywherrrre being a fucking runerrrr.”

How wrong he was, what about Jesse Owens, Sidney Wooderson?

“Who the fuck are they mon?”

He wasn’t that thick. A heavy smoker, well on his way to lung cancer, he was forever on the earole for fags and, here’s the cunning of the man, if you didn’t give him one he would stand beside you and howl like a wolf. In any well-ordered society he would have been taken away, but in this camp he was considered normal. He could be pinpointed, suddenly, as from some distant tent came unearthly howling.

Captain Peters once asked: “What is that?”

I told him, “Private Andrews.”

“Oh, he’s phnut! very good at it,” said Peters, who wasn’t too bad at it himself.

We now have a 15cwt truck and driver. He is private Jim Brockenbrow. His father had been a POW in World War I, stayed in England and married a lass from Mousehole. The fruit of that union, now known as that ‘square-headed bastard’, he would defend his Teutonic ancestry with a Cornish accent.