Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (6 page)
Read Where Have All the Bullets Gone? Online
Authors: Spike Milligan
Tags: #Biography: General, #Humor, #Topic, #Humorists - Great Britain - Biography, #english, #Political, #World War II, #Biography & Autobiography, #Humour, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #History, #Military, #General
The lessons start. “You see dis black a notes.” Can I see it? I ask him is he an optician or a music teacher? That is the note of C. I knew that. “The notes on the line-a above is E.” I knew that. He told me how the scales went. I knew that as well. Something else I knew, I was being conned. I went away richer in life’s experience and he richer by two thousand lire. I watched as he counted every single lire. It’s the little things that count and he was one of them.
One night after closing I hie me to the city of Herculaneum. The dead city lies sightless in the bay light of a Neapolitan moon. I walk through the unattended entrance: ‘Vietato ingresso’. The city is like Catford, after dark. Dead. I walk along the sea front from which the seas have departed that day in AD 79. This was Bournemouth to Pompeii’s Blackpool. Here people sat on summer’s nights drinking wine and eating figs from water-filled bowls. Now all gone. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.
Ohhh, Herculaneum City
Ohhh what a terrible pity
All of you had gone
Except a little tiny bitty.
Back at the billet I awake Tom.
“Who’s that?” he snuffled.
“Errol Flynn.”
“You silly bugger.”
“A man can dream, can’t he?”
Where had I been, and did I get it? “Nay, I’m as pure as the driven snow. I’ve been to Herculaneum.”
COURT FOR THE IGNORANT
JUDGE:
What is a Herculaneum?
QC TARLO:
Herculaneum my lord is a place where any free-born slave can go and Hercu-his-laneum.
JUDGE:
Oh, and in Hercuing-his-laneum, what benefits are derived?
QC TARLO:
The swelling on the Blurzon is much reduced.
JUDGE:
What is a Blurzon.
QC TARLO:
It is a small hairy area at the back of the knee where Armenian shepherds crack their nuts.
Oh, what’s Herculaneum? By day I have quite a lot of time on my hands; I also have it on my legs, elbows and shins. There was a lot of it about.
A Colonel Intervenes
Y
es! One evening as I sat at the reception desk varnishing walnuts and cracking them behind my knee, a man in a jeep approached. He was to be instrumental in changing my life. By instrumental I don’t mean he was playing the trombone, no. The man is Colonel Startling Grope, a reddish middle-aged man, portly, used to good living, hair cuts, Horlicks, thin legs and suede desert boots. He had a body that appeared to have been inflated, and the air was escaping. When he signed in he shot me a glance full of meaning that I knew not the meaning of.
Later that night, as he and his cronies are departing, all so pissed you could hear the cistern flushing, he enquires: “What do you do here?” I tell him on a good day I give General Alexander his hat. Otherwise I try not to whistle the Warsaw Concerto. He is intrigued; as he should be. I am quite lovely. Seriously, I’m a wine steward and resident manic depressive. “How would you like to come and work for me as a wine steward and resident manic depressive?” I say yes. Why? Because I have been brought up to feel inferior to everybody: priests, doctors, bank managers and officers were all Gods. To say no to them was a mortal sin punishable by 500 Hail Marys and an overdraft.
Within a week a jeep arrives and takes me away. The girls all cried and the men cheered. Looking through my diary I found the note I made at the time.
Translation: “Posted O2E Maddaloni on 8/8/44. Very depressed, same feeling as before.”
So! I was feeling myself like I had before, a duty that until recently had been performed by Maria.
What was happening to me? I didn’t want to be a Manic Depressive Wine Waiter in Italy! I wanted to be a Manic Depressive Harry James in Catford. Why did a poofy Colonel need a wine waiter???
The jeep driver is an ex-paratrooper. Ted Noffs gives me the first warning: “Yew wanna watch yer arsole wiv ‘im.” My God, a Brown Hatter! We drive in silence. Speedo says 33 mph, petrol half full, all exciting stuff. Right now my last exciting stuff, Rosa, was back at Portici. An hour’s dusty drive with night approaching. A sign: MADDALONI.
Maddaloni on a Good Day
“Not far now,” said Noffs. “We korls it Mad’n’lonely, ha ha.” He was such a merry fellow, a fellow of infinte jest and a cunt. We enter a town and slow down outside a faceless three-storeyed municipal school. Turning left by its side we come to a rear back lot with a line of tents and parked vehicles. Noffs stops outside a ten-man tent. “This is yourn.” I thank him and lug my kit into the tent which has an electric light, brighter than the three slobs lying on their beds, smoking and staring. These are khaki skivvies, the playthings of the commissioned classes. One is Corporal Rossi, London Italian Cockney. “You the new wine steward?” Yes. He’s the head barman. I’ll be working under him. That’s my bed. I ask all the leading questions:
- Where’s the cook house?
- The NAAFI?
- The Karzi?
- What day was free issue?
- Any ATS?
I find the canteen in the main barrack block (more of it later), have a glass of red wine and a cheese sandwich. The place is full, and soon so am I. I don’t know anybody and nobody wants to know me, but then I haven’t been on television yet! The red wine sets me up for bed. Back under bloody canvas yet again. Like Robert Graves I thought I’d said Goodbye to All That; instead it was Hello to all This! I slept fitfully, sometimes I slept unfitfully. Variety is the spice of life, or if you live in a after-shave factory, the Life of Spice.
Raffia Party Hats. I was given orders like ‘Tins to be smoothed’ and ‘Bar top to be desplintered’. There I was at dawn with a dopey driver driving around the streets of Caserta buying cabbages, potatoes, figs and oranges, lentils and the whole range of fresh foods for O2E Officers’ Mess. Another Fine Mess I’d gotten into. Shagged out by mid-afternoon, I was then put on bar duties for the evening, serving a crowd of pissy Hooray Henrys. By the amount of drink and smoke around they must long since have died of lung cancer or cirrhosis. Disaster. The bar phone rings; they want a Major Bastard. That’s how they pronounced it.
“Phone call for Major Bastard,” I yell above the din.
A man purple with rage and halitosis snatches the phone: “Bass
-tard
, you Bastard,” he hissed. He was a real Bass-tard!
I was making a cock-up of the job. Not that I couldn’t do it, I didn’t want to.
“The Colonel wants to see you,” says Rossi. OK, if he looks through that window, he’ll get a glimpse of me desplintering the bar.
“Look Milligan,” says Major Startling Grope. We are in his office. “The Sergeant says you aren’t very good at your job.”
“He’s a liar, sir. I’m bloody useless at my job. I could lose us the war.”
He laughed. How am I at clerking? I don’t know.
“How are you at figures?”
“Terrible, you should see the women I go out with.”
“Look, Milligan, give it a try. If you don’t like it, we can try something else.” Like Suicide. OK.
I work for him in ‘O’ Branch in the school building. A large airy office with a Sergeant Hallam, a mild-mannered poof. Then a clerk, Private Len Arrowsmith, a small lively amusing lad; then me at the bottom of the heap as filing clerk. We each have a separate desk. It’s cushy. I just get files, give files and take the files back; the job has all the magic of an out-of-order phone box. It’s OK to sleep in the office provided bedding is hidden during the day! So I move in and join Arrowsmith.
“You’ll like it here,” says Len. “At night you have a lovely view of the typewriter.”
Romance
S
o far Sergeant Hallam has always carried the files to the Colonel. But I’m lovelier. So now it’s me.
Announcement over the interphone. “Send Milligan in with File X.” The Colonel is ‘getting to know me’. I was going through what girls go through with in the initial chatting-up process.
“What is your — er — do sit down, Milligan, you can dispense with rank.”
“I haven’t any rank to dispense with, sir.”
“You can call me Stanley.”
“Yes sir, Stanley.”
“What’s your first name?”
“Spike, Stanley, sir.”
“Spike? That’s not your real name.”
“No, my real name is Terence.”
At the mention of the name his eyes lit up with love.
“Terence,” he lisped. “Yes, that’s better, Terence, that’s what I’ll call you.” Like Private Noffs said: “Watch yer arsole.”
I had not forgotten my trumpet. In the evening I’d practise in the office. Those notes that echoed round Maddaloni’s fair streets were to lead me to fame, fortune, overdraft, VAT, Income Tax, mortgages, accountants, solicitors, house agents, nervous breakdown and divorce.
O2E
Dance Band, August-September 1944, each man a master of posing
. Piano:
Sgt. S. Britton;
Bass:
L/Bdr. L. Prosser;
Drums:
Pte. ‘Chick’ Chitty;
Guitar:
Phil Phillips;
1st Trumpet:
Gnr. S. Milligan;
2nd Trumpet:
Pte. G. Wilson;
1st Alto:
Sgt. H. Carr;
2nd Alto:
Pte. J. Manning;
Tenor:
Pte. J. Buchanan
It starts with a tall thin, bald, moustachioed Sergeant Phil Phillips. He leads the O2E band. Will I play for them? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Here is a recollection of those days by the bass player L/Bdr Len Prosser, who is now, according to his psychiatrist, the President of the United States.
LEN PROSSER’S RANDOM REMINISCENES OF ITALY - 1944 -1946
The O2E Dance Orchestra started out playing for dancing in the hall at Maddaloni Barracks, later playing ‘in the pit’ for variety show each Saturday night and on occasion during the week. For some shows the band would be on stage in the tradition of ‘show bands’, set up in tiers. Recalled is one particular Saturday evening when several of the band members had been celebrating some promotions in the cellar bistro know as
’Aldo’s’
in the village of Maddaloni Inferiors (very), partaking of the local, very stickly and thick version of Vermouth, imbibed from cut-down beer and wine bottles. I was one of them; I am not certain that you, Spike, were there, but it was possible, since I recall that at some time in your career you were awarded the stripes
of a sergeant
, and that was most likely the time. When it cam to near curtain time for the show, which the band was to open from behind the tabs with Dorsey’s
Song of India
, we left Aldo’s and wended our way up to the hall feeling rather worse for the wine.