Adolf Hitler_ my part in his downfall - Spike Milligan [20]
“Let’s sleep on the outside,” I suggested. He hit me. The whole lunatic job started again. By sundown the thing was up. Gunner White found Cordon’s missing money. That night we all drank Gunner Cordon’s health. A mile away, in the dark, Cordon on his hands and knees was searching the ground with a candle.
Shaving al fresco in Mill Wood, with the Germans only forty miles away. The cross eyes were the result of a blunt blade
Me, line laying. My tin hat had just fallen off and I was afraid of dine-bombers
Signallers transporting the tent
BURNING OF THE CLUBS (MILL WOOD)
It was during this time the Goons in the Popeye cartoon appeared and tickled my sense of humour, and any soldier I thought was an idiot I called a Goon. This was taken up by those with a like sense of humour. We called ourselves the Clubbers. We built a club rack outside the marquee and, in time, we fashioned great gnarled clubs from fallen branches. They all had names—‘Nurkes Nut Nourisher’, ‘Instant Lumps’. The pride was a magnificent find by Gunner Devine; it was a part of a blasted oak, five feet long, almost a replica of the club of Hercules. We added to it by driving earthing irons into the head. It was solemnly christened, ‘Ye Crust Modifier’. The way the Clubbers were assembled was by a trumpet call based on the Fanfare from the ‘Boys from Syracuse’ film. Immediately the gang would do ‘Hollywood Rhubards’, rush forth, grab the clubs, run into the woods hitting trees and shouting ‘Death to the Goons’. This exercise was our downfall. We were caught one summer night by the duty officer. Drunk and naked, we were running through the woods wielding clubs and yelling ‘Viva Joe Stalin’. We were ordered to destroy the weapons. We had a solemn funeral procession. They would have to burn in warrior’s graves. These turned out to be the disused rubbish tip at the bottom of a gently sloping hill. Rubbish was dumped by trucks via a small gauge railway. Filling the truck with clubs, we soaked them in petrol and set them ablaze. Giving the truck a start we jumped on, Edgington in front, holding on with his arms stretched backwards, looking like a ship’s figure head. The truck gathered momentum, flames built up, we were gathering speed and singing ‘Round and round went the bloody great wheel’, when suddenly it occurred to me there was no method of braking. As we careered towards a mountain of old tins, crying with laughter, I shouted, “Jump for it.” We all leaped clear, save Edgington, who seemed transfixed. At the very last minute he let out a strangulated castrati scream and hurled himself sideways as the blazing truck buried itself into the mountain of tins with an ear splitting crash.
It was a fitting Viking end for the Sacred Clubs. Occasions of insanity such as this stopped us all going mad.
The Gun Position Telephone at Mill Wood was in a small wooden but nine foot by eight foot, some two hundred yards from the gun. We were fairly isolated, off the road, in what had been a sand quarry. The but backed on to the working face of a sandy cliff about, fifteen feet high. Around and above grew gorse and brambles. It was a perfect getaway place, so much so that I used to volunteer to do any other signaller’s duty. It was simple. You sat by the phone and every hour tested the line to Battery Exchange. Twice a day we’d take down something called a M.E.T. These were figures that I didn’t understand, all to do with temperatures and barometric pressures. The G.P.O.A.↓ ‘specialists’ would work out from a book of tables what effect this information had upon the fusing of the shells and ranging.
≡ Gun Position Officer’s Assistant.
It was all too much for me. A week’s duty in the but all centred around a gramophone lent by Nick Carter, and jazz records I would bring back from leave. Happiness was a mug of tea, a cigarette, and a record of Bunny Berrigan playing ‘Let’s do it’. Sharing