Monty, his part in my victory - Spike Milligan [13]
“Got to be back by mid-day tomorrow — sod it,” said Doug regretfully.
“Good night lads,” yawned Edgington.
“Steady,” I said. “You haven’t had an accident for an tour.”
Back to the Battery
We arrived back dead on time, 6 hrs late. What’s this??? Move at dawn??? “Where to?”
“Somewhere else,” we were told. “We’re already somewhere else,” I said. “This bloody moving,” said White, “I should write to my MP.”
“Why don’t you?”
“He’s a cunt, that’s why; he’s in the Navy — 2nd Class stoker.”
“If you voted him in you’re all cunts.”
“No, we’re not, huddersfield is a very intelligent town.”
“Then why did you say it with a small h?”
“Pardon?”
“Huddersfield? They’re at the bottom of the third division!”
“Because all their players are in the Kate.↓ You know how old the current goalie is?”
≡ Kate: Kate Carney = Army.
“No.”
“68. He had 13 own goals and two heart attacks last season.”
Men of the 7th Batt. Black Watch, almost out of their minds with boredom, recreate a Busby Berkeley musical happening
Move from Hammam Lif
May 27 ‘43
My Diary:
We leave Hammam Lif and move to destination ‘Secret’.
“Secret?” said White, “Soon there’ll be 6 bloody Regiments there, how do you keep that lot quiet?”
“If we was tourists, how much would this trip cost us?” said Edgington.
“Thousands,” said White.
“Ah yes,” said Gunner Maunders, “but this is travelling 3rd Class.”
He was speaking from an agonized position atop reels of signal wire; sans boots and socks, with his feet reeking in the heat.
White was stretched on a pile of blankets, most of which were in better nick than him, he was about to light the briefest of dog-ends. I pondered on how he could do it without scorching his nose; he produced a piece of cardboard which he slipped under his nostrils, as a kind of fire guard.
“Neccitas et mater inventum,” said the learned Bombardier Deans.
“What’s that mean?” said White.
“It means, Gunner White doesn’t speak Latin.”
“Who needs Latin?”
“It’s a dead language,” chips in Edgington.
“But he’s just spoke it, and he’s not dead.”
“He learnt it for when he is,” I said.
Lunch
In the shade of the olive trees we sat and ate our sandwiches, and then drove on. Life was timeless.
Deans was running through a ‘Filmgoer’ 1 year old. “Clark Gable has joined up. He’s an air gunner,” he said.
“That’s not a very big part.”
“The war has been badly cast,” I said. “I should be playing the part of a rich conscientious objector living with Joan Blondell who has to be massaged, nude, every hour with hot chocolate.”
Posters on trees are calling on the French to join the ‘Armee Libre Française’.
“Bloody fools,” said Maunders. “I wouldn’t join up because of a poster.”
“Haven’t you ever ‘eard of Patriotism?” said Deans. “Suppose Jerry invaded England — and tried to screw your sister. Wot would you do?”
“I couldn’t do nothin’ could I? I’m in bloody North Africa.”
May 30/31 1943 — 1st June
“We’re here,” said someone. We’re here’ was a place called Ain Abessa. We all leapt enthusiastically from our lorries to be confronted by another desolate plain with a slight rise in the middle. “That rise, gentlemen,” said Lt Budden, “is home.”
The heat was stifling, even the crows were walking.
“I saw Ronald Colman in Beau Geste and he never weated like this,” said Bombardier Fuller.
“Perhaps they shot it in Norway,” I said.
My father had told me ‘there’s always more breeze on a slope’, I leaned to the left but felt no cooler. Evening came.
I filled my water bottle for the night, and took Mepacrin. I couldn’t sleep. Why was there a war? Could it have been avoided? Why didn’t I avoid it? By now I could have been making my way as a trumpet player through the ranks of the big bands. Perhaps one day I would play with Tommy Dorsey and screw Helen Forrest. By dawn’s early light I wasn’t in Tommy Dorsey’s Band, and the only screw was holding up the tent pole.
The cookhouse waggon was missing, “I don’t miss it at all,” aid White. We ate the remains of yesterday’s haversack rations which