Monty, his part in my victory - Spike Milligan [14]
After Parade, we spent all day putting Signal gear into a Nissen hut, and testing the equipment.
By midday, the cooks had arrived! We stood in the broiling sun, watching the sweating cooks as they ladled out Maconochies and rice pudding. We retired to our tents to escape the flies.
My bivvy was roomy, I had increased its height by adding three foot purple canvas wall along the trailing edge and dug down three feet so that I had more head room. An electric light ran from the truck, there was a wireless set by the bed and the fridge was on order. Over the roof I had put a fly sheet making the tent some ten degrees cooler.
Inside of my tent. Ain Abessa.
One afternoon Edgington and I were practising post-war sleeping, when the distant voice of L/Bdr Sherwood was heard: “Oi, you in there.”
“Hello?” (me),
“I bet you I can get you out of that tent in minutes 2.”
“Balls —”
“10 francs.”
“Done.”
“Right — minutes 2 starting now.”
We doze on.
“Minutes 1 and 40 secs,” shouts Sherwood.
I hear a combustion engine approaching. I have a nasty feeling: I raise the tent flap. A Bren Carrier is nearly upon us. The bastard! He’d put it in bottom gear, pointed it at our tent and let it loose unmanned!
“Fuck! He’s going to win,” says Edgington.
“No, he’s not, grab that tent pole, I’ll take this one.”
“That was cheating,” said Sherwood as he unscrews his wallet. He had to run 400 yards after the Bren and we had to reset up our tent. All for 10 francs. We were bloody mad.
The Arabs had rifled the tombs of the Pharaohs, now it was our turn. Chalky White was asleep. A brown hand came under the tent flap, White hit it with a pick handle, and there was an agonized, “Ow fuckin’ ‘ell.” It was Gunner Devine feeling for White’s fags.
Kerrata Gorge. Holiday
2nd June 1943
Chater Jack realized Ain Abessa was lowering morale, so again he set up more holidays. With Lt Budden and Sgt Dawson in charge, Gunners Edgington, Fildes, Shipman, Tume, Carter, Bdr Deans and Milligan drove to the Kerrata Gorge. Through tortuous mountain roads we drove amid a magnificent wild scenery.
The road had been hewn from solid granite, and on the floor of the gorge was a giant engraved stone ‘Le Travail du Militaire Française 1882’. It was a masterpiece of construction. Gradually through a series of tunnels, the road descended to the floor of the gorge level with the river Agrioun; adjacent was perfect ground for camping. We pitched our Iti 10 man tent under a tree, facing the river! The back drop to all this was the great Kabylie range of mountains. Soon the quiet of the gorge was broken by shouts and splashing. The walls of the gorge rose three hundred feet, and, growing in abundance by the stream were pink and scarlet Rhododendrons. With towels wrapped around our middles we sat in the shade, Al Fildes strummed ‘Come with me, to Blue Hawaii’. “Pity we can’t share this with the poor buggers from home,” he said.
“We are the poor buggers from home,” I reminded him.
Kerrata Gorge, North Africa
Lt Cecil Budden swims without his specs, colliding with rocks, cliffs and driftwood and comes out a mass of bruises. I can see him now with those magnificent PT shorts hanging below the knee like wet concertinas. Edgington! now there was style, again those draggley drawers, the cheeks of his bottom peek-a-booing above the elastic, he was somewhere in the Tarzan/Gregory Peck mould. His approach to the dive was to make a fifty yard momentous run-up, reach the water, trip and fall face in. As he surfaced (usually upside down) he put on that ‘man of Action-Sport-and-Labour Exchange’—look, and then, with an over-arm stroke, he would set off, a look of determination on his fine face.
Edgington ‘surficing’
Gradually he would sink from sight, the only man in the world who had learnt to swim downwards.
There was no organization, someone cooked one day, someone else another; it worked out very fairly, especially for me. I did bugger all.
Climbing Kerrata Gorge
3 June 1943
It was first light, a cool morning, with the