Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [26]
The Milligans moved to England in 1933, when Spike was fifteen. The family was decidedly poor, though no decision had ever been made. Spike joined the war as a gunner in the Royal Artillery, but he was not a natural warrior. In North Africa, his unit proceeded to fire a heavy artillery gun without having dug it in, thereby sending the thing recoiling down a hill, where it narrowly missed a truck occupied by Lance Bombardier Harry Secombe. The burlap covering opened at the back of Secombe’s truck and a face popped in. “Anybody seen a gun?” Spike inquired. (Secombe’s tale of the event runs like this: “We couldn’t get the Germans out of these hills. We kept sending them letters, but they wouldn’t go. . . . This huge gun jumped out of the gun pit, and it came pattering over where we were and missed us by a few yards, you know, in this little truck. And I thought, ‘They’re throwing guns at us.’ ”)
The comedy of Spike Milligan’s World War II took a darker turn when he was blown up at Monte Cassino. His unit was taking cover in an olive grove outside an enemy-held monastery. “I was counting out my Woodbines and reached five when this weird sound hit my ears,” Spike remembered. “I can’t describe it. It was like a razor blade being passed through my head.”
Spike was dispatched to a rehab hospital—the same one to which Harry Secombe had been sent after breaking his eyeglasses. (This is one of Secombe’s explanations, at any rate. The other is this: “I had been invalided and downgraded after I got lost in a blizzard.”) Whatever it was that put Harry Secombe in the hospital, Harry soon discovered that he and Spike shared the same antic sensibility. Spike described one day: “A crippled sergeant in a wheelchair came round and asked, ‘Does anyone do entertainments?’ ” Spike responded by telling four jokes in quick succession, none of which produced a laugh—“so I picked up an axe and struck Harry Secombe.”
Harry told of staying with Spike in a Roman military hostel, men sleeping on every available surface: “There was Spike all tucked up in bed, nice and comfortable with his pajamas on, so I poured a bottle of beer over his head.”
In Milligan’s case, one suspects that the unbalanced foundation of his worldview, or the solid foundation of his unbalanced worldview, had been formed before the razor sliced through his brain, but the war certainly exacerbated his despair. “I got used to seeing men jumping out of little holes and looking about with binoculars. Men looking out of tanks with binoculars. Always men looking out and throwing things at one another. I thought to myself, ‘This is mad.’ ” Yes, it was. And so was he.
Chronically underhoused after the war, Spike moved into Jimmy Grafton’s attic, whereupon his friends dubbed him “the prisoner of Zenda.” The Grafton Arms, the pub on the first floor, had been in the Grafton family since 1848 and was now being operated by Jimmy, fresh back from the war, where he had served as an infantry officer. Grafton was no ordinary publican, however, since he also wrote comedy scripts for BBC radio. But it was not Grafton’s scriptwriting talent that initially drew Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe into the pub as patrons. It was the fact that the Grafton Arms served drinks after hours.
Bentine and Secombe had shown up at the pub one day in 1946 or ’47 and immediately began complaining about the poor quality of a radio comedy show they had recently heard—Variety Bandbox, the author of which was none other than Grafton himself. Then again, Grafton was writing Variety Bandbox for the comedian Derek Roy, whom Spike described as “about as funny as a baby dying with cancer.”
Since Harry’s strange friend Spike began spending a lot of time at Grafton’s anyway, Grafton offered him the attic space, where Spike, too, began typing comedy scripts for Derek Roy’s new program