Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [105]
“‘Ello,” he yawns, “what’s the time?”
“Just gone five…bloody cold.”
I automatically prepare my bed. I’m off to collect grub, I wobble across the hard ground, balancing my dixies, powdered egg and mashed potatoes; as I walk I sip the life-giving tea—why do we dote on tea? It tastes bloody awful, it’s only the sugar and milk that makes it drinkable. It’s like fags—we’ve got hooked. Weary, I climbed into my bed, three dark blue blankets, and one grey, funny how I should still remember the colours…As I closed my eyes, the sun was streaming above my sand-bagged wall; it cut a golden swathe into our dug-out, illuminating Deans’ legs. He was shaving into a metal mirror and humming a tune.
“Sorry mate,” Sgt. King is peering down on me, “we’re fresh out of signallers, you’ll have to go back on Command Post at eight.”
What was it now? 6.40. “OK, Sarge, I’ll kip till then. You’ll wake me, won’t you?”
No he won’t. I sleep fitfully, casting glances at my watch. I’m back in London—no I’m not, I’m in Italy. My mother is making banana sandwiches. I’m off to work—no I’m not, I’m in Italy at five to eight. And I was washing in Spike Deans’ dirty water; a fag, and I’m back in the Command Post. Lt. Stewart Pride is duty officer. Christ, I’m tired.
“I’ll get you a relief at mid-day,” said Bombardier Fuller; the bugger looked clean-shaved and fresh. He’d been getting his quota of kip.
“A moment of cheer.” Edgington just off Exchange duty comes in. “Some mail, up, mate.”
I recognise my brother Desmond’s terrible handwriting, that or it’s been written during a violent earthquake. He is seventeen, working as an errand-boy in Fleet Street for fourpence a week, he gets up in the dark, travels on a smoke-filled blacked-out third-class carriage to all-black Black-friars—then to some grim office, runs around the streets with messages and packages that are now forgotten, meant nothing, left no trace and changed the world not one jot, he then came home in the dark on a blacked-out train to a blacked-out house, no wonder he went to Australia. He tells me he’s doing lots of drawings, and follows the course of the war with teenaged fervour—he has a paste-up book—and numerous drawings. He sends me one of ‘German Bombers over Riseldene Rd, SE 23’. Shall I send him one back of German bombers over my dug-out?
7.2 being laid by Bdr. Fordham (eh?), Lauro, January 1944.
Lt. Stewart Pride awaiting a call to stand in for James Mason.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16, 1944
I have no entry in my diary, but in a small pocket-book I had written this. “On road to OP. Wherever that is. It’s going to be a big ‘Do’. Everything secret. With me are Lt. Budden, Bdr. Fuller, Driver Shepherd. It’s a glorious evening, blue sky, sunshine so unfitting for a bloody battle—here goes—long live Milligan. Wait, we are to go back to the gun position for the night and await further orders. So to bed. Did not pleasure any lady with my boots on.”
I remember dumping my Arctic Pack on the OP jeep, and made my way back to the dug-out. Spike Deans was still awake. He was scribing to some bedworthy female on Anglo-Saxon shores, “If only she was on the bloody phone it would save all this burning of midnight oil.”
“Yes,” I said wearily.
“Here,” he stopped writing, “weren’t you supposed to be at the OP?”
“Change of plans, Churchill didn’t want to risk me, so he’s called it off…until tomorrow.”
“What a bastard, getting you all worked up and then call it off…Where’s Fildes?”
“He’s already gone on ahead…with the first party.”
“Sod his luck.”
He continues his lovelorn missive. “Christ, it’s quiet,” he says. “I can hear the nib scratching on the paper.”
“Haven’t you got a silencer?”
“Good night, kind sir.”
MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 1944
REGIMENTAL DIARY:
Regimental OP established at 882960 and line laid by 10.30.
FILDES’ DIARY:
This was the hottest time I’ve ever had when we crossed the Garigliano. Shepherd and I in jeeps