Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [11]
“Are they going to take me?” I asked an orderly.
“Yes, you’re next, Corporal,” he comforted. “We had a lot of badly wounded, we had to send them off first.”
With the sun setting, and the tent sides turning pink in the light, I was loaded aboard an ambulance in the top bunk. The top bunk! It all came back to me, the top bunk, that’s the one my parents always put me in during those long train journeys across India on the old GIP* Railway…all seemed so long ago…
≡ Great Indian Peninsula.
The ambulance bumped and jolted through the narrow mountain roads. I recalled those bright sunlit Indian days, as a boy, where every day was like a Kipling story…
“Like a drink of water, Corporal?”
“Yes.”
The attendant poured water into a tin mug. I gulped down two, it tasted like nectar.
It was four stretchers to an ambulance; in between with his back to the driving cab sat an orderly. The inside was painted white. The vehicle smelt new. A blood plasma bottle was attached to the soldier on the lower bunk, his chest swathed in bandages. The orderly constantly checked the flow of the plasma. The German kept groaning. It all seemed to be coming to me through a heat charged mist. I was hovering twix delirium and reality. I doze off.
The ambulance stops, near-by artillery are banging away, the doors open, it’s dark, voices mixed with gunfire, I am being unloaded. I’m on the ground, from there a large municipal building with a flat roof is silhouetted against the night sky. Covered with ivy, it looks like the setting for Gormenghast. I am carried up stairs along corridors, more stairs, and finally into a dim-lit ward of about thirty beds, all with mozzy nets down. I am placed on the floor.
“Can you undress yourself?” says an overworked orderly.
Yes, I can.
“The pyjamas are under the pillow,” he points to a bed.
My God, it looked good, already turned down, white sheets and pillows, TWO PILLOWS, being ill was paying dividends. I pulled on the standard blue pyjamas.
“Where’s the karzi?” I said weakly.
He pointed out the door. “Dead opposite.”
I wasn’t quite dead but I went opposite; that journey over, I pulled my body under the sheets. I was desperately tired and feverish, but stayed awake to enjoy the luxury of sheets. Another orderly; they all wear gym shoes so you don’t hear them coming, he took my pulse, temperature, entered them on a board that hung on the foot of my bed.
“Like some tea?” He spoke Yorkshire.
“Aye,” I said in Yorkshire.
“Anything to eat?”
“Yes, anything.”
He came back with a plate of tomato soup and bread. On the tray were four white tablets.
“Take these when you dun, they’ll help bring temperature down.”
“I don’t want it down, I want it up for the duration.”
I gulped it down. Took the tablets, brought them all up. Who said romance was dead? So much for my first forty-eight hours in Italy.
SEPTEMBER 26, 1943, 0600 HRS
Awakened by a nurse. A female nurse, all pink and scrubbed in spotless uniform smelling of Pears soap.
“Darling, I love you, marry me,” I said.
“Good morning,” she said, threw back the mozzy net and before I could answer had stuffed a thermometer in my gob.
“It’s down,” she said.
“What’s down?” I said.
“You’re only a 100.”
She bent over the next bed, and showed two shapely legs, one would have been enough. I felt my temperature go up again. I really was ill. I fell asleep, an orderly woke me up with breakfast. The ward was coming to life, I wasn’t; orderlies were taking down the last of the black-outs, those patients who could were putting the mozzy nets up, trailing out to the ablutions, others were swallowing medicines, here comes mine, four white tablets, what are they? The orderly doesn’t know.
“I don’t have to,” he says, “then if you die it’s not my fault.”
Cheerful bugger. For the first two days my temperature goes up and down, and so I’m not alone, I go with it. At night it was worst with delirium and terrible dreams. However, gradually