Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [12]
“Come in,” says the Colonel.
The matron throws back the bed clothes, lathers all around his ‘willy’, shaves him and starts to leave. The Colonel says, “Pardon me, matron, but why did you bother to knock?”
In the next bed is a Marine Commando, Jamie Notam. He’s in with our old friend ‘Shell Shock’, received during the landings around Marina. He was forty-one, a bit old for a Commando.
“I used to be a Gentleman’s Gentleman,” he’s speaking with a broad Scots accent.
Jamie is sitting on the edge of his bed, he is in his battle dress, his boots highly polished, a hangover from his gentleman’s gentleman days. His bed was immaculate, his eating irons and mess-tins shine like silver. He basically wanted to do things; if he folded a newspaper it was always perfectly square, but there the creation stopped. He could never make anything. It was always do but what he did was perfect. He must have been the ideal servant. It’s eleven o’clock of a morning. Outside the sun shone, that autumnal light more silver than gold, it beamed through the windows of our ward, favouring the beds who were on that side.
In the centre of the ward are three trestle tables loaded with books, periodicals and newspapers. On one is an old Italian wireless set plugged up to a ceiling light. From it issues music from Allied Forces Network in Algiers. It’s mostly danceband music and singers like Crosby, Sinatra, Dick Haymes, Vera Lynn, Ann Shelton and Evelyn Dall (who?). The ward is big, high ceiling, plenty of light. All the bedside lockers have a water jug and glass. If you wished, you could have orange or lemon juice flavouring. In the locker were those tortuous pieces of porcelain, the bed-pan and the pee bottle. The attempt to make the place look homely, small tins with a few wild flowers, was very much appreciated. Since my admission, the sounds of artillery had daily receded. It was now reasonably quiet, save for the sound of planes passing overhead.
Some of the patients sat up in bed, some writing letters, some reading newspapers with headlines like:
AMBASSADOR KENNEDY TELLS PRESIDENT BRITAIN IS FINISHED
(if he meant after the war he was spot-on). Some soldiers had donned their dressing-gowns and were seated on other patients’ beds, talking, smoking, or playing cards. The sick ones lay still, some asleep, some staring at the ceiling. We aren’t a casualty ward so we don’t have any blood or bandages. The lad in the bed on my right is very ill and in an oxygen tent; he has pneumonia and looks ghastly. My temperature was down to normal in the day, up to a hundred at night.
“How’d you get into the Commandos at the age of forty-one?”
“I told ‘em I was thirty.”
“Why didn’t you say thirteen, you’d have got out altogether.”
“I wanted adventure.”
“Call this adventure?”
He shows me photographs of himself outside his master’s Manor House somewhere in Scotland.
“You left all that to come here?”
He nodded ruefully. “I must ha’ been bloody mad,” he said.
Well he was now. He was interesting company even though he was on tranquillisers and occasionally fell down. I sent him on errands like scrounging fags, getting my breakfast tray, bringing extra cups of tea, he loved it, he was back ‘in service’ again, and I took every advantage of it.
“Shall I gie yer boots a clean?” he’d say and I would say “Yes,” wouldn’t I?
I felt well enough to write my first letter home from Italy.
My dear Mum, Dad and Des,
I am officially somewhere else, that somewhere else is where I am, I am not at liberty to say, the whole of this land we have arrived in is now TOP SECRET, in fact no one is allowed to know where it is, even the people who live in it are told to forget they are here, however, the bloody Germans know where it is, and don’t want to let us have it (Spaghetti). I’ve been here about a certain number of days