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By Root 240 0

(Spaghetti) and we all arrived here by certain transport and landed at a certain place at a certain time, of all these facts I am dead certain (Spaghetti). We are allowed to mention the sky, so I’ll say that we have in fact got one, it’s directly overhead and high enough to allow you to stand up. The weather, well it was nice and warm when we landed but is turning cool, as are the natives, and now there is rain every other day, I am not with the regiment at the moment, no, I have had an illness called sandfly fever, it’s caused, as the name suggests, by getting sand in your flies, which immediately sends your temperature soaring, so despite the cold weather I’m quite warm thank you, in fact my temperature got so high, walking patients used to sit around my bed at night to keep warm. (Spaghetti). However, I’m better now, I’ve still got a temperature but it’s normal. Next I’ll be sent to a bloody awful Reinforcement Camp, where all the mud is sent to be slept on by unclaimed soldiers. So far the Battery have not sustained any casualties except me. (Spaghetti). With the censorship as it is it’s pointless to write any more, all I want you to do is to write and tell me where I am (Spaghetti).

Your loving Son/Brother/Midwife Terry

SEPTEMBER 28, 1943

MY DIARY:

THE NEWS SAYS JERRY’S EVACUATED NAPLES. HEAVY RAIN.

A Scottish, sandy-haired, freckle-faced Doctor is at the foot of my bed, he looks at me, smiles, looks at my board.

“Temperature’s down then.”

“Is it, sir?”

“It’s ninety-nine. How do you feel?”

“I feel about ninety-nine, sir.”

I slept most of that day, waking up for meals. It was all very pleasant, the service, the sound of the rain, the bloke in the next bed dying. That evening they took him out for some kind of an operation and he never came back. I remember the name on his chart was Parkinson ACC, he was a cook aged forty-five, and he’d snuffed it. Poor bugger; still, he was an army cook, and killed quite a few in his time.

What news! there’s an ENSA Concert Party in the Big Hall this evening!

“What’s ENSA?” says Jamie.

I told him, “Every Night Something Awful.”

British troops’ triumphal entry via the side streets while the Americans take the main roads.

The Hall was packed. There is a proper stage; on the curtains are the faint outlines of the Fascists’ emblem, which has been unravelled in a hurry. A Sergeant is in the pit on a lone upright piano, he strikes up a merry medley of tunes, “Blue Birds over the White Cliffs of Dover’ (and why shouldn’t they be white with all those birds flying over?). The curtains part and there are three men and two girls in evening dress, they were the ‘squares’ of all time, they are all singing ‘Here we are, Here we are, Here we are again!” Which was an outright lie as we’d never seen ‘em before. We give them a good hand. A short red-faced male with a fierce haircut and popping eyes comes forward and starts to wrestle with the microphone to bring it down to his height.

“Thank you! Thank you!” he gushes. “Well, as we say, here we are again.”

He tells a series of terrible jokes, we roar with laughter, he announces the Something Twins, on come two girls dressed as Shirley Temples, they sing ‘On the good ship Lollipop’, and we wish they were, they do a very simple tap dance. Storms of applause, next a male about fifty sings ‘The Bowmen of England’, as if all their strings were slack, he finishes, storms of applause! On come the two girls dressed as sailors—loud whistles. They sing ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’. The third male comes on, he’s everything a comic should be except funny, about forty-five, rotund, evening dress, a flat cap, a glove on one hand, after each joke he transfers the glove to the other and says ‘On the other hand’, he ends up with a song that I forgot even as he sang it. He left an indelible blank on my mind. The pit pianist then plays ‘The Stars and Stripes’…Storms of cheers, what liars we are. So it goes on; a brave attempt to cheer the lads up, and we all appreciated it, it was as well we didn’t have to pay. We wander back upstairs to