Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [19]
It was late evening when we finally arrived at the Porta Ercolano that led into the Via de Sepolcri. We sat in the mouth of one of the tombs and smoked a fag. Webb was knocked out.
“Bloody hell,” he said. “I never heard of the place, I never knew it existed, they don’t say a bloody word about places like this at school. Alfred the Great, Henry the Eighth, Nelson, Queen Victoria and that’s the bloody lot.”
I discovered that the Americans had actually bombed it! They believed German Infantry were hiding in it! Not much damage had been done, museum staff were already at work trying to repair it. Bombing Pompeii!!! Why not the Pyramids, Germans might be hiding there? Or bomb the Astoria Cinema, Wasdale Road, Forest Hill, that’s an ideal hiding-place for Germans? Or bomb Mrs Grollick’s boarding house, Hagley Road, Birmingham?
Webb afforded me amusing incidents during the day; we approached the front of a house in the Via de Mercurio, another shabby unshaven attendant was standing outside. He looked like a bag of laundry with a head on. He indicated a boxed partition on the wall. “Vediamo questo?” he said, and the innuendo was that of something ‘naughty’.
“Si,” I said fluently.
We gave him ten lire each, and with a well-worn key he opened the door. It revealed a male figure dressed as a Roman soldier; holding up his kilt from under it was an enormous phallus that rested on a pair of scales, the other scale held a bar of gold. Very interesting, but the point of it all escaped me.
“Wot’s ‘ee weighing ‘is balls for?” said Webb, the true archaeologist.
“I think it’s something to do with wartime rationing.”
The Italian explains the message, the man is saying, “I would rather have my prick than a bar of gold.” Wait till he’s sixty, I thought.
Another diversion is the Lupanarium.
“‘Ere, isn’t that a man’s prick sticking out over the door?”
“Well, it certainly isn’t a woman’s.”
It was a monster made of concrete and about a foot long.
“What’s it doin’ up there?” says Webb.
I demonstrate by hanging my hat on it.
“A hat-stand? Get away.”
“Well, it’s a stand of some kind,” I explained, “and this is a house of ill repute.”
Webb grinned from ear to ear. “Ahh, that’s why they got that bloody great chopper sticking out, then.”
“You should have been a Latin scholar,” I said.
The Lupanarium: around the walls were paintings, or rather a catalogue of the various positions that the clients could have; there was everything but standing on the head. I observed that the cubicles the ladies had to perform in were woefully small, one would have to have been five foot four or a cripple. It must have been an interesting sight that day of the eruption, all fourteen cubicles banging away and suddenly Vesuvius explodes, out the door shoot men with erections and no trousers followed by naked screaming tarts.
’Screwsville—Pompeii’: when we got there the girls had gone.
You don’t get that stuff in the film versions.
The sun was setting when we retraced our footsteps. I was loath to leave but I was to return here again in exciting circumstances. We hitched back on several lorries including one American with a coloured driver, yellow.
“Ain’t you limeys got any fuckin’ transport?” he said.
“Yes, we have lots of transport, trams, buses, but they’re all in Catford.”
He didn’t know what I was talking about and he said so. “What are you talkin’ about, man?”
He hated me. I hated him. It was a perfect arrangement. We were just in time for dinner. I took mine to the billet (the walk did it good) and ate it in the semi-reclining position; when in Rome.…Another occupant of our billet stumbled in. Corporal Percival, he’s smelling of beer.
“Where have you been?”
“I been to Naples,” he said.
Naples wow! The big time! The Catford of Italy.
“I went to the Pictures, I saw…Betty Grable and Cesar Romero in Coney Island. Bai she’s got lovely legs.”
“What about his?”
“Fook off.”
“Of course, I’ll pack at once.”
Percival was a North Country lad, all ‘Eeeee bai Gum’.