Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [22]
“George Formby cud play ‘is bludy ‘ead off,” says Percival.
The thought of a headless George Formby fills me with delight.
“Ask ‘im ter play ‘In the Mood’.”
“You ask him.”
“Aye, banjo player, sonari ‘In the Mood’.” He then sings several bars of unrecognisable crap.
The old musician smiles and shrugs his shoulders.
“Silly bouger, ‘e don’t recognise it.”
“Listen, Glen Miller wouldn’t recognise it.”
“Gid aht of it,” he’s getting pissed now. “Ah use ter play in t’local dance bund.”
He got thoroughly nasty, I paid the bill and left him asking the old man to play ‘When the Poppies Bloom Again’. I for one didn’t want to see him again till they did. I walk back in the cool dark evening, and just my luck, a jeep with two redcaps pulls up.
“Where you going, Corporal?” They smell of recently consumed whisky, I suppose this was their post-piss-up Let’s-go-out-and-do-somebody trip. I tell them I’m walking back to the CPC.
“Where’s your paybook?”
To their dissatisfaction I produce it.
“Where’s your unit?”
“Lauro.”
“Where’s that?”
“Italy.”
“Don’t be funny with us, sonny,” says the second one, who has to angle his head back at forty-five degrees to see out from under the peak. The first one smiles with triumph.
“You haven’t signed your will,” he beams.
“How silly of me,” I said.
“Sign it at once.”
I wrote my name painstakingly across the will ‘Corporal Hugh Jympton’.
They roared away breaking the speed-limit. It was a delightful surprise to reach the billet to find their jeep in the ditch, upside down, and an ambulance loading on the two redcaps. I find the billet empty save for Webb.
“Where’s all the lads gone?”
“Lorry arrived this morning and took them away. Some kind of draft.”
I slept well that night; as I blew out my little oil lamp, it started to rain, it poured, it deluged, and lightning played about the crown of Vesuvius…
OCTOBER 19, 1943
I was getting twitchy, doing nothing positive for so long. I had started talking to myself, and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers. I had rearranged my billet so many times that my bed had been placed in every position except the ceiling, and I was working on that. There were days when I’d try and see if I could get both legs into one trouser leg, and both feet into one sock. I was carrying out this exercise when Percival comes in.
“There’s a bloke in a truck waiting fer you.”
“Is he wearing a white coat?”
“He looks bloody daft so he must be from your mob.”
I couldn’t believe it. I packed my humble belongings and dashed outside. There was my Cinderella’s coach in the shape of a 15-cwt truck. The driver is Ted Wright, a short, very dark, good-looking lad with large brown eyes, and eyebrows so perfectly arched that they looked as though Jean Harlow had drawn them on him.
“I’ve come to take you home,” he said with a grin.
In sheer delight I give him five cigarettes.
“What’s this for?”
“That’s for picking me up, Ted.”
“I must pick you up again.”
“You saved me from going mad.”
He put the truck in gear and off we drove. It was an over-cast day, with an occasional peep through by the sun. We are driving along the narrow coastal road. It takes us through small towns—Torre Annunziata, Torre del Greco, Resina,
Portici—all built on the new coastline formed by the earth-shaking disaster of AD 79, possibly by those very people who fled Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and other dead cities not yet discovered. It was easy to imagine these short swarthy inhabitants as their direct descendants. Wright gives me news of the mob.
“We’ve had our first casualty.”
At once I