Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [25]
“You’re just in time, we’ve got to reel in the OP cable.”
“Oh,” I groaned, “I can’t do that, I’m convalescing from sandfly fever, they’ve got all the sand out but there’s still a lot of flies left.”
He shoves me forward. “On that bleedin’ truck.”
There was no escape. The M Truck signallers start to reel in the line. We travel North along a tree-lined road; ahead in the distance lie a range of mountains, some snow-capped: these are the ones we will have to cross to gain access to the Garigliano plain. Jerry has pulled back into them and is waiting.
“He knows a good thing when he sees it,” says Fuller, looking at them through his war-loot binoculars.
OCTOBER 21, 1943
Reeling in a telephone line is very simple. A 15-cwt ‘Monkey’ truck has a hand-operated cable drum on a mount, you walk along disentangling the line and the lucky Gunner stays on the truck and winds the drum. It was a fiercely contested position, bribes were offered, money and cigarettes exchanged hands. It never worked.
“I know just how a trained chimp feels,” ‘Ticker’ Tume was moaning. He was in a ditch untying the line from a stake. “We’re just trained bloody monkeys,” he went on. “Once you’re caught by a circus, that’s it, they can do what they bloody like, make you ride bicycles, jump through hoops, it’s all to humiliate. I never thought I’d see the day when I was a performing bloody monkey.”
There were cries of encouragement from the lads.
“This isn’t a war,” he continued, “this is a bloody chimps’ tea party.”
There was a great cheer. The end of the line is up a water tower in the grounds of what had been an Iti Prisoner of War camp. Edgington looks at his watch.
“It’s exactly 4.45,” he informs us.
“Oh good,” I said. “I must remember that.”
The landscape was devoid of any signs of life. All the cattle and farmers had ‘scarpered’.
“I feel we are the last humans left alive,” Edgington said gloomily.
He frequently made such predictions. In post-war years, Harry’s brother Doug told of an occasion in the thirties when Harry had predicted the exact date of the end of the world. When the appointed day came and naught happened, Doug felt cheated. He phones brother Harry and asks what went wrong, and Harry says, “Er—well, give it a couple of days.”
Harry denies this story. Meanwhile, in Italy, Harry is sent up the tower to unhitch the telephone line. He starts to climb a dodgy ladder. I say dodgy, as the rungs came away as he grabbed them.
“Brew up,” says Fuller.
We adjourn to one of the huts. It’s the Camp Commander’s office, now a mess of scattered papers, broken furniture, on the floor a picture of Mussolini, the glass smashed, footprints over the Duce’s kisser. Graffiti on the wall.
“The Hamps were here.”
“The Tebourba Tigers.”
The latter refers to the name they conferred on themselves after a savage action at Tebourba in Tunisia. Where are those tigers now? Watching telly? Washing up?…We make a fire of broken furniture, and put on the brew can. We add our graffiti to the walls. “Gunner Milligan was here, and will make sure he never returns.” Someone wrote ‘Chelsea FC for ever’. Such patriotism.
Jock Webster, our myopic driver, is i/c tea; he had a remarkable forehead, bulging like a balloon. Gunner Birch explained: “Before his bones ‘ad ‘ardened, someone put a pump up his arse and blew him up.”
Why wasn’t this man writing in The Lancet? ‘Myopic’ Webster is now putting spoonfuls of compo mixture into the boiling water, well, not exactly in, just missing the tin. We reorient him with “Left hand down a bit, bit more…right.” How he became a driver is beyond logic. To keep him on the road his passengers had to shout endless instructions. “Look out, STOP,” etc. However, he was such a nice bloke we hated to give him the push, but he broke down so often, we had to.
“Oo fort of ‘ow ter make compo?” Tume asks.
“I fink,” pontificated