Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [27]
“Where you bloody well bin then?” says Ronnie May, who had been laying in a bivvy dreaming of some grotty bird in Houndsditch. I had seen her photograph, and the best place to think of her was in a muddy field in Italy.
“We bin reeling in a line,” said Bombardier Fuller.
“No one told us to keep any late dinners,” said May, starting to wipe a diseased tin-opener across his apron. “Good job I kept the oven in,” he said.
“You should always keep a few late dinners, Ronnie,” says Edgington. “Theatregoers, you know.”
We are all swiping left, right and centre to throw off the mozzies, “Let’s all put on a fag and smoke ‘em out.”
Hurriedly we lit up and forming a circle facing outwards started to envelope ourselves in clouds of smoke. Soon we were all coughing like consumptives; it alleviated the situation but as soon as we stopped, the mozzies returned. To help them, Jerry starts lobbing over odd shells. Running and eating, we dive into the muddy ditch, there in the dank dark we squat and eat mouthfuls of lovely hot stew, mixed with dead mosquitoes.
“What a terrible position,” grumbled Edgington. “I’ve eaten many meals,” he went on, “but Mosquito Stew, never.”
“Eat as many as you can,” I said, “better still, bite ‘em.”
The rims of our ears were now a mass of red lumps.
Edgington continues, “You never know, in France these might be a delicacy like frogs’ legs.”
Whoosh! Plonk! Whoosh! Plonk! Jerry is lobbing over 155mm shells that we have been told to avoid.
“If you like tomato sauce, that tells me you’re a carman’s pull-up eater,” I said.
“Wot’s wrong with a carman’s pull-up?” says Tume.
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “It’s the tomato sauce…have you ever looked closely at the bottles? The tops are congealed with dirt and stale tomato sauce, they never wash the bottle out, they just squirt in fresh red crap.”
“How do you know, clever Dick?”
“I know because I was on a tomato sauce round, we used to go around with a lorry, me and a bloke called Len Brockenbrow, we had great petrol tins full of this red crap, and a kerosene oil funnel. We’d stick all the bottles on the deck, I’d hold the funnel, Len would pour out the goo, and we never once see the bottles clean. I tell you there was stuff at the bottom of the bottle that was twenty years old; Len told me he once looked down the neck of a bottle and he saw an eye looking up at him.”
“Was it the manager?” says Edgington.
“Anyways, there’s only one good sauce to put on grub and that’s Worcester,” I said.
“Worcester? Burns the arse off you,” said Fuller.
“Good,” I said. “I always wanted to get rid of mine.”
Jock Webster interrupts. “None of you ignorant swines has any idea of sauces.”
“Have you?”
“No, I’m an ignorant swine too, but if there is a sauce that compliments a meal it’s HP.”
“Harry Prickers,” said Harry.
“Wot?” said Wilson.
“HP stands for Harry Prickers,” he repeated.
“I wouldn’t stand for that,” I said.
Wheeee, plop, wheee, plop. More shells, but they don’t explode.
“Duds,” says Trew.
“That or AP.”
“AP?” says Edgington. “Wot’s he want to fire Armour Piercing at us for?”
“It’s the dinner they’re after,” I said.
“Gad, you’re right,” says Edgington, immediately seizing on the nonsense. “Once they can get a shell through the crust on a British Army Stew, the way is open to pour in reinforcements. In no time they would be behind the back of the cookhouse cutting off our supply of food, and bringing the Army Catering Corps to its knees.”
“Imagine,” I said. “Imagine what fixed-line Spandaus could do to a treacle duff. No, we’d have to surrender. We’d have to haul up the white pudding cloth, and hand over the entire plans of our Treasured Meat and Veg Stew. For England the war would be over.”
“Never,” said Harry. “We could get to the colonies, Canada, Australia, and start making meat and veg stew with a new formula, and—”
He was cut short by a very close Whhhheeeee Splot. Another shell. There was a silence broken only by a chorus of mosquitoes.
“You alright, Harry?