Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [38]
He won’t half give it to you when he sees it again, I thought. Meantime his TOP SECRET message was now burning merrily. We left him trying to read it.
I had put up my pup tent against a bank surrounding a field. I lay in bed and wondered if the helmsman’s face was still showing white through the wheel house and where was that man Edgington? Sometimes known as Edge-Ying-Tong (the last two words were to become a song that came third in the Hit Parade of the late 1950s).
Edgington was even now speeding through the night in a traffic jam as the whole battery were homing in on our position, and they would be with us in dribs and drabs throughout the night. I listened and I could hear the first dribs arriving, followed by the drabs.
“Where’s the cookhouse?” could be heard.
Food! This bloody army were food mad!
A posh voice: “The cwook house is over theaire and there’ll be a hot meal in halwf an hour.” Now I’d already had my dinner, my watch said 11.50, it was very late, I was tired, warm and comfortable and I wasn’t hungry…nevertheless at 12.30 am I find myself in the queue. Ahead of me is another stomach on legs, Kidgell! The nearer he got to the serving table the more silent and tense he became. When there was only one man to go, Kidgell would go dead silent, sweat would appear on his brow, you could see him repeatedly swallowing the excess of saliva that was mounting in his mouth and nearly drowning him, then!…It was his turn! There was nothing twix him and the bubbling, steaming food containers, his trembling hands would hold out his dixies, he would crouch forward like a sprinter in the blocks, his eyes would extend from his head like organ stops. The moment the last drop of gravy from the cook’s spoon had finally fallen into his tin, Kidgell would Start eating immediately as he walked to a spot to sit down. By the time he got there he’d finished the main course and was into the duff. This gone he would gallop to the back of the queue hoping to get ‘seconds’.
If he thought he was going to be recognised, he would put his tin hat on and keep his head well down to hide his face. What gave him away was his dribbling, drooling and shaking hand when he got near the grub; he earned his title, ‘the famine’.
“I reckon,” said our cook, “if he got to a field of wheat first, the locusts wouldn’t stand a bloody chance.”
Another Day at San Marco
“Gandhi’s legs,” Edgington reads aloud from a soggy Daily Mirror rapidly becoming an antique.
“What about Gandhi’s legs,” I said.
Out here in Italy there had been no news of Gandhi’s legs since we landed.
“It says here,” Edgington continues, “Gandhi’s legs are the thinnest political legs in the world.”
“Rubbish,” I said. “My mother has the thinnest in the world. She has legs like old pipe-cleaners.”
“Ah but she has non-political thin legs, we’re talking about political thin legs.”
“My mother voted Labour—she walked to the polling booth. Of course her legs are political.”
Fuller sticks his head in our tent.
“We’re moving.”
“Moving?” I said, “I can’t feel a thing.”
“There’s not enough mud here,” chuckled Fuller. “The Major is reccying for a quagmire.”
“When?” said Edgington mournfully.
“Tomorrow. 0600.”
“Why do wars always have to be so bloody early—it’s always 0400, 0500—0500!! What’s wrong with 11.30? Eh? Who feels like fighting at bloody dawn? A man is much braver at 11.30!”
I left him raving in his damp tent as I went to man the No. 22 wireless set that kept us in contact with RHQ. It was 20.30. I went to relieve Ernie Hart, who was dutifully asleep on his set with headphones on. With true camaraderie I left him there and went back to bed. I am awakened at midnight, by an enraged Hart.
“Look at the time—you were supposed to relieve me at half-past eight!”
“I did but you was a-kip—wasn’t you? I didn’t have the heart to wake you.”
The staccato rat-a-plan of rain drops on the canvas roof as the deluge started.
“Do I have to get up?”
“Yes, you bloody well do—it’s 11.20—you’ve got five minutes to do—”
Bugger. I sat at the set for five minutes. I called