Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [6]
“I know that, sir, Blackpool’s in England.”
“Get dressed at once and report to me!”
The officer stormed off. Well, almost! In turning he hurt his ankle. Next thing the khaki God of authority is hopping up and down, holding the injured limb, his face contorted with pain. He sees before him a sea of smiling gunners.
“You’re all on a charge,” he screamed.
“I think that’s a fair ending,” said Edgington, grinning at the departing cripple.
My God! Edgington was holding a mug of tea! How did he do it? He pointed to a tin brewing over a derv fire. Sgt. Mick Ryan comes across. He is dripping with sweat—was it fear of work?
“Come on, youse bloody signallers!” he points to a Scammell and a jack-knifed 7.2 gun well down in the sand.
We take the drag ropes and pull. The rest of the morning is a repetition of this. “Heave, steady,” etc. A naval officer in virgin-white uniform motors past in a jeep. He is tall, suntanned. He has the eyes of a man used to searching distant horizons, a handsome intelligent face and strong jaw and a mouth with the suggestion of a smile. The medals on his jacket told of his past heroisms. He was—how can I describe him?—a pain in the arse. Nice Lt. Budden is approaching.
“Hands up all the men who want to go to war!”
There is a massive negative response. He points at me.
“You. Milligan.”
This was victimisation!
“There must be some mistake, sir. I’m eighty-six and a cripple.”
He points. “Over there, 25-year-old liar.”
I clamber on to Sherwood’s bren carrier to be taken to a premature death. The carrier is overloaded, I perch on top. Budden sits in the passenger seat looking at maps. We roll across the sand hills; it’s not easy for me to stay on, so with consummate skill I fall off.
“Stop being silly now, Milligan,” says Mr Budden.
I remount. This time I jam myself between two kitbags. We reach a secondary road and—here comes the bonus—we pass the Temple of Neptune and Cerene, at Paestum, both looking beautiful in the sunlight. Strung from the Doric columns are lines of soldiers’ washing. At last they had been put to practical use. If only the ancient Greeks had known.
What the ancient Greeks didn’t know was that L/Bdr.
Milligan had fallen off again! I got back on. This time I removed the kitbags, I climbed into the hole and they lowered the kitbags on top, leaving my head and shoulders free. I had appealed to Sherwood to drive slowly past the Temples.
“Wot Temples?”
“You’ll never get another chance to see them close at hand,” I said.
“You’re right,” he says. “You’ll never get another chance to see them again,” and he drove on.
Mr Budden has heard all this.
“Bombardier Sherwood is not of a scholastic mind, Milligan. He is a son of the soccer field. Had you said, ‘Slow down, Reading are playing the Mussolini Rovers’, I’m sure it would have touched a part of his English soul that is forever football boot.”
We have cleared the sand dunes, the minor roads, and have turned left on to the Battapaglia highway going north. We wait to allow some of the vehicles to catch up with us. There’s no sign.
“I suppose they’ve stopped to see the Temples,” grinned Sherwood.
The houses that line the road were two-storey, square, whitewashed. Hanging on the walls were strings of tomatoes. People sit outside on simple wood and rush chairs. The women were mostly bare-legged, wearing black clothes and wooden-soled sandals. Some pretty-faced girls look from the windows. A short fat middle-aged balding man runs across the road and gives us a bunch of purple grapes. He smiles and shakes his hand in a friendly gesture. “Viva Englise,” he says. I chew grapes and spit the pips at the neck of Sherwood.
Twenty minutes later our little convoy is complete.
“We are to establish an OP, somewhere up there,” Budden points to the mountainous country ahead.
I hated OPs; when they were quiet they were quiet, but when the shit was flying it was a dicey place. We pass several burnt-out tanks, mostly ours; that’s the trouble, Jerry had better tanks. We were trying to get away with superiority