Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [62]
Fildes has raced to the battery office and returned with mail.
“You always get more than anyone else, Milligan.”
“Well, you unimaginative buggers only write to one bird, I wrote to ten; you’re paying the penalty for monogamy.”
I am drinking Deans’ coffee and luxuriating in my letters. Ah! Romance! Darling I love you, Dearest, my Darling, Darling Terry, Darling, darling, darling, good luck to them all I say! Alf is depressed, one of his kids is ill with scarlet fever. Fancy being a child in this war, shortages, fathers away, might get killed, bombs, and scarlet fever on top.
“They’re only going to give forty-eight hours’ leave in Naples,” Jam-Jar comes in with the news. There is a stunned silence. “Didn’t you hear?” repeats Jam-Jar, removing his tin hat, leaving the lining on his head. “Leave…” he starts to spell it out. “L-e-a—”
“Alright, alright, we heard,” I said. “Me and my friends are in a temporary state of shock. We’re not used to such announcements.”
“Naples,” says Deans looking up ecstatically.
Fildes isn’t enthusiastic. “Forty-eight hours? That’s no bloody good, it’ll take us half a day there and hack, all we’ll get is an afternoon and a morning, what can you do in that time?”
“I should imagine, if you have the right addresses and you’re quick, you could get in ten shags, three Litres of Vino and a ton of spaghetti,” says Nash.
“Shags!” Jam-Jar has a look of horror on his face. “Don’t you know Naples is the most Syphilitic city in Italy?”
“That’s nothing, we’ll make it the most syphilitic in the world!” says Nash with a sweep of his hand.
“Perfidious Albion,” says Jam-Jar.
“Vitreous China,” I reply.
“We’re going to look a bloody scruffy lot, we need a clean change of clothing.”
“Clothing,” I mocked, “we need a complete change of body, I smell like the inside of a Guardsman’s sock.”
So that I will be nice and fresh for the journey I’ve been put on Command Post from 2.30 in the morning till 5.30! Lt. Stewart Pride is on duty. No! he’s got malaria; I peer into the officers’ billet.
“Hope you feel better soon, sir.”
He looks up from his camp bed. “Thank you, Milligan,” and so saying downs half a bottle of whisky. He looks terrible and is sweating like a pig. Whisky. They all admitted that it was this fiery Scots anaesthetic that made them try for a commission. I get my head down early. At the dreaded hour of two twenty-five and three quarters, Alf Fildes wakes me. “Spike!”
“Ahhhhharggh—Arggh!”
“Your turn.”
“Arrrggg—Arrrggg Argg-er”
He stands over me, pulls the blankets off. “You’ll go blind,” he says.
In the Command Post Lt. Budden is talking to Bombardier Edwards. The night is a quiet one. Thirty-six rounds fired of harassing fire. I doze with my back against the wall. Towards dawn I fall off the box I’m on. The phone buzzes. “Command Post,” I say.
It’s the 8th Survey Regiment, or rather one of them. They give me a message that is all gibberish, I write down the string of figures and hand them to Lt. Budden.
“This must mean something to someone,” I said.
Budden takes the message, screws his eyes up, they appear to have a left-hand thread.
“Ahhh, at last, Deans,” he handed the message to him.
Deans takes it. “Ahhh yes.” he said.
From it they start doing sums, and drawing lines with protractors and set squares. I return to the dozing, and I fall off the box a second time. This way I pass the long hours till dawn.
It’s now Saturday, November 27.
I have to alert the cooks, so I take my mug. Gently I wake May, for he is a cook, and therefore God. I help him find his boots and assist him to his feet, all the while saying, “Ronnie May is a prince among men, for his is the truth and the light and walks in the ways of wisdom.”
“You want some fucking tea, don’t you?” he said.
“Ahhh, the master can even read the human mind.”
I stick around as he starts up the field oven by throwing a lighted match into the dripfeed tunnel. Whoooosh. It ignites.
“Food, bloody food, that’s all this lot think of, all I am is a total slave to the intestines of this lot, how can a public schoolboy like