Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [72]
In the Command Post, Lt. Walker, MID, has liberated the souls of the duty signaller and specialist with excerpts from a whisky bottle. We start rolling in the telephone lines, and dismantling the equipment.
“I could do this with my eyes closed,” said Ernie Hart.
“Try it then,” said Shapiro. He did, and dropped it in the mud.
“Stand by to move!” What we are supposed to stand by they do not say. I choose a tree. You never know when you might need it. I have Kung Fu’ed my kit into my big pack and kitbag. I have wrestled my tent to the ground, got a half-Nelson on the tentpole and heaved it from the earth, then with a great javelin throw I have hurled the lot into the back of G Truck.
“Owwwww fuckkkkk,” so the truck is not empty. Through his burnt binoculars, Jenkins has spotted some rubbish in yon field, and he sends yon Gunner Hall, and we can hear yon swearing from him.
Yes. We’re all ready to move. All the rubbish has been picked up. The pits filled in.
“Yes,” Edgington reflects, “we’ve done everything save strew fresh grass-seed.”
We were ready to move. We stand by our vehicles, all smiling, and as I say, ready to move. We warmed the engines up, ready to move, cleaned the windscreens, ready to move. Oh yes, we were ready to move. I said so. “I’m ready to move, aren’t you?” I said to Edgington and he said, “Oh yes, I’m with you on that, as sure as I’m 954022, I’m ready to move.”
For three hours we were ready to move, then four, five and six hours. We were all falling silent. On the seventh hour Bombardier Deans said, “I think somebody’s fucked it.”
Lt. Walker is passing with a bemused smile on his blond face, he turns and says, “What are you waiting for?”
“Anything,” I said.
He paused then walked on towards his truck, where he turned and shouted, “If it’s any consolation, I’m as pissed off as you are.”
“There’s a big hold-up on the Teano Road,” said BSM Griffin, trying to help.
“There’s a bigger fucking hold-up here,” said Jam-Jar. “I’m going to see a lawyer!”
“Give him my love,” said Griffin. All night we sat and froze with only tea and bread scrounged from the cookhouse truck as relief. In painful positions we tried to sleep out the rain-filled night. It was like being tied up in sacks and thrown in the Bosporus. The growling of empty stomachs rings round the valley. At the sound of a snore a sleepless voice says, “Lucky bastard.” I have had my legs in every position except behind my neck, and I’m saving that for an emergency. I am just dozing off with my legs behind my neck when the truck jolts.
“Mummy, mummy.” I shake Deans gently by the throat. “Get the bucket and spades, we’re off.”
Along the dawn-haunted roads we slush along. By now, life has so little interest, an announcement that the world was coming to an end could only have cheered us up. I am dozing, dozing, smoking, dozing…
“Wake up! We’re ‘ere.”
BSM L. Griffin as he appeared in Volume 3
Deans is clambering out the truck, sleepily I follow, and where are we? It’s a farm. We are in a large courtyard flanked by a large four-storeyed redbrick Victorian Gothic building with a circular Camelot-type tower, along with numerous other utility buildings. The courtyard was knee-deep in crap. We donned our ‘Wellies’. We are all assigned a building, the Specialists and Signallers are given what is a shed being used as a coal-bunker.
“You’ll have to clear it up if you want to get comfortable,” said Sergeant King. I dumped my kit on the coaldust-laden floor.
“Can’t we burn it and start again?” I said.
There was the ‘sorting-out-where-to-kip