Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [73]
Captain Sullivan, who personally supervised the chicken-shit clean-up.
“As you can see, this yard has been crapped in for the last hundred years by chickens, cows, sheep…”.
Was he going to say, ‘now it’s our turn’?
“If we’ve got to spend Christmas here, we don’t want to spend it up to our neck in shit, so we’ve got to set-to and clear it up, the sooner the better.”
He then left us to clear up the shit, while he went away not to. The lads set-to with shovels, but I could see that it was going to take days. I put the great Milligan brain to work and I came up with the answer. Some large squared-off timbers lay around, the thickness of a tree trunk; they were about twelve feet long by about four feet square. To these we attached dragging ropes and by pulling them along the yard up a slope, we deposited the crap into an adjacent canal. Any chicken that tried to crap here now got a brick on the back of the nut. Clouds of black coaldust swirled in the air as we set about our shed. We got so black that soon the strains of ‘Swannee. Ribber’ were heard, and what appeared to be negro gunners doing the cakewalk.
“I don’t think this was always a coal-bunker,” said a blackened Deans. “It’s been used as a garage at times.”
“Oh what a relief,” I said. “These little bits of unsolicited information do wonders for us.”
It was a weary bunch of gunners that bedded down that sooty night.
With the usual ingenuity, each man had concocted a bed of sorts, the most painful was Gunner Devine’s. He slept on a sheet of corrugated iron, it made the most devastating clanging noise every time he moved.
DECEMBER 12, 1943
MY DIARY:
COLD AND RAIN. CONTINUED TO SHOVEL SHIT AND COALDUST.
Much the same as yesterday. After the overnight rain the courtyard has refilled with crap, and we start all over again. The Signallers and Specialists attacked their billet. They enlisted Ted Wright, who drove the water cart in and turned the taps on. There is nothing to report for the days that followed, save the horses. (Save the Horses. A new appeal.) The fallow fields and meadows housed a collection of horses and a few donkeys. A ride wouldn’t be a bad thing. With this in mind the Gunners Devine, Nash, White and Milligan strode manfully over the canal bridge, and closed in on three shaggy looking equines. At our approach, they looked up, ears forward; with lots of outstretched hands and utterances, ‘Good boy, here boy, woah boy’, and ‘Come here, you bastard’, we managed to get one to stand still while Vic Nash prepared to mount. Had he ridden before? He thought so. Up he goes. He sat there for a few moments savouring the height; being a short-arse, this was all new to him. He lights a cigarette.
“Never mind the bloody fag, get the thing going.”
Devine was anxious to see the display. White was somewhere chasing a brown filly that had almost taken him out of sight. We had heard him shouting implorations, but he was now down to slinging lumps of turf after the reluctant creature. Here, however, Nash was preparing. He threw his cigarette away, then said to the animal, “Come on…off we go.” She didn’t go off. He tried several more ‘off we goes’, but she went on grazing.
“Get ‘er head up, will you,” he instructed us.
This done he tried a sudden use of the heels and in doing so fell off.
“I thought you said you could ride,” said Devine.
“I thought so too,” insisted Nash.
Devine helps him up again but they still argue.
“It hasn’t moved yet and you’ve fallen off.”
“It takes time to get back into the swing of it…when I say ready, give her a smack on the arse…right?”
Right. Nash settles, takes a firm hold of the rope and the mane.
“Right,” he yells.
Devine connects his palm with her rump. SMACK! loud and clear. We helped Nash up again.
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to remember,” he said.
Devine pats the horse. “I can do better than that: I’ve never ridden, but it should be easy. I seen tons of cowboy pictures