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By Root 218 0

I remember. She didn’t half play me up, she took me home one night, straight into the bedroom and, laugh, she was a mass of Women’s Mag cliches. When I pulled her skirt up she said, ‘There was a flash of pink thigh, and a rustle of silk petticoat’, then when I kissed her, she turned her head away and said, ‘She turned her head away and felt his warm breath on her neck’. I began to think she was a dummy being worked by Barbara Cartland. When I gave up trying I got up to leave, and as I combed my hair, she said, ‘He stood, nostrils twitching, combing his plum-black hair’. I never saw her after that, though she did leave a message with the Battery office for me to contact her. ‘Tell him I’ve changed my mind’, was the exact communication; what it was she changed her mind about I’ll never know.”

Gunner White is sitting on an oscillating petrol tin, and reads from an old Bexhill Observer. “Listen! German raiders attacked several points along the SE Coast, a bomb was dropped on a farm, the explosion blew the door off the bull pen, the bull made his way to the cow pasture and the farmer had great difficulty in getting the bull back. He himself was attacked.”

Gunner Birch, shrouded in cigarette smoke, tells us that in a letter from home his father told him there was a theory that Hitler was insane as the result of piles.

“Hitler has piles?” chuckled Edgington.

“I don’t know,” said White, “it’s my father, he says—” here he picked up the letter and read, “Ron Lester, the publican, said that Hitler went mad through piles, he was operated on by a doctor, and the operation went wrong, and he still has them.”

“It was a Jewish doctor,” I said. “That’s why he had it in for the front-wheels.”*

≡ Front-wheel skid = Yid.

“Don’t tell me,” said Edgington sitting up, “don’t tell me World War 2 is due to piles.”

“What a sobering thought,” I said. “To think, a case of Anusol Suppositories could have stopped it.”

“It’s not too late,” said Edgington. “We should load a Lancaster and drop three tons of pile ointment on his Reichstag.”

“You see? Nothing’s sacred these days, even a man’s Reichstag.”

Birch blinked and listened at the conversation he had started. “What’s a Reichstag?” he said.

“Grub up,” is all someone had to say to empty the hut.

Drooling

Fildes has already mentioned this, let me amplify.

The Oxford Dictionary says it’s ‘To drivel, to slaver’. I give you the lie, in our battery Drooling had an entirely different meaning. It started on the farm and, in our case, the cause of drooling was sexual frustration. If you saw a lone gunner for no perceptible reason suddenly make a low groaning sound that sounded like OOOOLEEEEDOO-LEYYYYYY, at the same time appearing to grab an erect invisible phallus with both hands that by their position suggested a ‘chopper’ about five feet in length, which he then proceeds to thud against the nearest wall with a cry of OLLEEEDOOLEE, THWAKKKKK!! OLLEEEDOOLEEEE THWACK!!, this was the new Drooling craze. It was not abnormal to come into pre-parade gatherings of bored gunners all apparently holding mighty invisible choppers, thudding them against walls, trees and the ground. When Major Jenkins first witnessed this from a distance, he asked Sgt. Jock Wilson, “What are they doing, Sergeant?”

And Wilson said, “It’s something to do with the shortage, sir.” Jenkins parried, “The shortage of what?” Wilson replied, “We don’t know, sir.” Travelling on the back of a lorry, the sight of a pretty girl immediately erupted into mass drooling until she was out of sight. Of late, the song ‘Drooling’ had come to light; it was sung to the Flanagan and Allen tune, ‘Dreaming’.

Droooooooolingggg

Droooooooolingggg

Each night you’ll find the lads all Droooo-lingg

A little Drool don’t hurt no body

And if it does then we don’t give a Sod-dee

Droooo-ling

Droooo-ling

It’s so much better than Tom Foolingggg

A little drool can ease your heavy load

So keep Drooling till your balls explode. The author is unknown, he wants it that way. The farmyard square (now that it had been cleared of three hundred years of dung)