Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [79]
Devine has returned from a fruitless fishing trip, “Are they sure there’s fish in this canal?”
“Where else, you silly sod?”
“Then why didn’t the fuckers bite? All I caught was this.”
“That’s a…er…it’s not a salmon,” said Liddell; not a bad guess, the creature was three inches long and black.
“It’s a nigger’s dick,” said White.
“Oh, great,” grinned Devine, “I’ll smuggle it back to Liverpool and hire it out to old ladies.”
“Oh dear,” said Deans in a female voice, “and I’ve cooked all these chips.” He stamped his foot on the floor, from which arose a cloud of coal-dust.
Bombardier Fuller has arrived, “There’s a little line-laying to be done—no panic it’s only a short one, about a quarter of a mile.” As we clamber aboard M2 truck, we witness the spectacle of a Driver Ron Sherwood of Reading, riding a bicycle backwards. Ask him to do a job and he’s gone in a flash, but ride a bicycle backwards, oh yes, he’ll do that all day. Sherwood was a lovely footballer on the wing with a slight tendency not to pass to anybody, and he wasn’t a bad pianist, no, he was terrible. He could get the right-hand melody going, but with his left hand he would hit any note, but he did it with such panache, a smile and a wink, that cloth-eared gunners would say, “Corrrrr, you can’t half play the piano.” and they were right, he could only half play that piano.
Very quickly we laid the line to RHQ. I opened the door to see a gaggle of our top officers all swigging whisky; among them was dear Major Chater Jack, now a Lt.-Colonel. It had not changed him, he was still knocking it back.
“Hello, Bombardier Milligan,” he said warmly.
“Nice to see you again, sir—can you see me?” He laughed.
With a few pleasantries exchanged, I connected up the D 5 telephone.
“There’s some of the lads outside, sir.”
“I’ll come out and see them…”
From the top he waved down to the lads on the truck, we all wished he’d never left us. It was the last time I would ever see him. The date was December 16, 1943.
I remembered the first time I’d seen him in Bexhill, a smallish, very dapper man, a weathered face, always ready to smile. I had noticed he was wearing a very fine brand-new pair of brogues.
“Very nice shoes, sir.”
“My batman doesn’t like them.”
“That’s because he has to clean them, sir.”
This Christmas Concert is bothering me, I tell BSM Griffin,
“If we don’t get a piano we can’t do the concert.”
“Oh, we can’t have that,” he said, his Welsh accent thick as the Brecon peaks. “It’s going to be alright, Spike. Lt. Walker’s going with you in a truck tomorrow to look for a piano.”
Great. I tell Harry. “Oh good,” he said, “pick a good one.”
“Pick one? They don’t grow on bloody trees.”
“A twenty-foot Beckstein, otherwise I refuse to play it.”
He and others were on ‘shit scraping’ duties. This was the general title given to any cleaning jobs, and as the farm and the buildings seemed never to have been cleaned since the Renaissance, the crap was everywhere.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1943
MY DIARY:
0830. OFF WITH LT. WALKER LOOKING FOR A PIANO, SPARANISE FIRST, PLACE HAS BEEN HAMMERED TO BITS BY ARTILLERY BUT PEOPLE STILL LIVE IN IT. NO PIANO. ON TO CAPUA, NO PIANO. ON TO SANTA MARIA LA FOSSE, NO PIANO.
We weren’t having much luck. I went into the Teatro Garibaldi hoping we might knock off the piano. As I entered I hear someone playing a splendid rendering of the Liszt Concerto. No. 2 in B Minor. The pianist was a young American sergeant. Outside again, I walked around a street market and (so my diary says) for some