Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [96]
“Oh,” he said.
It was a waste of bloody time. If I had answered ‘Mussolini’s fault’ he’d have been satisfied.
“Agh—ah—weel—Glasgae—ah fuck,” he’d caught up with us. We watch men catching octopus along the shore, to kill them they pulled them inside out. It was obscenely cruel, but then Man is.
“Do they eat those bloody things?”
“Yes.”
White shuddered. “Ugg—like eatin’ bloody worms.”
The Anglo-Saxon will devour stale bread, bully beef, hard rolls, food boiled to death and obliterated with artificial seasoning—yet delightfully cooked octopus in garlic, No. You are what you eat, that’s why we all look so bloody ugly. Back to billets to see if the showers are hot. Yes! But oh God! the news has got around, crowds of steaming red naked men cram the bathrooms—there’s five men to a shower.
“It’s every man fer ‘ees bloody self.” So saying, White and I charge our way in; the bodies are so compressed, I’m sure someone else washed my legs by mistake.
“Arrgg, yer sael nay fuck,” the Scot; he’s under the shower, but still in his underwear.
All clean and glowing, smelling of Wright’s Cold Tar, we are ready for the evening. We’re nearly skint so we have to eat the Army grub; we needed every penny to get pissed.
“Let’s look fer somewhere noo.” White is looking up the steps that run up the centre of Amalfi. “Thank fook we got rid of that bloody Jock.”
It’s evening now, above I spot Hesperides; I didn’t mention this to White, he was already baffled enough by the Geological Fault lecture. All the way up the stairs at intervals were little Trattorias; we ascend half-way up the town and a pretty girl is standing invitingly outside of a house.
“You wanna drinka wine, bebe?”
White needs no second invitation, we go inside; it’s a one-woman brothel. Now these weren’t regular whores, but working-class girls who had fallen on hard times and were doing it just for ‘the duration’. Inside is a square white-washed room with a charcoal burner in the middle; there are simple wooden chairs with rush seats around the walls; several soldiers are drinking red wine from a large bottle on the centre table. There a large middle-aged lady in a black dress, and another young girl of about fifteen, pour us some wine. The girl from outside has come in and points to one of the soldiers; they go into the next room and I hear the lock go in the door. I felt uncomfortable, I’d never had it away with a whore, and being a Roman Catholic by upbringing, the thought of doing it with one horrified me. However…A couple of hours later I had blown all my money on wine, and the girl had been through about six customers, but she kept looking at me and saying ‘You want?” and pointing to the room. I had declined, and each time she got angrier; she was in fact fancying me. (Why not? I was the best-looking one there.) My rejections finally drove her to say, “You, you no-lika-me. Why you no say?” I explained that I hadn’t any money, whereupon in my drunken state she grabbed me, ushered me into the next room and screwed me. At the end I said, “Niente Soldi’, she put her finger to her lips and went ‘Sushhhhh’, then, wait for it, she gave me a thousand lire.
“You no speak other soldiers,” she confided, “you come back again, domani notte, eh.”
Well, well, my male ego was bursting, after all she was not a common whore. Common whores wouldn’t rate me at one thousand lire a go, no! This girl had a fine sense of values and a remarkable understanding of currency. Would I catch something? That’s the question that haunted me in bed that night; however, I had broken the back of my Roman Catholic inhibitions. What would the Pope say? It all reminded me of the story of a fifty-year-old Pioneer Corps soldier who was caught having a knee-trembler in a doorway in Bradford. The Judge had told him he was a disgrace, there was far too much of this thing going on in Town etc., he was going to make an example of him and give him three months for indecency. The comment from the Pioneer soldier, “I tell thee summat, you’ll never stop fookin’ in Bradford.”
White is laying back in bed,