Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [15]
“I hand hats to departing officers,” I replied.
He smiled and barley twisted his way out. A great soldier, a terrible dancer.
Music Maestro Please
Spoleto had given me the address of a Professor Fabrizzi. He lived in a seedy villa in Resina, a town built over the city of Herculaneum. He was about seventy and used to play the harp in the San Carlo Orchestra and I could see that it wouldn’t be long before he would be playing it again. He had long white snowy hair, a gaunt shrunken smiling face and two deep-set brown eyes. Harmony and counterpoint? Of course, 500 lire an hour. “Harmony is not easy,” he said. At 500 lire a go I agreed. His ‘study’ was lined with books on music and gardening. Perhaps I could learn harmony and tree growing. “Professor Milligan will now play his tree! The compostion is in A Minor, the tree is in A garden.”
The lessons start. “You see dis black a notes.” Can I see it? I ask him is he an optician or a music teacher? That is the note of C. I knew that. “The notes on the line-a above is E.” I knew that. He told me how the scales went. I knew that as well. Something else I knew, I was being conned. I went away richer in life’s experience and he richer by two thousand lire. I watched as he counted every single lire. It’s the little things that count and he was one of them.
One night after closing I hie me to the city of Herculaneum. The dead city lies sightless in the bay light of a Neapolitan moon. I walk through the unattended entrance: ‘Vietato ingresso’. The city is like Catford, after dark. Dead. I walk along the sea front from which the seas have departed that day in AD 79. This was Bournemouth to Pompeii’s Blackpool. Here people sat on summer’s nights drinking wine and eating figs from water-filled bowls. Now all gone. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.
Ohhh, Herculaneum City
Ohhh what a terrible pity
All of you had gone
Except a little tiny bitty.
Back at the billet I awake Tom.
“Who’s that?” he snuffled.
“Errol Flynn.”
“You silly bugger.”
“A man can dream, can’t he?”
Where had I been, and did I get it? “Nay, I’m as pure as the driven snow. I’ve been to Herculaneum.”
COURT FOR THE IGNORANT
JUDGE:
What is a Herculaneum?
QC TARLO:
Herculaneum my lord is a place where any free-born slave can go and Hercu-his-laneum.
JUDGE:
Oh, and in Hercuing-his-laneum, what benefits are derived?
QC TARLO:
The swelling on the Blurzon is much reduced.
JUDGE:
What is a Blurzon.
QC TARLO:
It is a small hairy area at the back of the knee where Armenian shepherds crack their nuts.
Oh, what’s Herculaneum? By day I have quite a lot of time on my hands; I also have it on my legs, elbows and shins. There was a lot of it about.
A Colonel Intervenes
Yes! One evening as I sat at the reception desk varnishing walnuts and cracking them behind my knee, a man in a jeep approached. He was to be instrumental in changing my life. By instrumental I don’t mean he was playing the trombone, no. The man is Colonel Startling Grope, a reddish middle-aged man, portly, used to good living, hair cuts, Horlicks, thin legs and suede desert boots. He had a body that appeared to have been inflated, and the air was escaping. When he signed in he shot me a glance full of meaning that I knew not the meaning of.
Later that night, as he and his cronies are departing, all so pissed you could hear the cistern flushing, he enquires: “What do you do here?” I tell him on a good day I give General Alexander his hat. Otherwise I try not to whistle the Warsaw Concerto. He is intrigued; as he should be. I am quite lovely. Seriously, I’m a wine steward and resident manic depressive. “How would you like to come and work for me as a wine steward and resident manic depressive?” I say yes. Why? Because I have been brought up to feel inferior to everybody: priests, doctors, bank