Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [16]
Within a week a jeep arrives and takes me away. The girls all cried and the men cheered. Looking through my diary I found the note I made at the time.
Translation: “Posted O2E Maddaloni on 8/8/44. Very depressed, same feeling as before.”
So! I was feeling myself like I had before, a duty that until recently had been performed by Maria.
What was happening to me? I didn’t want to be a Manic Depressive Wine Waiter in Italy! I wanted to be a Manic Depressive Harry James in Catford. Why did a poofy Colonel need a wine waiter???
The jeep driver is an ex-paratrooper. Ted Noffs gives me the first warning: “Yew wanna watch yer arsole wiv ‘im.” My God, a Brown Hatter! We drive in silence. Speedo says 33 mph, petrol half full, all exciting stuff. Right now my last exciting stuff, Rosa, was back at Portici. An hour’s dusty drive with night approaching. A sign: MADDALONI.
Maddaloni on a Good Day
“Not far now,” said Noffs. “We korls it Mad’n’lonely, ha ha.” He was such a merry fellow, a fellow of infinte jest and a cunt. We enter a town and slow down outside a faceless three-storeyed municipal school. Turning left by its side we come to a rear back lot with a line of tents and parked vehicles. Noffs stops outside a ten-man tent. “This is yourn.” I thank him and lug my kit into the tent which has an electric light, brighter than the three slobs lying on their beds, smoking and staring. These are khaki skivvies, the playthings of the commissioned classes. One is Corporal Rossi, London Italian Cockney. “You the new wine steward?” Yes. He’s the head barman. I’ll be working under him. That’s my bed. I ask all the leading questions:
Where’s the cook house?
The NAAFI?
The Karzi?
What day was free issue?
Any ATS?
No, there’s no ATS but there’s scrubbers in town who do it for ten fags. There’s ‘one that does it for two but she gives you a dose’. This is the stuff that never reaches Official War Histories, folks! I find the canteen in the main barrack block (more of it later), have a glass of red wine and a cheese sandwich. The place is full, and soon so am I. I don’t know anybody and nobody wants to know me, but then I haven’t been on television yet! The red wine sets me up for bed. Back under bloody canvas yet again. Like Robert Graves I thought I’d said Goodbye to All That; instead it was Hello to all This! I slept fitfully, sometimes I slept unfitfully. Variety is the spice of life, or if you live in a after-shave factory, the Life of Spice.
Raffia Party Hats. I was given orders like ‘Tins to be smoothed’ and ‘Bar top to be desplintered’. There I was at dawn with a dopey driver driving around the streets of Caserta buying cabbages, potatoes, figs and oranges, lentils and the whole range of fresh foods for O2E Officers’ Mess. Another Fine Mess I’d gotten into. Shagged out by mid-afternoon, I was then put on bar duties for the evening, serving a crowd of pissy Hooray Henrys. By the amount of drink and smoke around they must long since have died of lung cancer or cirrhosis. Disaster. The bar phone rings; they want a Major Bastard. That’s how they pronounced it.
“Phone call for Major Bastard,” I yell above the din.
A man purple with rage and halitosis snatches the phone: “Bass-tard, you Bastard,” he hissed. He was a real Bass-tard!
I was making a cock-up of the job. Not that I couldn’t do it, I didn’t want to.
“The Colonel wants to see you,” says Rossi. OK, if he looks through that window, he’ll get a glimpse of me desplintering the bar.
“Look Milligan,” says Major Startling Grope. We are in his office. “The Sergeant says you aren’t very good at your job.”
“He’s a liar, sir. I’m bloody useless at my job. I could lose us the war.”
He laughed. How am I at clerking? I don’t know.
“How are you at figures?”
“Terrible, you should see the women I go out with.”
“Look, Milligan, give it a try. If you don’t like it, we can try something else.” Like Suicide. OK.
I work for him in ‘O’ Branch in the school building.