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By Root 153 0

some great food such as meat balls and rice; a welcome change from our diet in the barracks). We also played at the Palace in Caserta for dances, and for the same purpose at the Palace in Naples, which you will recall was a huge NAAFI when we were there. Gracie Fields was then living on Capri, and she would be a regular visitor to the Naples NAAFI, performing on every visit and eventuall(y) becoming something of a bore to the fellows regularly visiting the place. The band played each Thursday evening for an open-air dance in the orange grove in the centre of Maddaloni; many American officers would be there, some of them were musicians who liked to sit in with the band. We also travelled to other places and performed for American and British units in concert. These included a two-week trip to Rome to play in the NAAFI there, which in normal times was a most modern department store. I remember you being in this place, Spike, up in one of the rooms trying out material on a piano. The band played in the evenings for dancing at that place, and in the daytime we roamed about the city. You and I billeted together on that occasion and bith of us were very upset at finding some small children rummaging for food in a garbage can (not that this was at all unusual). We managed to ‘steal’ some sandwiches for them and you gave them some cigarettes, also, that they presumable could trade for something edible.

One big fillip to our enthusiasm at that that time was a gesture on the [xxxx] of the Americans for whom we played; they gave us a chance th visit their Post Exchange and choose some new instruments and a number of orchestrations. That was in Caserta. This brought some great band numbers such as Woody Herman’s Apple Honey and several Glenn Miller orchestrations. Our first run-trought of String of Pearls provided a memory of Jim Manning (2nd alto and a regular Army band musician) coming to a solo part inscribed ‘as played by ernie Caceres’. It comprised a series of minin-value chords written in notation. Jim played the top minin in each case and the rest of us dissolved in laughter. Jim took umbrage, saying, “If you don’t like it, get fuckin’ Ernie Casseries to play it.” And then he walked out of the hall where we were practising.

Do you remember our band room in the barracks? It was furnished with rugs and armchairs and suchlike stolen from places where we had been playing, such as officers’ clubs in the locality. It was a simple matter to load such items into the truck, with our gear, at the end of the evening. It was this band room that I first realised how great you were with the guitar, finger-style. I can remember your lying on the rug with the guitar on your chest, playing [xxxxx] extempre thing that had all of us quiet and listening. Even a young ATS girl named Gay Endars, who was a singer with the band and a girl-friend of Stan Britton’s, was completely enraptured by that moment. And I don’t suppose you will even remember the incident.

Another Glenn Miller memory: The Welsh lad, Harry Carr, lead alto (he looked like a cadaverous version of Engelbert Humperdinck) playing the chart of Moonlight Serenada for the first time with tears streaming down his face from the sheer emotion of playing the orchestration and its soaring lead alto part. Harry, a carpenter in civilian times was, as I recall, a pretty good musician who also played piano quite brilliantly, but had only one piano piece in his reportoire: the verse of Stardust.

Also remembered are other fellows in the band such as guitarist Bert Munday. Nicest fellow you could meet, and pretty well known prewar as a semipro in South London (his home was at the Oval). I saw him a few times after the was; hed died of leukemia in 1949.

Stan Britton, phlegmatic person and rather heavy-handed pianist from North London. Easy to get along with and quite knowledgeable musically. I recall that he put together som 12-bar blues things for the band, calling the chart Maddaloni Madness when we played ‘at home’, Caserta Capers when played thereat, and so et seq.

Another easy-going chap