Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [21]
The bay is calm, looking like skimmed oil. We bounce on the surface and the morning mist starts to lift. In twenty minutes looms’ the soaring purple head of Mount Epomeo. We draw near to the south shore, skilfully entering a little fishing mole amid red and blue fishing boats with the warding-off evil eye on the prows. We heave to as our two officers surface flushed and smiling. We jump ashore. The Colonel misses and plunges his leg up to the groin in the waters. “Oh bother,” he says, meaning “Oh fuck.”
With seven dry legs and one wet one, we follow the Colonel up a small path inland that leads us to a bleached white Italo-Moorish villa on the sea. A brief pull on the doorbell; the red mahogany door opens to a small smiling, white-coated, thirty-year-old, blood group Rhesus negative inside leg forty-two, valet. He ushers us in, all the while looking suspiciously at the Colonel’s one damp leg. This is the Villa San Angelo, owned by an Italian Colonello with two dry legs. He is at the moment ‘away on business in Naples’. Possibly at this moment, he and two pimps are changing lire into sawdust on the Via Roma.
The Moors have left their mark here: many arches, turquoise tiled floors, latticed screens, Fazan carpets. It is a treasure house of antiques — Majolica Ceramics, Venetian Glass, Inlaid Moorish Muskets, Tapestried Walls. “Homely isn’t it, Terence,” says the Colonel. After a cold buffet of avocado and prawns and wine of the island, our officers retire to sleep. Len and I are directed to the private beach down a few rocky steps. The day is sunny, the sea is like champagne. We plunge into crystal clear waters that in forty years time will be floating with tourist crap and overpopulation. Lording over the island is Mount Epomeo, hung with a mantle of vineyards and bougainvillaea. Legend has it that the giant Typhoeus lies transfixed beneath it. A punishment for screwing one of the Naiads. I suppose one way of keeping it down is to put a mountain on it.
On this very island Michelangelo used to visit the lady Vittoria Collona — mysterious, as he was gay.
VITTORIA:
‘ows the cealin goin, Mike?
MICHEL A:
I bin using the long brush but it’s doin’ me back in.
VITTORIA:
Why don’t you arst the Pope fer scaffoldin’?
MICHEL A:
Oh ta, I knew these visits ‘ere wouldn’t be wasted.
Hours. We lie on the beach sunning and smoking, and like true smokers throw our dog ends and matches in the sea.
“Hello, down there.” The Colonel’s red face is at the grilled Moorish window, his face looking equally grilled. We must come up, tea is being served. A long refectory table laden with salads and a magnificent bronze samovar. Our every whim is waited on slavishly by the little Italian. “They’re a dying breed,” says Startling Grope. (He was right. The Iti died the day after we left.) The officers are slopping down one Alexander after another and we all repair to the beach again; Captain Clarke in a one-piece suit that was out of date when Captain Webb swam the channel, and the Colonel in a pair of bathing drawers of ‘the briefest gist’. He plunges in, comes out, and goes up to bed. Captain Clarke strikes out to sea so far that the current gradually carries him out of sight round the headland. He is not shouting ‘help’ but just in case we shout “Goodbye, sir.” He disappears. Should we inform the life-guards? No, there’s plenty more like him. Hours later he returned overland via the Villa Fondalillo some three miles away. When the Italian flunkey opened the door, a shagged-out Captain Clarke fell into the house, but at least he had two wet legs and a body to match.
Eventide and we are returning; the RAF boat waits at the mole. The Colonel has organized it perfectly, except