Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [22]
“You drive, Terence,” says Colonel S. Singing all the while, we are back at Maddaloni in just over the hour and under the weather. It was a memorable day. Even as I type this, I can see that splendid sunlight on that warm azure sea in a time capsule that will never come again.
Len and I are bedding down for the night. “He must have drunk ten bottles of wine, two of Strega and two of brandy,”
Len said. “You’ll see, when he goes it will be his liver or his bladder.” He was wrong: in 1970 Stanley died of heart failure during an operation for piles. But for piles, Stanley would be alive today, doing ten years for interfering with little boys.
One of them could have been me. I speak with experience.
. You see that evening on our return from Ischia, I drove Stanley back to his billet and he put his hand up my shorts. I thought, this could mean promotion for me, but no, I said “Look here, sir, fuck off…sir.” He is sorry. It will never happen again.
Len falls about laughing. “Cor, fancy, there’s men up the line dying and down here the Colonels are trying to grab yer goolies.” I reminded him it was better than dying. “Let’s face it, would you rather be fucked or killed?”
Ars Gratia Artist
I have entered an Art Contest, and I win!
Nude winner of art contest
The prize is given me by a new man, Major Rodes of the Highland Light Infantry. He too is gay, and has just returned from some daring deed behind the enemy lines, like squeezing partisans’ balls under fire. Now he is out of the line as he has developed a hernia (did he use a dark room?) and he is billeted with us awaiting an operation. This has been delayed by Brigadier Henry Woods who is a ‘rupture expert’ and wants to get the Major the right hospital and the right surgeon. So, I receive my prize from a ruptured major who was a professional artist in Civvy Street! Did he chalk the pavements? He laughs not. My drawing is very good, had I done any artistic training? I told him I’d done a bit in Goldsmith’s College. He said never mind her, would I like to do murals? Had I ever done any murals? Yes, I did ‘All Coppers are Bastards’ outside the Lady Flo’ Institute, Deptford, 1936. He shows me a drawing of Hyde Park Corner in high Victorian days. He wants to do an enlargement on the wall of the Officers’ Mess. “There’ll be something in it for you,” he says. OK, I’ll do it. Murals; mean swines, anything to save buying wallpaper. Evenings I don my denims and start work.
I square off the wall and then draw the enlargements.
Officers’ Mess Maddaloni on a Bad Day, 1944
Military supplies showing liver cripplers, Maddaloni, 1944
To my delight it comes very easily. It means working late after the Officers’ Mess closes, but in lieu I’m given time off in the mornings. I am praised. “My word, you are talented, Terence,” says Stanley, Sir. “You play the trumpet and guitar and you can paint. Is there anything you can’t do?” Yes, sir, Sheila Frances.
The Colonel is to do a tour of the front lines. Would I like to come too? The front line? Does he think I’m mad? He does. No sir, my days of sitting in an OP trench full of water with 88s air bursting over your head and your bottle bursting underneath are over. “Goodbye, good luck, God be with you, but not me.”
O2E is womanless, save for tall lovely ATS Captain Thelma Oxnevad, six foot with sparkling blue eyes and certain things…We like each other, but alas, she is an officer and a gentleman and I am a gunner, the stuff that gutters are made of.
“No Spike, I can’t walk out with you.”
I don’t want her to walk out, I want her to walk into my bedroom. No, if Brigadier Henry Woods heard this, she’d be cashiered and I’d be shot. I tell her that’s OK with me. I tell her that when we take our clothes off she wouldn’t be able to tell the gunner from the Captain! Nay nay nay. When I dance with