Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [31]
This was the beginning of an ongoing Judaeo-Christian hilarity. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs, I’d call, “Is that the Yew?” I could hear his stifled giggles.
“Listen Milligan,” he’d say. “Believe me, the Irish are famous for nothing.” And so to Christmas.
Yes, Christmas, bloody Christmas. We decided to do our shopping in Naughty Naples. All up the Via Roma urchins are grabbing us and singing, ‘Lae thar piss tub darn bab’. Why in the land of opera do they descend to this crap? If the reverse were to apply in London, little Cockney kids would be singing ‘La Donna e Mobile’ as they begged. We make our Christmas purchases and retire to the Royal Palace, NAAFI, where, God help us, we are assailed by God bless her and keep her…away from us…Gracie Fields. She’d had a bad press at the beginning of the war about living in America, leaving poor Vera Lynn and Ann Shelton to face the bombs. Now she was making up for it. Every day she’d leave her Capri home and bear down on unsuspecting soldiers. “Ow do lads.” Then, without warning, sing ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’.
After a while the lads had had enough of ‘Ow do lads’ and ‘Sall-eeee’ and the sight of her looming up the stairs would start a stampede out the back, with cries of “Christ! Here she comes again.” Nothing personal against the dear lady, who had a big heart and an enlarged liver, but she did overdo the “Eee ba gum, ‘ave a cup o’ tea lads.”
Sometimes you wouldn’t know she was in, until from a distant table, you’d hear ‘It’s the biggest Aspidistra in the World’. To get rid of her we directed her to a table of Goumiers (Rapists by appointment to the Allies) by telling her they were Gurkhas. “Sallyyyyyyy, Salleeeee,” she sang at the baffled Moroccans. They didn’t even try to rape her.
A look-out on the Royal Palace NAAFI roof, watching for signs of Gracie Fields’s boat
December
It’s cold, cold, cold. You can strike matches on ‘em. My family have had a photo taken that sends a chill of horror through me. Were they dead or stuffed? My brother has the sneer of a high-born Sioux Chief, my mother has had a bag of flour thrown at her face, and my father looks as though he’s just been asked to leave for an indiscretion.
A Christmas card from my mother gives my brother second billing, and poor father! Dad is spelt with a small d. Is he getting shorter? There are no traditional Christmas cards in Italy, so I send those available.
For my father I did a funny drawing of a man with a revolving wig. You see, my father wore one. His fear was that any gale over force three lifted the front and transferred it to the back. People wondered why he wore his hat in the Karzi.
O2E Christmas Arrangements
The Welfare Department had made a Christmas tree that stood by the concert stage. A wonderful effort dressed in crepe paper, cotton-wool balls and little candles. Pity about the fire.
We are putting up snow scenes with make-do commodities.
My brother, mother and father, Desmond, Florence and Leo Milligan
A Christmas card from my parents in Brentwood, posted October 10 1944
To my parents
To my brother
We ask the Sick Bay for six rolls of cotton wool and are told that no one can be hurt that bad and live. I pack my presents. Mother has a small glass bubble enclosing Virgin Mary and Child; a good shake and they are obscured in a snow-storm, and death by hypothermia. Father will have his favourite King Edward cigars, but brother Desmond? What do you send a squaddie in the front line? Of course, a slit trench. No, I send him a sandbag, and, just in case he doesn’t laugh, a box of preserved fruit.
Christmas Eve
Pouring, ice-cold rain. Steve and I are sitting in the festively decorated canteen. We feel seasonal but would rather feel an ATS. We are taking a little