Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [32]
Stop the festivities! The Germans have broken our lines in the Ardennes, all our washing is in the mud! Yet another it’s-going-to-be-over-by-Christmas-promise gone. Still, it could be worse. Like poor old Charlie Chaplin who was in a paternity suit — unfortunately it fits him. Steve Lewis looks up from his newspaper, stunned! How can this happen? Will Hitler win after all? Should he telegraph his wife and say, “Sell the stock, only take cash.” Stay cool. Help is coming. Is it John Wayne? No, it’s Sheriff Bernard Law Montgomery. He is going to ‘tidy up’ the battle, which ends with him claiming he’s won it, and he will shortly rise again from the dead. Eisenhower is furious. He threatens to cut Monty’s supply of armoured jockstraps and Blue Unction. Monty apologizes: “Sorry etc., etc. You’re superior by far, Monty.”
Christmas came and went with all the trimmings, tinned turkey, stuffing, Christmas Pud, all served to us by drunken Sergeants. Now we were all sitting round waiting for 1945. It had been a good year for me. I was alive.
January 1945
Cold and rain.
Letter from home.
Very quiet month.
Then, on 23 February 1945, this drastic message was flashed to the world from the pages of Valjean, the O2E house magazine.
Trumpeter.
Is there no stylish trumpeter in the ranks of the Echelon ? At present the O2E Dance Orchestra is handicapped to a certain extent by the lack of one of these only too rare musicians.
Ex-trumpeter ‘Spike’ Milligan, who has now gone on to the production line, had to hang up his trumpet on medical grounds, so if there is a trumpeter in our midst please contact SQMS Ward of R/O.
Milligan has hung up his trumpet! A grateful nation gave thanks!
It started with pains in my chest. I knew I had piles, but they had never reached this far up before. The Medical Officer made me strip.
“How long has it been like that?” he said.
“That’s as long as it’s ever been,” I replied.
He ran his stethoscope over my magnificent nine-stone body. “Yes,” he concluded, “you’ve definitely got pains in your chest. I can hear them quite clearly.”
“What do you think it is, sir?”
“It could be anything.”
Anything? A broken leg? Zeppelin Fever? Cow Pox? La Grippe? Lurgi?
“You play that wretched darkie music on your bugle, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You must give it up.”
“Why?”
“I hate it.” He goes on to say, “It’s straining your heart.”
Bloody idiot. It’s 1985, I’m a hundred and nine, and I’m still playing the trumpet. He’s dead. At the time I stupidly believed him and packed up playing.
The band without me. As you can see, they don’t sound half as good
The first Saturday Music Hall of the New Year was a split bill. The first half Variety, the second half, a play Men in Shadow. It was seeing the latter that prompted me to do a lunatic version of our own. We timed it to go on the very night after the play finished, using all the original costumes and scenery.
Men in Gitis.
Tomorrow the chief attraction at the Concert Hall will be the super, skin-creeping, spine-tingling production ‘Men in Gitis’. In it are the craziest crowd of local talent that one could imagine. Spim Bolligan, the indefatiguable introducer