Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [47]
Playing ‘Star Eyes’. My eyes are closed to avoid seeing any Cold Collation.
The dance contest is to be ‘judged’ by Brigadier Henry Woods CBE, which is no worse than Mary Whitehouse choosing the best porno movie. Groans follow his every decision but he goes merrily on giving marks for the dancer with the ‘best haircut’ in the Waltz, and ‘best-polished shoes’ in the Quick Step. It’s the biggest debacle since Dunkirk. By some miracle Rosetta Page wins the spot prize — she’s covered in them. In my white Harry James jacket, dyed black trousers, bandaged hand and moustache, I manage to get the last waltz.
“What happened to your hand, Spike?”
I caught it on some barbed wire, I tell her. “I’m going on leave. Will you miss me?” Of course she will, she makes a point of it.
A letter from a girlfriend, Beryl Southby, sends me news of a song contest being held at the Hammersmith Palais by Oscar Rabin. Immediately I am George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. I see myself at a lonely piano on a grouse moor in pouring rain. Lit by a hurricane lamp, I am dressed as a damp Chopin. All through the tempest I cough blood, sip lemon tea and write a masterpiece of a tune called ‘Dream Girl’. I write to my friend Gunner Edgington in distant Holland telling of my composition, a tune that is a sinecure for the depressed; one chorus will cure love sickness, two will stop varicose veins, three will prevent scrofula and psoriasis. The first prize is a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds; think what I could do with that! For a start, I could spend it. I send the song off. “Dear Oscar, herewith the winner, signed Bombardier Milligan S.”
That was in 1945…perhaps the post is slow. The winning song was ‘Twitty Twitty Twink Twink means I love you’. Now you know what’s wrong with the bloody country. At the time I didn’t know what was wrong with the country, other than there was a great shortage. I for one wasn’t getting enough of it.
Little Bits of Useless Information
I had started to write essays (Essay, essay, essay, Who was that lady I saw you with last night…); these essays weren’t, like Lamb’s, they were like Mutton. One was on the death mask of a young girl found drowned in the Seine in 1899. I was haunted by the smile on the dead girl’s face. Where else did I expect to see it? In an Essay Contest run by Corporal Hewitt, I won nothing. I’ve kept it secret until now, under the Thirty-Year Release of Information for the Security of the Nation Act.
A Trifle
Every morning a pretty Italian girl passed our office window. I would say ‘Buon Giorno’ to her through the bars of my window, and she would throw bread to me. I did this drawing of her, now released under the Release of Information for the Security of the Nation Act.
One morning as I called to her, she burst into tears. What was wrong? Len Arrowsmith, married man, father and lecher, tells me. “It’s possibly the menstrual cycle.” Oh, I thought that was a ladies’ bike. They say you live and learn. Well I didn’t. It was my tenth day without Cold Collation.
September 27
DIARY:
SERGEANTS’ MESS DANCE. RAINING
I was so excited at the prospect of UK leave that my swonicles were revolving at speed. Like a fool I thought I was going back to 1939. I’m still trying to get back to 1939. That was the best time. It all lay ahead of you. Now it’s all behind and I don’t want to look back. A letter from my mother tells me I have no home to come to. Her and dad are renting the ground floor of 40 Meadow Way, Woodhatch, Reigate at twenty-seven separate shillings to be paid at once to the landlady. Rations are short, they have eaten the couch. “Your father has left the army and is working at the Associated Press in Fleet Street. If you come, you’ll have to sleep in the box room on dad’s officer’s camp bed.” A camp bed! — a home fit for homosexuals. Brother is ‘in Germany’. By order of the King of England he is hitting refugees who try to nick