Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [62]
A New Life and a New Dawn
A truck is waiting to take me away. How many times have I done this? Yet again the kit is piled in the back, and like a sheep to market, I am driven away, all on the whim of one man who thought I played my trumpet too loud. I am puzzling over what CPA means. Captain’s Personal Assistant? Cracked People’s Area? Clever Privates’ Annexe? “None of these,” says the driver. “It’s ‘Centril Pule of Hartists (Central Pool of Artists), hits a place where orl dhan-graded squaddies who can hentertain are sent.” Was he a down-graded entertainer?
“Yer.”
“What do you do?”
“Hi sing Hopera.”
“Opera?”
“Yer, you know, La Bhome, Traviahta, and the like.”
“Were you trained?”
“Now, it cum natural like.”
“Have you ever sung in opera natural like?”
“No, I just done the horditions like. The Captain says ‘ees waitin’ for a suitable vehicle for me.” Like a bus, I thought.
We have driven through Naples, turned left at the bottom of Via Roma up the Corso San Antonio, which goes on for ever in an Eastern direction. Finally we arrive at a broken-down Army Barracks complex. The walls are peeling, they look as if they have mange. I report to a Captain Philip Ridgeway, a sallow saturnine fellow with a Ronald Colman moustache who looks as if he has mange as well. He sits behind the desk with his hat on. He is the son of the famous Ridgeways’ Late Joys Revue that led to the Players Theatre. He looks at my papers. “So, you play the trumpet. Do you play it well?”
“Well, er loudly.”
“Do you read music?”
“Yes, and the Daily Herald.”
He smiled. He would find me a place in ‘one of our orchestras’. I was taken by a Corporal Gron, who looked like an unflushed lavatory, and shown to a billet on the first floor, a room with forty single beds around the walls. In them were forty single men. This being Sunday, they were of a religious order that kept them in kip until midday. I drop my kit on a vacant bed, and it collapses to the floor. “That’s why it’s vacant,” laughed Corporal Gron, who laughed when babies fell under buses. Next bed is Private Graham Barlow. He helps me repair the bed with some string and money. Nice man — he played the accordion. Noel Coward said, “No gentleman would ever play the accordion.”
I had no job as such, and as such I had no job. Breakfast was at 8.30, no parade, hang around, lunch, hang further around, tea, extended hanging around, dinner and bed. The CPA Complex had the same ground plan as the Palace of Minos at Knossos, consisting of rehearsal rooms, music stores, costume stores, scenery dock and painting area, Wardrobe Mistress, Executive offices. People went in and were never seen again. The company was assembled from soldier artistes who had been down-graded. They would be formed into concert parties and sent on tour to entertain those Tommies who weren’t down-graded. The blind leading the blind. The facilities were primitive, the lavatories were a line of holes in the ground. When I saw eighteen soldiers squatting/balancing over black holes with straining sweating faces for the first time, they looked like the start of the hundred yards for paraplegic dwarfs.
My first step to ‘fame’ came when I borrowed a guitar from the stores. I was playing in the rehearsal room when a tall cadaverous gunner said, “You play the guitar then?” This was Bill Hall. If you’ve ever seen a picture of Niccolò Paganini, this was his double. What’s more, he played the violin and played it superbly; be it a Max Bruch Concerto or I’ve Got Rhythm, he was a virtuoso. But bloody scruffy. We teamed up just for the fun of it, and in turn we were joined by Johnny Mulgrew, a short Scots lad from the Recce Corps; as he’d left them they were even shorter of Scots. Curriculum Vitae: Pre-war he played for Ambrose and the Inland Revenue. In the 56 Recce in N. Africa. Trapped behind enemy lines at Madjez-el-Bab. Lay doggo for forty-eight hours in freezing weather. Got pneumonia. Down-graded to B2…
Together we sounded like Le Hot Club de France. When we played, other musicians would come and listen