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that of all that talent out there, we had topped the lot. After the show, a Lieutenant Reg O’List of CPA came backstage. He had been a singer at the Windmill in London, which was rather like being a blood donor in a mortuary. He thinks we’re great. Can he take us to dinner? God, we were in the big time already. Off the Via Roma is a wonderful pasta restaurant, we’ll love it. Great! Lieutenant O’List does it in style, we go in a horse-drawn carriage. Bill Hall plays his violin as we drift down the Via Roma. Wow! Life is good. The restaurant is all one can dream of: the waiters wear white aprons, the tables have red and white check cloths, there’s an oil lamp on every table, a mandolin band playing. As soon as we enter the waiters sweep us up in a cushion of hospitality. “Si accomodo, accomodo,” a bottle of wine with the manager’s compliments, thank you very much with our compliments. Giddy with success and a free dinner we eat a mountain of spaghetti. Reg O’List can’t stop telling us how good we are and we can’t stop agreeing with him. He can’t believe we are just the result of a chance meeting in a barrack room. Can we play some jazz after dinner? Yes. “Hey! I know! why don’t we put on a show?” etc! The customers stop eating, they cheer and clap, encore, encore. Free wine is slopping out of us. Enough is enough. Reg O’List is now very pissed; he will do his Windmill Act; he starts to sing ‘Begin the Beguine’; he has a powerful shivery square voice.

“If he’s from the Windmill,” says Gunner Hall, “why doesn’t he take his clothes off?” The night ends with Bill Hall splitting away from us — the last sight we had of him was on a tram playing opera to adoring passengers. What a night. It would lead us slowly down the road to oblivion.

The show-stopping Bill Hall Trio: J. Mulgrew on bass, Bill Hall on violin and Spike Milligan on guitar

Capt. Reg O’List, Pioneer Corps, playing and singing ‘ When they Begin the Beguine’, Italy 1945

ROME AGAIN

Rome Again

I’m going to Rome again! This time with a difference. No more three-ton trucks, but a charabanc! Our touring officer is Lieutenant Ronnie Priest, a misnomer if ever there was one. Ronnie looked like someone whose cab was off the road for repairs. His cockney accent clashes with the officer’s uniform, but he does the job. The charabanc! stops at the hotel in Vuomero to pick up our Italian artistes. As the girls enter there’s the usual ‘Hello little darlin’’ from the lads. Mitzi, the violin-accordion player, is Hungarian and forty-three; she’s i/c the girl musicians and getting it from Franco Lati, our Charles Boyerish conductor (see photo). The route you all know by now. We arrive in Rome, Sunday evening, at the Albergo Universo. Spring beds! Sheets! En suite bathrooms! Secombe and I share a room. Disaster. I am neat and tidy. Secombe is not. He hits the room like an exploding shell. One drawer a vest and a comb, a shoe wrapped up in an Army shirt, a broken bottle of Brylcreem wrapped in newspaper, a shaving brush with three hairs in a box, a towel shot with holes, mess tins stuck with toothpaste. If a Red Cross official had been present he would have been declared a disaster area. Secombe was a mass of nervous energy, he went in all directions at once — you needed a man-size flyswat to catch him. Whichever part of the room you went, he was there first; if you looked in a mirror, he was looking back at you. He gave off long bursts of garbled conversation, interspersed with raspberries and bits of songs. His record for staying in one place was three seconds. Having spread his kit like a plague around the room he was massaging his head with Brylcreem, and singing, raspberrying, insane laughter, and babbling: “Rome, Rome ha ha ha, lovely Rome, ha ha ha raspberry…Pretty girls pretty girls…ha ha ha, scream, raspberry” and was gone. I dined alone in the hotel. The manageress: “Was everything alright, signor?” No, could she kill Secombe? She is a strapping thirty-year-old with black Eton-cropped hair; she joins me for coffee. She had been an Olympic athlete, a javelin