Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [66]
Would I like to have tea with her some time and see her javelino? Yes. I retire to my wonderful room, I luxuriate in the bath and watch the bubbles rise. Wearing my now splodgy blue pyjamas I slide slowly between the sheets. Ahhh!
Oh wonderful clean sheets
One of nature’s real treats
Tho’ my pyjamas don’t look very good
It’s better than walking the streets.
— W. McGonagall
Around about midnight I have written several letters and am reading an anthology of British Verse printed in Italy. I’m skimming through Shakespeare’s Sonnets and in comes Staggering L/Bdr Secombe, ha ha, he has that huge grin with revolving teeth. “Hello, hello, hoo! up! scream! raspberry: Whoops.” He gets up again. “Spike, do you like beer?” Yes, he empties a bottle of it over me, screams with laughter, falls back on the bed, which collapses, and goes into a deep cross-eyed grinning sleep. Thank God, he’s unconscious. I strip off my sodden pyjamas, take a shower, and when I get back he’s gone!!! No, no, he’s hammering on the door, he thought he was going into the bathroom and went into the hall. I let the chattering farting thing in, he lets go with a few top C’s and vanishes into the bathroom. There’s a great crash as he does something or other. I put my beer-soaked pillows on his bed and take his.
He didn’t come out of the bathroom. Next morning I found him asleep in his bath, an idiotic smile on his face and one boot off. God, Wales has a lot to answer for.
He arises and is full of the joys of chattering, farting, singing and cries of Hey hup la! He’s down the stairs like a clockwork doll, into the dining-room, eats six breakfasts, sings, whistles and farts his way through ten cups of tea. Where was he last night? He went to a dance, met a pretty signorina hoi hup! and in a moment of Welsh hieraith hoi! hup! gave her his leather Army jerkin. From now on he froze.
“The hit of the night was Bill Hall’s trio. Bill’s ecentric hot fiddling will take him far and his partners on bass and guitar make up the best act of the night.”
The show opened at the Argentina Theatre; again the Bill Hall Trio are the hit of the show.
The act was basically very fast jazz numbers; ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, then ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’, ‘Tiger Rag’, all with visual gags. The response was unbelievable; we realized that here we might have something that would have great potential in civvy street.
The Alexander Club, Rome, Harry Secombe (l) willing Johnny Mulgrew (r) to pay the bill. Bob Wayne standing.
Life was really better than I had ever had it. First-class hotel accommodation, food, free all day, and a roaring success at night. Tomorrow didn’t matter, except it kept arriving. By day we’d swan around Rome with the inevitable visit to the Alexander Club.
We had a sword of Damocles. It was Bill Hall. He was itinerant, and we never knew where he was or what he was doing. After the show he’d disappear into the Rome night and its naughty areas and we wouldn’t see him till a few minutes before we were due back on stage. It got so bad that I would go on stage without him even being in the theatre; it was then I started to tell jokes just to hold the fort.
Spike on top of the Colosseum
BOLOGNA
Bologna
Sunday. We are off to Bologna. Where the hell is Bill Hall? Someone says Italy! We search the hotel, then his room; there’s nothing in it though he’s slept in both beds, left a tap running, and a pair of socks in the sink. Wait, what is this unshaven wreck with a violin case? It is he. He gets on the charabanc, ignoring the fact that we’ve been waiting half an hour. A desultory cheer greets him. Totally unmoved, he sits down. I watch a drip from his nose fall and extinguish his dog-end. I am seated at the back on a bench seat. I have placed my guitar case on the luggage rack and as we start, it falls off on to Hall’s head. “You have-a musica on yewer brayne,” says Mitzi. It is a good joke for a forty-three-year-old Hungarian accordion player.
We are heading inland and it’s snowing. NO car heaters in those days! We are climbing the narrow