Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [79]
I wrote home and told my delighted parents. Mother proudly informed the neighbours that her son was a ‘Banjo-playing Officer’.
Copy of letter asking us to stay on six month contract
The signature looks like ‘Waolb Petal’. I didn’t know we had one. Now, upgrading to officer status caused problems -though still not due for demob till August, we jumped the gun and donned civvies — officers’ peaked caps, with green and gold shoulder flash CSE. It was a culture shock for the Officers’ Club in Naples when Gunner Bill Hall entered its portals.
“‘ere! where you goin’?” said the door sergeant, to someone who looked like a dustman.
“I am going in,” said Hall. “Where you goin’?”
The sergeant looked at the thin scruffy apparition in crumpled khaki drill with a fall of cigarette ash on the shirt front. “This club is for officers,” he said, pointing to the door.
“I am a bleedin’ orficer,” said Hall, pointing to himself.
The sergeant demands identification. I watched his face gradually crumple as he read the authorization slip. He gave a sob and walked away. The barman treats Hall like a leper and moves the fly papers nearer.
In his wake, the new-found Officer Hall left a series of broken club secretaries. One offered to sell him a suit, another resigned. Several asked Hall for medical certificates. Mulgrew and his evil sense of humour relished the confrontations. He told how on one occasion at an Officers’ Bar, on the approach of Hall, they put newspapers down. He was popularly known in the Officers’ Clubs as ‘Oh Christ, here he comes’, or ‘Thank Christ, there he goes’.
Barbary Coast
Rumours of another show are in the offing. Raymond Agoult and his wife asked me how would I like to ‘write a musical’. I said ‘sitting down’. The theme was to be Anne Bonney, the lady pirate, and her lover Calico Jack. I remember the opening chorus. Lyrics —
There’ll be ten thousand dollars
For anyone who collars
Calico Jack.
CHORUS: Calico Jack!
Again it was too ambitious financially. “God, Milligan, we’d have to sell the Navy to pay for it,” said Captain O’List.
There’s an alternative — it’s to be called Barbary Coast, a series of variety acts done in an 1880s Bowery Bar setting. The MC is Jimmy Molloy, a forty-year-old Crash Bang Wallop insult-type comic. Jimmy is overweight and over here. The Bill Hall Trio will perform ‘as directed’, so we wait, directionless, while the wheels of power turn.
Meantime, I must prepare for my civilian status. I must buy clothes to adorn my civilian body and shoes for my civilian feet. Drawing out my savings, I course the Via Roma; for the life of me I could not understand how the Italians could produce such luxurious clothes. There’s a wealth of real silk, pure wool, pure cotton garments. I chose a dark blue corduroy jacket and a lighter pair of trousers, a black and white check sporting jacket with ‘British’ flannels, three white silk shirts and a blue satin tie, a white polo-neck sweater, all of which would hide my post-war back-up army underwear. One thing I never bought — shoes. I had a pair of huge ‘sensible’ brown brogues that made my feet look five times the size, shaped like marrows, apparently inflated and about to burst.
“Wot yer want ter buy all that crap for?” says Bill Hall. “You’ll only draw attention to yourself.” I understood him not.
Me in civvies standing against the statue of Goethe in Rome
The Voodoo Moon Club
We would use the rehearsal room, yes! A dance! ORs only! Bornheim, George Puttock and myself took it upon ourselves to turn the room into a London night club. We begged, borrowed, stealed, bribed. I wanted it to look like a giant aquarium. I blacked out windows, filled the space with underwater features, rocks, etc., all from the scenery department, put low-key lighting in, then covered the whole with a large piece of aquamarine perspex. We stapled plain white paper to the scruffy table-tops,