Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [8]
BAIANO
The Baiano Rehabilitation Camp
The camp is half a mile outside the town adjacent to a cemetery. The entrance is flanked by two Nissen huts, one the general office, the other the Captain’s office. A whitewashed logo of stones spells out REINFORCEMENT REALLOCATION AND TRAINING CENTRE. It’s laid out on a tented grid system and the camp centre has a large dining tent. Across the road in a light green villa is the new ‘Officers’ Wing’, made necessary by the increasing number of bomb-happy officers. “It would be demoralizing, phnut, for the officers to be bomb-happy in front of the phnut! ORs,” says Peters, who is bomb-happy in front of us all the time.
The setting was very tranquil, away from noise, war and volcanoes. “You see,” said my Scots prophet, Rogers, “we’ll never be bloody heard of again.”
WHITEHALL 1952
The Scene:
CHURCHILL lays on a couch being massaged with brandy by a GENERAL.
ALANBROOKE:
Isn’t it time we brought them home?
CHURCHILL:
No, they’re loonies — they’ll vote Labour.
ALANBROOKE:
We’ve had letters from Milligan’s mother and father.
CHURCHILL:
It’s more than he has.
ALANBROOKE:
They want to thank you for keeping him out there, and to announce a room to let with gas ring and kipper fork, twelve shillings per week.
CHURCHILL:
Tell General de Gaulle we’ve found him an embassy.
Orginisateum
A complete office and service staff have arrived, including Private Dick Shepherd, a medical orderly from Rochdale. His knowledge of medicine goes like this: “Soldiers laying down are sick ones.” A clerk in the form of Private ‘Bronx’ Weddon of the Berkshires, both misnomers — he had been neither to the Bronx nor Berkshire. He was from Brighton, but you couldn’t go around saying: “I’m Brighton Weddon.” He said he was ‘A journalist who worked for Marley Tiles’. I didn’t get the drift. Another addition was the Camp ‘Runner’, Private Andrews; that is, at the mention of work he started to run. He had an accent like three Billy Connollys, he hated the army, he hated the job, he hated the world and all the planets adjacent.
“Luk herrre, Spike, no fuckerrr everrr got anywherrrre being a fucking runerrrr.”
How wrong he was, what about Jesse Owens, Sidney Wooderson?
“Who the fuck are they mon?”
He wasn’t that thick. A heavy smoker, well on his way to lung cancer, he was forever on the earole for fags and, here’s the cunning of the man, if you didn’t give him one he would stand beside you and howl like a wolf. In any well-ordered society he would have been taken away, but in this camp he was considered normal. He could be pinpointed, suddenly, as from some distant tent came unearthly howling.
Captain Peters once asked: “What is that?”
I told him, “Private Andrews.”
“Oh, he’s phnut! very good at it,” said Peters, who wasn’t too bad at it himself.
We now have a 15cwt truck and driver. He is private Jim Brockenbrow. His father had been a POW in World War I, stayed in England and married a lass from Mousehole. The fruit of that union, now known as that ‘square-headed bastard’, he would defend his Teutonic ancestry with a Cornish accent.
“Luk’ere, them Germans hain’t bad fellas, it’s them bluddy Narzees that’s the narsty buggerrrss.”
Andrews will have none of it. “Listen Jamie, the fuckin’ Germans are fitin’ on the same side as the fuckin’ Nazis.”
“Oo arr, but them’s not memburs o’ the Narzee party.”
“Awa fuckin’ hame, there’s nay fuckin’ difference, they all shute tae kill, that’s why I’m fuckin’ herrrre.”
He had a point. Poor Brockenbrow, they ragged him stupid. “‘ere ‘itler, take this package to Town Major Portici, don’t give