Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [9]
Photo of office personnel
* this man is now in South Africa somewhere
Daily Life in the Camp
Reveille at 0700,
Roll call at 0730,
Breakfast at 0800.
Parade 0915,
Sick Parade and Defaulters 1000.
Everything was organized. We had typewriters, filing cabinets, inter-camp phones, electric light, but no mangle.
I was having recurring bouts of depression, just suddenly black, black gloom. I was missing the Battery. I wrote what must have been an embarrassing letter to the CO. Major Jenkins. It was snivelling and grovelling, asking to be forgiven for failing in the action at Colle Dimiano; would he give me another chance, anything, I’d do anything to come back. I’d go insane if I stayed here. It demanded a reply if only on humanitarian grounds. He never replied. He was an officer and a gentleman, so fuck him, but, he was a good soldier and a pain in the arse…all over.
It’s a nice morning. I’m in the office sipping tea I’ve brought from breakfast. A new intake arrives, a big batch, over a hundred. Bronx and I are documenting them. “Next, please,” I say in my cheer-up-chum voice, and there was Lance Bombardier Reg Bennett from our North Africa concert party. He bursts into tears. “Don’t cry, Reg, there’s a drought on.” An attempt to joke him out of it. He’s from the 74 Mediums, a sister regiment. The Americans had bombed his position on the terrible day of the Monastery disaster. “We were bloody miles away, but bloody miles from the Monastery. Why me? Do I look like a Monastery?” His friends had been killed and wounded, and it had done for him.
Now he disagrees with my version of our meeting. He says:
“I came to the camp and you weren’t in the office when I came through. I was in the camp two days, and I was going out of my mind with depression and boredom when one day I heard the sound of a trumpet coming from a tent. I thought, Christ, it’s Spike. I came over, threw back the tent flap and there you were laying on the bed blowing your bugle. I remember putting my mess tins full of dinner down to shake hands with you.”
If, after forty years, our stories differ so much, how many changes has the Bible gone through? Did Jesus meet Paul on the road to Damascus or was it Lance Bombardier Bennett?
“I thought I heard you playing the trumpet, Jesus.”
“No,” says Jesus, “that was Milligan. You haven’t seen Bombardier Bennett, around, have you?”
Reg was in a bad way, tense and lachrymose. I took him down town in the evening and we sat in a Vino Bar drinking white wine. Of an evening, the people of Baiano emptied out on to the streets and sat in little groups at their doors, mothers, fathers, children, uncles, aunts, all chatting away, laughing or lamenting the state of the world. Like we watch ‘Dallas’, the Italians watched German air-raids over Naples, cheering when some Jerry plane was hit and the pilot was having his arse burnt off, or parachuting into the Bay of Naples to die of typhoid.
We became friendly with one Franco and his family. He was a shoe salesman in Naples, forty, excused war duties because of ill health, though when I met his giant wife and six kids I couldn’t see the reason. She had bosoms like the London Planetarium and was feeding not only her own baby, but wet nursing her neighbours’.
We are invited to partake of the meagre fare. (The last meagre fare I had was a cheap day return to Brockley: Groucho Marx.) Mussels! All bigger than mine. And garlic, phew! Franco’s brothers are musicians; they play the mandolin and guitar. I thought they’d like to hear some jazz, so I strummed and sang ‘When my sugar walks down the street’. They asked for a translation which was ‘Quando mia sucro passegiare fondo la strada, tutti i piccoli ucelli andato tweet tweet tweet’ or, “When my sugar ration walks down the street, it is attended by little birds going tweet tweet tweet.” They liked my Players cigarettes. In exchange they offer me the local Italian brand. I forget the name, I think it was Il Crap.
The village had its resident tart who traded on the outskirts of the town. Her