AL:
You don’t know what true love is Milligan, there’s too many birds in your life.
ME:
I spread my investments! Keep as many on the boil as you can, I’ve got 7 going for me back in England, see there’s —
EDGE:
Look out! He’s going to have a roll call!
ME:
There’s Beryl — Marie — Kay — Ivy — Madge — Betty — Dot — Doris.
DOUG:
Companyyy! stand at easeeee!
AL:
Don’t they ever find out about each other?
ME:
I keep the door locked.
EDGE:
You’re evil Milligan, with all that shaggin’ it’s going to drop off one day.
DOUG:
Believe me, it won’t half make a noise when it hits the ground.
We awoke at first light, and played “Who’s-going-to-make-the-tea?” By ten past 9 no-one had given in, finally Edge arises, bent double bladder bursting.
“I’ll make it.”
“He’ll only just make it,” I thought.
We heard him tinkering about outside, he broke into a little tune.
Don’t blame me,
For falling in love with you.
I’m under your spell
But how can I help it don’t blame — BUGGER!
“How’s he going to rhyme that,” I thought. He’d burnt himself. With Edgington, striking a match could lead to anything. Edgington tying a boot-lace could end up with a broken arm. Edgington cutting his toe nails could mean an amputated leg.
A British soldier forcing an Arab to smash his foot with a large hammer so as to effect an early discharge
“Come and get it!”
We got it, fried eggs and sand. It was just after 10 a.m. when Doug put the lorry in gear and started following the signs.
“What happened at the Carthage?” said Doug, who was still puzzled.
“It was a great Naval Power! Had a war with Rome, I forget the score. The Romans razed the city, and ploughed the ground with salt.”
“How did you know all that?”
“Chambers Encyclopaedia,” I said, “as a kid I loved reading. Given a chance I could have been a great scholar, even University.”
“You could have been a great University?”
“Everyone ought to get a university education,” said Al. “I reckon if Harry had been through a university, he might be writing concertos instead of burning himself makin’ the tea.”
“I think he’d burn himself writing a concerto.”
“Chambers Encyclopaedia?” said Harry. “I thought that was the history of Piss Pots.”
Without warning, Kidgell burst into song. “Loveeeeeee let me taste the wine from your lipssss,” and then went into hysterical laughter.
“He’s goin’ off his nut,” said Edgington, “it happens to short arses like him.”
Doug frowned, smiled and grimaced as only a facial cripple could. “Short arsed men are well known for their power. Take Nelson.”
“You’re not,” said Fildes querulously, “you’re not lumping yourself in his class?”
A smile played across Kidgell’s face.
“Answer, answer,” shouted Edgington, banging his fist on the dashboard and cutting his finger.
“Yes,” said Kidgell, “I do, I have the same short arsed qualifications as ‘im, it’s just that I never had the same chances.”
Al turned and looked at Kidgell.
“What are you staring at?” he giggled.
“Christ,” chuckled Al, “you in charge of the H.M.S. Victory?”
“How do you know that inside me there isn’t a brilliant naval tactician?”
“Say Ahhhh,” I said, “and I’ll look for him.”
“Personally you look more like a ½ Nelson,” said Edgington.
“Alright, alright, you think what you want, I still say short arses have a greater power over their fellow men by reason that they’re nearer the ground and haven’t got so far to fall.”
That baffled the lot of us and we gave up. Edgington was bending his fingers over each other to make ‘Crab Claws’. “I learned this as a nipper,” he said. We set off again, sucking our ration of boiled sweets.
We were doing 15 miles an hour, at that speed you could say ‘Look at that’, but, at modern speeds it’s “Did you see that?” Finally, CARTHAGE! We parked by a clump of trees, and walked to the ruins of the amphitheatre.
It was almost featureless now. What a sight it must have presented, clad in marble, as high as El Djem, the sun of Africa reflecting its white surface, the roar of crowds, the blood, the mangled remains, like Celtic vs Rangers.
“Is this it?” said Doug.
“Yes.”
“This is what I missed Bing Crosby on the Road to Bali for? It’s terrible, it’s like Catford.”
“One minute you’re allying yourself with Nelson and when you see history you say it’s Catford! You short arse, I only brought you here because the ruins were low enough for you to see over.”
“Well,” says Kidgell, “I still say a Carthage is not as good as Bing Crosby in the Road to Bali.”
A postcard I sent home at the time. It shows the amphitheatre at Carthage that Kidgell objected to
We brewed our tea on the floor of the arena, it was hard to bielieve blood spilled here 2,000 years ago.
We upped anchors and drove on, finally Doug picked a pot adjacent to a heavily bombed French maritime repair docks.
“Ah!” says Kidgell, “This looks more like a Carthage.”
He backed the truck under a large tree — a small group of Arabs with 3 donkeys and a camel are passing towards Tunis. They sell us oranges, eggs, dates and things that look and taste like Pistachio nuts, mainly because they were.
After a day of swimming, we are in bed smoking and talking.
“Got to be back by mid-day tomorrow — sod it,” said Doug regretfully.
“Good night lads,” yawned Edgington.
“Steady,” I said. “You haven’t had an accident for an tour.”
Back to the Battery
We arrived back dead on time, 6 hrs late. What’s this??? Move at dawn??? “Where to?”
“Somewhere else,” we were told. “We’re already somewhere else,” I said. “This bloody moving,” said White, “I should write to my MP.”
“Why don’t you?”
“He’s a cunt, that’s why; he’s in the Navy — 2nd Class stoker.”
“If you voted him in you’re all cunts.”
“No, we’re not, huddersfield is a very intelligent town.”
“Then why did you say it with a small h?”
“Pardon?”
“Huddersfield? They’re at the bottom of the third division!”
“Because all their players are in the Kate.↓ You know how old the current goalie is?”
≡ Kate: Kate Carney = Army.
“No.”
“68. He had 13 own goals and two heart attacks last season.”
Men of the 7th Batt. Black Watch, almost out of their minds with boredom, recreate a Busby Berkeley musical happening
Move from Hammam Lif
May 27 ‘43
My Diary:
We leave Hammam Lif and move to destination ‘Secret’.
“Secret?” said White, “Soon there’ll be 6 bloody Regiments there, how do you keep that lot quiet?”
“If we was tourists, how much would this trip cost us?” said Edgington.
“Thousands,” said White.
“Ah yes,” said Gunner Maunders, “but this is travelling 3rd Class.”
He was speaking from an agonized position atop reels of signal wire; sans boots and socks, with his feet reeking in the heat.
White was stretched on a pile of blankets, most of which were in better nick than him, he was about to light the briefest of dog-ends. I pondered on how he could do it without scorching his nose; he produced a piece of cardb
oard which he slipped under his nostrils, as a kind of fire guard.
“Neccitas et mater inventum,” said the learned Bombardier Deans.
“What’s that mean?” said White.
“It means, Gunner White doesn’t speak Latin.”
“Who needs Latin?”
“It’s a dead language,” chips in Edgington.
“But he’s just spoke it, and he’s not dead.”
“He learnt it for when he is,” I said.
Lunch
In the shade of the olive trees we sat and ate our sandwiches, and then drove on. Life was timeless.
Deans was running through a ‘Filmgoer’ 1 year old. “Clark Gable has joined up. He’s an air gunner,” he said.
“That’s not a very big part.”
“The war has been badly cast,” I said. “I should be playing the part of a rich conscientious objector living with Joan Blondell who has to be massaged, nude, every hour with hot chocolate.”
Posters on trees are calling on the French to join the ‘Armee Libre Française’.
“Bloody fools,” said Maunders. “I wouldn’t join up because of a poster.”
“Haven’t you ever ‘eard of Patriotism?” said Deans. “Suppose Jerry invaded England — and tried to screw your sister. Wot would you do?”
“I couldn’t do nothin’ could I? I’m in bloody North Africa.”
May 30/31 1943 — 1st June
“We’re here,” said someone. We’re here’ was a place called Ain Abessa. We all leapt enthusiastically from our lorries to be confronted by another desolate plain with a slight rise in the middle. “That rise, gentlemen,” said Lt Budden, “is home.”
The heat was stifling, even the crows were walking.
“I saw Ronald Colman in Beau Geste and he never weated like this,” said Bombardier Fuller.
“Perhaps they shot it in Norway,” I said.
My father had told me ‘there’s always more breeze on a slope’, I leaned to the left but felt no cooler. Evening came.
I filled my water bottle for the night, and took Mepacrin. I couldn’t sleep. Why was there a war? Could it have been avoided? Why didn’t I avoid it? By now I could have been making my way as a trumpet player through the ranks of the big bands. Perhaps one day I would play with Tommy Dorsey and screw Helen Forrest. By dawn’s early light I wasn’t in Tommy Dorsey’s Band, and the only screw was holding up the tent pole.
The cookhouse waggon was missing, “I don’t miss it at all,” aid White. We ate the remains of yesterday’s haversack rations which now looked like an operation.
After Parade, we spent all day putting Signal gear into a Nissen hut, and testing the equipment.
By midday, the cooks had arrived! We stood in the broiling sun, watching the sweating cooks as they ladled out Maconochies and rice pudding. We retired to our tents to escape the flies.
My bivvy was roomy, I had increased its height by adding three foot purple canvas wall along the trailing edge and dug down three feet so that I had more head room. An electric light ran from the truck, there was a wireless set by the bed and the fridge was on order. Over the roof I had put a fly sheet making the tent some ten degrees cooler.
Inside of my tent. Ain Abessa.
One afternoon Edgington and I were practising post-war sleeping, when the distant voice of L/Bdr Sherwood was heard: “Oi, you in there.”
“Hello?” (me),
“I bet you I can get you out of that tent in minutes 2.”
“Balls —”
“10 francs.”
“Done.”
“Right — minutes 2 starting now.”
We doze on.
“Minutes 1 and 40 secs,” shouts Sherwood.
I hear a combustion engine approaching. I have a nasty feeling: I raise the tent flap. A Bren Carrier is nearly upon us. The bastard! He’d put it in bottom gear, pointed it at our tent and let it loose unmanned!
“Fuck! He’s going to win,” says Edgington.
“No, he’s not, grab that tent pole, I’ll take this one.”
“That was cheating,” said Sherwood as he unscrews his wallet. He had to run 400 yards after the Bren and we had to reset up our tent. All for 10 francs. We were bloody mad.
The Arabs had rifled the tombs of the Pharaohs, now it was our turn. Chalky White was asleep. A brown hand came under the tent flap, White hit it with a pick handle, and there was an agonized, “Ow fuckin’ ‘ell.” It was Gunner Devine feeling for White’s fags.
Kerrata Gorge. Holiday
2nd June 1943
Chater Jack realized Ain Abessa was lowering morale, so again he set up more holidays. With Lt Budden and Sgt Dawson in charge, Gunners Edgington, Fildes, Shipman, Tume, Carter, Bdr Deans and Milligan drove to the Kerrata Gorge. Through tortuous mountain roads we drove amid a magnificent wild scenery.
The road had been hewn from solid granite, and on the floor of the gorge was a giant engraved stone ‘Le Travail du Militaire Française 1882’. It was a masterpiece of construction. Gradually through a series of tunnels, the road descended to the floor of the gorge level with the river Agrioun; adjacent was perfect ground for camping. We pitched our Iti 10 man tent under a tree, facing the river! The back drop to all this was the great Kabylie range of mountains. Soon the quiet of the gorge was broken by shouts and splashing. The walls of the gorge rose three hundred feet, and, growing in abundance by the stream were pink and scarlet Rhododendrons. With towels wrapped around our middles we sat in the shade, Al Fildes strummed ‘Come with me, to Blue Hawaii’. “Pity we can’t share this with the poor buggers from home,” he said.
“We are the poor buggers from home,” I reminded him.
Kerrata Gorge, North Africa
Lt Cecil Budden swims without his specs, colliding with rocks, cliffs and driftwood and comes out a mass of bruises. I can see him now with those magnificent PT shorts hanging below the knee like wet concertinas. Edgington! now there was style, again those draggley drawers, the cheeks of his bottom peek-a-booing above the elastic, he was somewhere in the Tarzan/Gregory Peck mould. His approach to the dive was to make a fifty yard momentous run-up, reach the water, trip and fall face in. As he surfaced (usually upside down) he put on that ‘man of Action-Sport-and-Labour Exchange’—look, and then, with an over-arm stroke, he would set off, a look of determination on his fine face.
Edgington ‘surficing’
Gradually he would sink from sight, the only man in the world who had learnt to swim downwards.
There was no organization, someone cooked one day, someone else another; it worked out very fairly, especially for me. I did bugger all.
Climbing Kerrata Gorge
3 June 1943
It was first light, a cool morning, with the sound of the river singing in the dawn. “Hands off cocks — on with socks,” said a voice.
As we unravelled ourselves from the blankets there was the usual “Anybody-seen-my-boots/socks/teeth/trousers/etc/?” It seemed like every night a giant spoon came and stirred the whole contents of the tent into a cloth porridge.
“Wot’s for breakfast?” Al Fildes pointed to something in the pan.
“It’s brown and black but tastes green!”
“Is it an omelette?” I said.
“That is the current opinion,” said Lt Budden.
So then it was up the gorge. It was tiring but not dangerous, but to Edgington! that was dangerous! We crossed the road to the West wall where a clear water stream was falling from above. I suggested that we follow it. I said, “Look, there s a clear water stream falling from above. I suggest we follow it.” We started to ascend, grabbing tufts of grass, bushes, roots and each other. At a hundred feet we paused on a small plateau -where a pool had formed, scuttling about in its depths were fresh water shrimps.
“Cor,” says Tume, “how did they get up here?”
“They climbed up the water,” I said.
The morning was gradually going from warm to hot, and we went with it. At about
two hundred feet it became a bit precipitous, people were saying “Whose silly idea was this?”
“We should be roped together,” said Edgington, whose position appeared to consist of one foot above his head on a ledge, and his other one dangling in space. Indeed Edgington should have been roped together.
We had reached three hundred feet, the top seemed no nearer. “Someone keeps addin’ a bit on,” explained Dean.
A brief description of the flora, among trees I saw Portuguese and Afare’s oak, elm, ash. The shrubbery round about was a mixture of strawberry tree, Myrtle and woodclimbers such as clematis. They were in various stages of flower and gave off a beautiful perfume at night, which was usually lost in clouds of tobacco smoke.
“I can smell a dinner,” said Edgington, now in the shape of a swastika. “Look!”
He pointed down to the camp way below where Fildes was stirring a large pot. The mention of food is fatal, immediately the massed legs started downwards like homing pigeons.
We all drew nigh to Al Fildes with sharp appetites. “What’s cooking then?” we asked. “It’s my laundry,” he said whereupon we taketh Edgington, and throweth him in the river. Budden came forth to see a soldier swimming fully clothed.
“What are you doing man?” he asked.
“I’m teaching my battle dress to swim sir.”
June 5th. Friday 1943
“There’s wild pigs, up the mountain,” the information was imparted by one Mahmoud, an Arab who came scrounging fags and whose head was therefore a mass of lumps; he would act as our guide if we wished. A pig for dinner? Marvellous, none of us were Jewish. Al Fildel diary reads:
Sgt Dawson and party set off with rifles and ammu, have dug 3 graves.
We left at 1900 hrs and were taken up a mountain path that brought us to a plateau, we arrived as the light faded. We climbed a tree and waited. Midnight. All fags gone. We were losing hope, Suddenly, Mahmoud let off a terrifying Arab fart. “Christ!” said Jordy Dawson. “No wonder the Crusaders lost.” I fell out of the tree laughing, the hunt was over. We trudged back to the camp fire, Bombardier Deans was sharpening a carving knife — “You tell ‘im Sarge; you’re biggest.” Deans took the news well and tried to commiserate saying ‘You’re a lot of cunts — we could have gone to bed whereupon Gunner Edgington accidentally looses off round that nearly parts Bombardier Deans’ hair. “That bloody does it,” said Deans.