LOONY : Hey you.
ME : Yes.
LOONY : Hey you. Come here. Come here.
(I could hear him perfectly from where I was, but I thought perhaps he had something to give me. I drew to the side.)
ME: Yes?
LOONY: What’s it like in there?
ME: (puzzled) What’s it like?
LOONY: Aye.
ME: Well, it’s wet.
LOONY: Oh, it’s wet, is it?
ME: Has that put you off?
LOONY: Is it warm?
ME: Yes.
LOONY: It’s wet and warm, eh?
ME: Yes.
LOONY: Is it comfortable?
ME: Yes.
(It would appear he wants personal references for the swimming hole.)
ME: Yes, it’s very comfortable, it fits well under the arms, it’s not too tight in the crutch, and the water reaches down to below the feet. It’s a light brown colour, you don’t need buttons and it doesn’t crease.
He stood still for a moment, then without a word of thanks, went his way whistling all the while.
Sport
Captain Peters is of a mind that we are in need of exercise. “Football! Phnut!” The camp is divided into four teams -Red, Blue, White, Yellow. The teams were up to twenty a side. I played for the Reds. I never saw the ball, but I heard it several times. Getting past two goalies presented difficulties, especially as they threatened you if you tried to score a goal. “You score and I’ll kill you, you bastard!” Still, it was fun. Athletics presented a problem as there was no track. Owing to the terrain, all races had to be run in a straight line. This was OK for the Dash but the mile was a disaster.
Records? Forget it; over the stony pot-holed track it took the winner of the 100 yards 20 seconds! The mile took a quarter of an hour and we had to send a truck out to bring them back. The Marathon was cancelled. As Peters said, “We’d never see them again.” The prizes were ideal for those trying to get fit. Fags.
June. A Posting
Ah! That Italian summer in the Campania. The mornings, the cool air touching the face like an eider feather, the dawn light under the tent flap vivifying the moment, the aroma of dew on earth, the distant cockerel, the sound of the old guard standing down, the clank of the early morning tea bucket. Long before we rose the trundling of ox carts to the fields and the “Aie!” of the calling herdsmen, all this and the lung-bursting coughing of Private Andrews.
“Who’s a lucky lad then?” says Sergeant Arnolds.
I pause at my desk and answer: “A lucky lad is the Duke of Windsor now soaking up sea and sun as the Governor of Bermuda.” No, no, the lucky boy is me. He throws me a document. From this camp of a thousand loonies I am being posted to the Officers’ Club, Portici, as a wine steward. The word gets round. Milligan is leaving!!
The night before I left, Reg Bennett, Jock Rogers, Bronx Weddon, Private Andrews and I had a farewell party at the Welfare Centre. It was eggs and chips and red wine. Reg played the piano, I played the trumpet, then into the back garden to hear the Italian orchestra playing old Neapolitan : Airs — ‘Lae ther piss tub down bab’ (‘Lay that Pistol down, Babe’).
“The place won’t be the same without you,” says a tearful Reg Bennett. I tell him it wasn’t the same with me. We stagger home by a hunter’s moon, our shadows going before us on the silver ribbon of a road. Me, at an Officers’ Club!
“I wonder what they’ll make me,” I said.
“They’ll make you an offer,” says Bronx.
The Officers’ Club, Portici
It was a large splendid classical-style villa on the main road. I walked up a tessellated path, then right up marble steps with Venetian balustrades into a large white foyer, which had pedestalled busts of Apollo, Hermes, Aristotle and several etcs. In a large dining-room I am intercepted by a short squat thick-set Corporal of the Black Watch, complete in clan kilt. He is the image of Jerry Collona.
“I’m Gunner Milligan I —”
He pounces in. “Ahhyes, you’ve come at an awkward time.”
“I could come back…after the war.”
No, follow him. Through an arched annexe into a sumptuous room, the beds are on a three-foot raised platform in the middle, surrounded by a Roman-style wooden railing in the St Andrew’s Cross design. “It’s how the Romans used to sleep, raised up,” he explains. “That’s my bed, use the mossy-net at night and take Mepacrin.” He is Corporal Tom Ross. “You can call me Tom, except near officers.” Right, he can call me Spike, except near railings. He is from the 51st Highland Division. Had I heard of them? Yes, we called them the ‘Hydraulics’ because they would lift anything. He too was bomb-happy. “Alamein, it were tue much fer me.” I told him not to worry, it was too much for Rommel as well.
I met the staff. The cook, Franco (all Italian cooks not called Maria are Francos in Italy), two serving girls, Rosa and Maria (all Marias not called Rosa are called Marias in Italy), girl secretary Bianca, Italian barman Carlo (all Italians not called Franco are Carlos except the Pope). The officer in charge is Lieutenant Oliver Smutts, bomb-happy, balding, with an Adam’s apple which looks like a nose further down; slim, as are his chances of promotion. He interviewed me. I was to be receptionist and wine waiter.
SMUTTS:
Do you know much about wine, Milligan?
MILLIGAN:
Yes sir, I get pissed every night.
The club is open from midday till the wee hours. It closes when either the guests or the staff collapse. A ‘Gypsy’ band plays for dancing; the leader is Enrico Spoleto, who turns out to be the Town Major’s batman, Eric Collins. In his black trousers, white shirt and red bandanna, he looked as much like a gypsy as Mel Brooks looked like Tarzan.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE Lieutenant Oliver Smutts… Ruler of a marbled drinking palace
Corporal Tom Ross An untreated Scots Eunuch
Gunner Milligan Buttons
Maria Virgin in Waiting
Rosa Virgin not waiting too long
Carlo Barman/Mafia
Bianca Hand maiden to Pasha Smutts
Franco Cook and resident Sex Maniac
Various gardeners, scrubbers, dustmen.
The job is bliss, except! Pasha Smutts is jealous. Bianca, his fancy, fancies Buttons. Was it my fault that I was lovely? Lots of fun and games with Maria and Rosa. Breakfast is in bed! Brought by Rosa or Maria. Maria made a point of whipping the bedclothes off to examine my condition. I never failed her. It was a good Rabelaisian start to the day.
My duties are to make out the menus, check the wine stocks, and release anyone imprisoned in them. Apart from the gypsy orchestra, there’s still a lot of fiddling. Tom balances the books so well we all pocket five hundred lire a week. The evil cook will do anything for fags except his wife. Rosa lays the tables and Tom lays Rosa. I sit at the door and book the officers in. It was a paid membership club, with a tendency to not remembership to pay. Like Groucho Marx said: “Never lend people money, it gives ‘em amnesia…”
The Dancing Officers
The terrace is cleared for these gyrations. Most of the partners are WREN or ATS Officers and the occasional upper class Iti scrubber. Spoleto and his ‘Gypsies’ make woeful attempts to play ‘Moonlight Serenade’, ‘One o’clock Jump’, and ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. The trouble is the partially deaf Italian drummer of seventy who has no damper on his bass drum so that it booms round the room like a cannon; but we are grateful for it when Spoleto takes a vocal in an appalling nanny-goat voice:
“There’ll be BOOM BOOM over the BOOM BOOM of Dover To BOOM BOOM just you wait and BOOM BOOM.”
Thank God they never played the Warsaw Concerto.
Dancing. There are none worse than those swaying pump-handled Hooray Henrys. I watched the agonized gyrations of the two dancers’ feet, neither pair knowing what instructions it was supposed to be receiving. The male feet getting vague messages, the female feet immediately having to adjust to their bidding. The female is being backed up like a coal lorry.
To vary this the male suddenly tries to revolve her round him, ending up with Barley Twist legs and shattered knees. The female legs are now at the rear of the male legs, the male unwinds his Barley Twist legs bringing the poor female’s legs back again, and the coal lorry style continues.
There can be no enjoyment in it at all, but it has to be done.
Through the warm night Spoleto and his ‘Gypsies’ batter through ‘Little Brown Jug’. I tell Tom, “He thinks he’s Glenn Miller.” Tom says he’s more like ‘Max Fuckin’ Miller’. It had to be done.
Wow! Gentry! General Alexander and his retinue breeze in for an after-dinner drink. Immaculate in starched KDs, he was in a, shall-we-say, “flushed’ mood; he had just seen the Anzio breakout, the fall of Rome and the news of D-Day. This was a celebration. I admired him until he too started barley twisting his legs on the floor. His laughing retinue was last to leave. As I handed him his hat, he said ‘What do you do?”
“I hand hats to departing officers,” I replied.
He smiled and barley twisted his way out. A great soldier, a terrible dancer.
Music Maestro Please
Spoleto had given me the address of a Professor Fabrizzi. He lived in a seedy villa in Resina, a town built over the city of Herculaneum. He was about seventy and used to play the harp in the San Carlo Orchestra and I could see that it wouldn’t be long before he would be playing it again. He had long white snowy hair, a gaunt shrunken smiling face and two deep-set brown eyes. Harmony and counterpoint? Of course, 500 lire an hour. “Harmony is not easy,” he said. At 500 lire a go I agreed. His ‘study’ was lined with books on music and gardening. Perhaps I could learn harmony and tree growing. “Professor Milligan will now play his tree! The compostion is in A Minor, the tree is in A garden.”
The lessons start. “You see dis black a notes.” Can I see it? I ask him is he an optician or a music teacher? That is the note of C. I knew that. “The notes on the line-a above is E.” I knew that. He told me how the scales went. I knew that as well. Something else I knew, I was being conned. I went away richer in life’s experience and he richer by two thousand lire. I watched as he counted every single lire. It’s the little things that count and he was one of them.
One night after closing I hie me to the city of Herculaneum. The dead city lies sightless in the bay light of a Neapolitan moon. I walk through the unattended entrance: ‘Vietato ingresso’. The city is like Catford, after dark. Dead. I walk along the sea front from which the seas have departed that day in AD 79. This was Bournemouth to Pompeii’s Blackpool. Here people sat on summer’s nights drinking wine and eating figs from water-filled bowls. Now all gone. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.
Ohhh, Herculaneum City
Ohhh what a terrible pity
All of you had gone
Except a little tiny bitty.
Back at the billet I awake Tom.
“Who’s that?” he snuffled.
“Errol Flynn.”
“You silly bugger.”
“A man can dream, can’t he?”
Where had I been, and did I get it? “Nay, I’m as pure as the driven snow. I’ve been to Herculaneum.”
COURT FOR THE IGNORANT
JUDGE:
What is a Herculaneum?
QC TARLO:
Herculaneum my lord is a place where any free-born slave can go and Hercu-his-laneum.
JUDGE:
Oh, and in Hercuing-his-laneum, what benefits are derived?
QC TARLO:
The swelling on the Blurzon is much reduced.
JUDGE:
What is a Blurzon.
QC TARLO:
It is a small hairy area at the back of the knee where Armenian shepherds crack their nuts.
Oh, what’s Herculaneum? By day I have quite a lot of time on my hands; I also have it on my legs, elbows and shins. There was a lot of it about.
A Colonel Intervenes
Yes! One evening as I sat at the reception desk varnishing walnuts and cracking them behind my knee, a man in a jeep approached. He was to be instrumental in changing my life. By instrumental I don’t mean he was playing the trombone, no. The man is Colonel Startling Grope, a reddish middle-aged man, portly, used to good living, hair cuts, Horlicks, thin legs and suede desert boots. He had a body that appeared to have been inflated, and the air was escaping. When he signed in he shot me a glance full of meaning that I knew not the meaning of.
Later that night, as he and his cronies are departing, all so pissed you could hear the cistern flushing, he enquires: “What do you do here?” I tell him on a good day I give General Alexander his hat. Otherwise I try not to whistle the Warsaw Concerto. He is intrigued; as he should be. I am quite lovely. Seriously, I’m a wine steward and resident manic depressive. “How would you like to come and work for me as a wine steward and resident manic depressive?” I say yes. Why? Because I have been brought up to feel inferior to everybody: priests, doctors, bank managers and officers were all Gods. To say no to them was a mortal sin punishable by 500 Hail Marys and an overdraft.
Within a week a jeep arrives and takes me away. The girls all cried and the men cheered. Looking through my diary I found the note I made at the time.
Translation: “Posted O2E Maddaloni on 8/8/44. Very depressed, same feeling as before.”
So! I was feeling myself like I had before, a duty that until recently had been performed by Maria.
What was happening to me? I didn’t want to be a Manic Depressive Wine Waiter in Italy! I wanted to be a Manic Depressive Harry James in Catford. Why did a poofy Colonel need a wine waiter???
The jeep driver is an ex-paratrooper. Ted Noffs gives me the first warning: “Yew wanna watch yer arsole wiv ‘im.” My God, a Brown Hatter! We drive in silence. Speedo says 33 mph, petrol half full, all exciting stuff. Right now my last exciting stuff, Rosa, was back at Portici. An hour’s dusty drive with night approaching. A sign: MADDALONI.
Maddaloni on a Good Day
“Not far now,” said Noffs. “We korls it Mad’n’lonely, ha ha.” He was such a merry fellow, a fellow of infinte jest and a cunt. We enter a town and slow down outside a faceless three-storeyed municipal school. Turning left by its side we come to a rear back lot with a line of tents and parked vehicles. Noffs stops outside a ten-man tent. “This is yourn.” I thank him and lug my kit into the tent which has an electric light, brighter than the three slobs lying on their beds, smoking and staring. These are khaki skivvies, the playthings of the commissioned classes. One is Corporal Rossi, London Italian Cockney. “You the new wine steward?” Yes. He’s the head barman. I’ll be working under him. That’s my bed. I ask all the leading questions:
Where’s the cook house?
The NAAFI?
The Karzi?
What day was free issue?
Any ATS?
No, there’s no ATS but there’s scrubbers in town who do it for ten fags. There’s ‘one that does it for two but she gives you a dose’. This is the stuff that never reaches Official War Histories, folks! I find the canteen in the main barrack block (more of it later), have a glass of red wine and a cheese sandwich. The place is full, and soon so am I. I don’t know anybody and nobody wants to know me, but then I haven’t been on television yet! The red wine sets me up for bed. Back under bloody canvas yet again. Like Robert Graves I thought I’d said Goodbye to All That; instead it was Hello to all This! I slept fitfully, sometimes I slept unfitfully. Variety is the spice of life, or if you live in a after-shave factory, the Life of Spice.
Raffia Party Hats. I was given orders like ‘Tins to be smoothed’ and ‘Bar top to be desplintered’. There I was at dawn with a dopey driver driving around the streets of Caserta buying cabbages, potatoes, figs and oranges, lentils and the whole range of fresh foods for O2E Officers’ Mess. Another Fine Mess I’d gotten into. Shagged out by mid-afternoon, I was then put on bar duties for the evening, serving a crowd of pissy Hooray Henrys. By the amount of drink and smoke around they must long since have died of lung c
ancer or cirrhosis. Disaster. The bar phone rings; they want a Major Bastard. That’s how they pronounced it.
“Phone call for Major Bastard,” I yell above the din.
A man purple with rage and halitosis snatches the phone: “Bass-tard, you Bastard,” he hissed. He was a real Bass-tard!
I was making a cock-up of the job. Not that I couldn’t do it, I didn’t want to.
“The Colonel wants to see you,” says Rossi. OK, if he looks through that window, he’ll get a glimpse of me desplintering the bar.
“Look Milligan,” says Major Startling Grope. We are in his office. “The Sergeant says you aren’t very good at your job.”
“He’s a liar, sir. I’m bloody useless at my job. I could lose us the war.”
He laughed. How am I at clerking? I don’t know.
“How are you at figures?”
“Terrible, you should see the women I go out with.”
“Look, Milligan, give it a try. If you don’t like it, we can try something else.” Like Suicide. OK.
I work for him in ‘O’ Branch in the school building. A large airy office with a Sergeant Hallam, a mild-mannered poof. Then a clerk, Private Len Arrowsmith, a small lively amusing lad; then me at the bottom of the heap as filing clerk. We each have a separate desk. It’s cushy. I just get files, give files and take the files back; the job has all the magic of an out-of-order phone box. It’s OK to sleep in the office provided bedding is hidden during the day! So I move in and join Arrowsmith.
“You’ll like it here,” says Len. “At night you have a lovely view of the typewriter.”
Romance
So far Sergeant Hallam has always carried the files to the Colonel. But I’m lovelier. So now it’s me.
Announcement over the interphone. “Send Milligan in with File X.” The Colonel is ‘getting to know me’. I was going through what girls go through with in the initial chatting-up process.