Steve Lewis, Eddie Edwards and Spike Milligan There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Jew…
Tired after a hard day’s travel, we ate it, then wrote off for compensation. The Yew, Lewis, has bagged the favoured upper bunk. “It’s the English class system,” he explains. “If a wild beast gets in it eats the lower class first, allowing the upper class to survive and re-let the bed for the next victim.” Next morning, early hot showers, singing, towel flicking on the bums etc., then breakfast of sausage, bacon, bread and jam, and we are like giants refreshed. We go on the town.
We are accosted outside a souvenir shop. “Hey Joe,” says an Iti tout. I tell him my name is not Joe, but Terence Alan Milligan and have a care. Do I want a picture? “Your-a-face-a-painted in five-a-minutes flat.” Do I want a flat face? OK-o. I must have had a face like a po — he has named me Jerry.
The Colosseum is to Rome what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris but less rusty. “That’s where they threw the Christians to the lions,” says Eddie. No Jews? “No, the lions weren’t kosher.” We eat gelati at a cafe; visit the Forum. “Not much of it left,” says Eddie. I tell him that the Forum was destroyed by Vandals. “I know, they did in our local phone box,” he said.
The Parthenon; two thousand years old and still intact! -the Barbara Cartland of Architecture. Within are the tombs of the Kings and Queens of Italy and there, immured in marble, is Michelangelo. Steve is very impressed. “What did he die of?” I tell him: “He fell off the scaffolding.” He is trying to translate the plaques.
“Pity they’re in Latin.”
“Why?”
“It’s a dead language.”
“Well they are all dead.”
I couldn’t believe it! Me from Brockley standing where Agrippa stood; it was as absurd as finding Agrippa queuing for fish in Catford. Steve is telling me he has cracked it. “Agrippa,” he says, laughing at the terrible pun. “Agrippa is…Latin for hair grips.” I thought I heard a groan from the tomb of Michelangelo.
Outside we turn into the Corso Umberto and witness the great cat colony. An old Italian lady is feeding them (as is the Roman custom). In answer to my query she says the cats have been here ‘Lontano fa’, so I tell my two chums, “They’ve been here since lontano fa.” Steve says, “That’s strange — they miaow in English.”
The Fontana de Trevi and its songs in water: it cascades, gushes, ripples, drips, laughs, squirts. It is magnificent.
I toss the traditional coin in. “What did you wish?” says Steve. I explain certain things about Candy and he is well pleased. Eddie throws his coin in; he won’t say what, but if it was to retire and live in Southampton and go grey, it’s been granted. Steve screws up his Jewish soul and throws in a low-denomination coin. What does he wish? He wishes he hadn’t thrown it in. We hold back as he starts to strip.
Food. A small restaurant, ‘La Bolla’ in the Via Flamania, a four-star place — you can see them through a hole in the roof. Here we are in the land of pasta, and I order stew. The photograph shows the evidence. I even had a cup of tea AND bread and butter. They didn’t have Daddy’s sauce.
Flashback! Steve had somehow (he can’t remember) gained ingression to a Roman widow’s flat. She was sixty with a daughter and son. He had arranged for two of us to stay there the last three days of the leave. And so it came to pass. We left Eddie standing in his shirt — Angora, for the wearing of- standing by his bottom bunk saying, “It’s not fair, I’m not going to play with you any more.” Yes, we gave poor Eddie the elbow, and if he wasn’t careful he’d get the shins and the knee bones as well.
Steve’s suitcase has labels. Albergo Vittorio Emanuel, Albergo Grande Viale, Albergo Re de Italia, Albergo Savoia. It gives a touch of class to his 2/6 Marks and Spencer reinforced cardboard box with the knotted string handle.
It’s in a faceless modern Mussolini-built block. We take the lift. “What’s this Primo Piano, Secondo Piano, Terzo Piano?” I told him that they had one piano on the first floor, two on the second and three on the third. Apartment 234. We are met at the door by the smiling grey-haired Roman widow. She’s yours, I tell Steve. We are shown into the bedroom, and having dumped our kit, she gives us tea. Her husband had died just before the war in a car accident; she has a twelve-year-old son Raymondo and a twenty-one-year-old daughter Anna, who will be mine!
It was mid-afternoon and we went to the PICTURES! George O’Brien in The Kid Rides West. I had already seen him ride East, North and South, and the film was exactly the same except he did it in a different direction. It was full of ‘Aw Shucks’, “You’re looking real purty today Miss Lucy’, and ‘Are you a-callin’ me a liar?” To the Alexander Club where my Hebrew friend did partake of Eggs and Chips. The REME band were playing. They were terrible. Someone shouted, “Mend a lorry.” The band meant well, but then so did Hitler.
Anna Morto
Little did we know of the tragedy that was impending. On our return we were let into the flat by daughter Anna. “Aye Steve,” she said, and kissed him. “This is my friend, Spike.” Anna was tall, blue-eyed and blonde. She could have been a model. Her brother is back from school, a dark lad with numerous questions: “Were we in the fighting, how was it, had we won any battles?” It could have been any boy anywhere.
Anna works of an evening. Blast! Chance one gone! She works in the American Officers’ Club, the Nirvanetta. She is bemoaning Rome’s loss of elegance. She tells us that during Mussolini’s regime a woman was safe to walk anywhere after dark, even during the German occupation, but now, she threw her hands up in despair, now it was terrible, she couldn’t take the drunkenness and the lechery. Chance number two gone. She wasn’t joking, as we were to find out.
We were tired and after a shower I donned my terrible ‘Made-out-of-cheap-sheet-then-dyed-with-a-dye-that-comes-off-in-bed’ pyjamas. I was reading old English newspapers and magazines from home. I must have dozed off and I was awakened by Anna coming into my room. She put her finger to her lips for silence, then whispered: “Can I borrow this chair?” Yes. Did she want to borrow me? I had two legs less, but I was willing to be sat on. No. I was the last one to see her alive.
At seven next morning, Raymondo burst into my room: “Anna Morto,” he shouted. I leapt from my bed and followed him to the kitchen. Anna was in the chair, a gas pipe leading from the stove to her mouth. Hurriedly I picked her up. It was horrible; rigor mortis had set in, and she stayed in the shape of a person seated. Steve put the mirror to her mouth.
The mother is distraught, and that poor boy, that little innocent face as yet unused to a world without a father, now his sister…The mother says she has sent for the police. It would be best if we weren’t found here. We leave in embarrassing haste with our pyjamas under our battledress. I often wonder if having two Allied soldiers in her home was the last straw for Anna. Please God, I hope not. I will never know. How insensitive we were. We never even went back or wrote or said thank you. What kind of a person was I…?
It put a terrible damper on the rest of the holiday and soon we were in the lorry rumbling back to our Alma Mater, Maddaloni. Trouble with lorries is you can only see out of the back. “You see where you’ve been and you already know that,” says the Yew.
Sometimes — on a dark night — I still see Anna’s face.
April 17
MY DIARY:
MY BIRTHDAY. I’M 27. HAD EXTRA CUP OF TEA.
The news tells us that the Germans in Italy are on their last legs.
Führer Bunker
HITLER IS IN THE KARZI GIVING HIMSELF ONE OF DOCTOR MORRELL’S ENEMAS.
ADOLPH:
Allez oops! Ahhh! Dat is better.
GOEBBELS:
Mein Führer, mein Führer.
ADOLPH:
Dere’s only one of me.
GOEBBELS:
In Italy our troops are running out of legs.
ADOLPH:
You Schwein, you haff ruined my happy enema hour.
I see Thelma Oxnevad. “Spike, did you enjoy your l
eave?” Never mind that, Thelma, marry me at eight o’clock tonight. QMS Ward is asking me to come back to the band. I say, what about my impending coronary? He says that’s all shit. As a qualified Quarter Master Sergeant he says I’m fit. But playing the trumpet could kill me! Yes it could, but if I take the risk, so will he. OK, I’ll try. There I’ll be, playing a great Bunny Berrigan chorus, I hit a top G, clutch my heart and crash face downwards on a mattress. ATS Candy Withers will raise my lovely head in her arms. Have I any last request? Yes, yes, yes, if she could just take her clothes off.
Also my thespian talents are in demand! Sergeant Lionel Hamilton thinks I could play a part in The Thread of Scarlet. Will I be the knot? We start rehearsing, but that old Black Magic called Manic Depression attacks me and I’m put to bed with Aspirins. What a doctor, I suppose he’s still practising. God knows, he needs to. The play goes on, and horror of horrors, it’s a success!
Someone is worse off than me. Mussolini has been murdered; he and his mistresses are hanging upside down in a garage in Milan.
It was a barbaric act that puts the clock back. However, the natives seem happy. Nothing like an assassination to cheer the masses.
The Mussolini Massacre. They shoot horses, don’t they?
May 1
MY DIARY:
IT’S OVER! JERRY SURRENDERS!
I had just sat down at my morning desk still reeking of porridge when a very excited Colonel Startling Grope thundered into the office. “Have you heard Terence? It’s over! I’ve just spoken to Alex at AFHQ and it’s OVER! General Vietinghoff von Nasty is at the Palace now signing the surrender.”
“Great! Do I have to sign anything, Stanley Sir? I mean, I haven’t agreed to the surrender.” We can have the day off, he’s right, it’s time we had it off. The Ities are in the street singing ‘Finito, Benito Finito’ and ‘Lae thar piss tub darn bab’. The bells of the churches ring out their iron victory message.
I walked back through the milling streets, lay on my bed and lit up a Capstan. I could hear the din outside and running footsteps, but I was strangely quiet. Suddenly a complete change of direction. How do you handle the end of a Campaign? I wanted to cry. Was it really over? 31,000 Allied troops had died — a city of the dead. Is a war ever really over?
A few days pass and Steve comes into the room. He is grinning: “Have you seen? He’s dead.” He shows me the headlines. ‘HITLER, SUICIDE IN BUNKER’. “Yes, he’s dead, his tart and his bloody dog.” He hammered the words out like nails in a coffin.
I had better news. Back at the officers’ club in Portici I had snaffled a bottle of Dom Perignon 1935. “I’ve been saving this, Steve,” I said, producing the bottle from its wrapper. We toasted the end in our enamel mugs. We sat grinning in silence. It was all too much; two soldiers; just statistics; where did we fit in…? Mind you, they were still fighting in Berlin, but most of the orchestra had stopped playing.
The Russians are sweeping into Berlin. Their might is awesome. The Allies and the Russians meet on the Elbe. At Lüneburg Heath, Monty accepts the German surrender. It’s over. Just like that. One day war, the next it’s peace. It’s almost absurd. The entire energy of O2E is vested in preparations for the official V-E Night celebrations. It would appear that only alcohol can generate true happiness: hundreds of bottles, barrels and fiasco are stock-piled in every available area. They are scrubbing out the fountain! Why? It’s the brainchild of RSM Warburton who has ordained that it be ‘filled with wine’. They had tried to get the fountains to gush, but the plumbing had long since decayed. The date is fixed. In Part Two orders:
YOU WILL ALL HAVE A GOOD TIME, YOU WILL GET DRUNK, AND YOU WILL ALL STAGGER AROUND…YOU WILL GET SICK OVER EACH OTHER FOR YOUR KING AND COUNTRY. THE BAND WILL PLAY FOR DANCING UNTIL 2 A.M.
The Square in Alexander Barracks
“Where did all those bloody Union Jacks come from?” Steve is counting the mass of flags that are now starting to appear around the barracks.
“Doesn’t it make you feel good,” I said, “to know that, despite it all, there are factories still making the British Flag.”
“Oh yes, there’s nothing like a good old Union Jack to cheer you up.”
“I always carried a photo of the flag, and many a dark night in a muddy trench, I’ve taken it out and said to my trench mate: “Cheer up,” and shown him my Union Jack. There would always be a response.” Wait! American flags are appearing. “My God,” I cry out, “they’re running out of Union Jacks…!” It’s getting bad! Italian flags are being hoisted, Russian! Any minute now the Ovaltinies’ emblem will be shown. Janker wallahs on ladders are putting up hurriedly painted banners. VICTORY IN EUROPE! others: WELL DONE O2E! A large board with a hand giving the Victory salute. It’s all happening.
I was still wondering if my brother had survived the last days of fighting. I saw him in Sydney last year and he was still alive. At the time I did not know he was still alive in Sydney.
Tuesday 8 May
Official Victory celebrationsssssss, commence! It starts with the day off. We can obtain breakfast up to and including ten hundred hours.
Sergeant Beaton gives a long thanksgiving speech: “Let us be grateful for this Victory.” We were grateful when he’d finished. On the hills behind the town, the Italians are climbing up to make a giant bonfire for the evening, a prelude to which is the occasional trial firework exploding in the street. We wash, rinse and sterilize our mess tins, then wipe them dry with disease-ridden teacloths. Years later, Peter Sellers told me that on this identical day, he was in Ceylon, telling an RAF MO that he (Sellers, that is) had heard a tiger outside his hut the previous night. There being no tigers in Ceylon, LAC Sellers was recommended for a Psychiatrist’s Report. Alas, what transpired at that session has never been recorded.
PSYCHIATRIST:
Aircraftsman Sellers, you say that you’ve been hearing tigers.
SELLERS:
Yes, sir, there was one outside my hut.
PSYCHIATRIST:
Do you know there are no tigers in Ceylon?
SELLERS:
Well there are now.
PSYCHIATRIST:
It says, and I quote: “I heard a tiger growling.”
SELLERS:
Yes sir.
PSYCHIATRIST:
You’re sure it wasn’t some other carnivore? I mean, lots of growls sound the same.
SELLERS:
Not this one, sir, this growl had stripes on.
At immediately-it-was-ready, the festivities started.
The Dance Hall is packed. For the first time Italian civilians are allowed in. A drunken fug hangs over everything. They’ve been drinking since dawn. In Alexander Square tables are laid with myriad edibles, a display that would have been a feast in rationed England. Fairy lanterns bedeck the trees, wine is flowing freely and the fountain is full of red chianti. It looks wonderful. On the hill the giant bonfire is alight. Fireworks are exploding in the streets under the great display of orchestrated electric lights.
V-E Night in Merry Maddaloni
We’ve never played so good. Charlie Ward sings: “We’re gonna get lit up when the lights go on in London.” It’s like an anthem. A great chorus comes from the dancers. Colonel Startling Grope has sent us up six bottles of Asti Spumante! The evening wears on, the dancers wear out. A GI joins us. His name is Ken Mule. He sings with the band. What a find — he sounds like Dick Haymes! More booze is coming up, but I’m keeping mine down. At two o’clock the dance finishes, but some of the band are ‘into it’ and go on jamming. I creep off and accost lovely Rosetta Page. We get a plate of sandwiches and a bottle of Valpolicella. Soon we are snogging.
“Oh, no, Spike, oh no.”
“Oh yes, Rosetta, oh yes.”
The sandwiches are crushed between us and are toasted.
“No ladies allowed in male billets.” The voice comes from the mouth under the little moustache of a Regimental Policeman.
“Haven’t you heard? The war’s over.”
br /> “Never mind that, out!” He makes a gesture.
I am not a violent man. I take him by the battledress and crash him against the wall. “Do you want to fuckin’ die?” He doesn’t want to die, and leaves.
Drink, drink, drink. Giggle, grope…Somewhere in the wee hours a long way away, sitting on the steps, someone is shaking me. It was me! No! It was Steve! He is naked except for his shirt. “Rosetta darling,” I say, “how you’ve changed.”
He giggles. “Isn’t it time you went to bed?” Yes. I was up about midday, surveying the wreckage of the previous night — most of which appeared to be me.
The CPA band that played on V-E Night +1. The picture has been shrunk owing to financial difficulties at the publishers.
2nd Day of V-E Festivities
A band from the Central Pool of Artists will play tonight, so you chaps can have a jolly good rest,” says Major New.
I’m lying in bed that morning ‘resting’, but for the love of me I don’t feel good. I feel myself all over but none of me feels good. I seek out Rosetta! Is she free tonight, or is she charging? Sorry, she’s got a date at Caserta Palace. So! She’s being unfaithful to me. Is it another man? No, it’s another Regiment.
“Darling, will you be my first wife?”
Never mind, there’s other distractions like housey-housey in the canteen, run by Sergeant ‘Dolly’ Grey, the Robert Maxwell of Maddaloni. “And another little dip,” he cackled. “Number nine, doctor’s orders.” As the afternoon wore on and his winnings mounted, I saw him visibly changing into a bent, hand-rubbing, cackling Scrooge. By five o’clock it was ‘Castor oil’ — we’d been cleaned out. I walked out with ten lire which had the purchasing power of a bootlace. Lewis! The Yew! He’d have shekels. Yes, he’ll lend me two thousand lire — after all, we were friends. I would just sign this paper consigning my entire worldly goods to him in the event of non repayment. So, as a bonded warehouse owned by Lewis, I went with him to the AFHQ Victory ball. Wow! Walking up those steps!