Memoirs 06 - Peace Work

  The trio plays for dancing. Swing, swing, swing, hot jazz, yeah Daddy! So I can dance with Toni, Bornheim relieves me on the accordion. I had never been relieved by an accordion before. Toni and I try to dance. It’s a crush, but what the hell. It’s nice just holding her. But now the drunks take over. Sergeant Chalky White thinks we need ‘livening up’: he is balancing a glass of beer on his forehead (Where had I seen this all before?) and doing a Russian dance. Why, oh, why, is it always the most untalented that think they are entertaining? “Eyeties can’t fucking sing,” he says and makes us all sing ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. A barge full of people in Venice and it’s ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. Then ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’. Splash. Riccy Trowler has fallen in the water. We haul him out, he’s giggling.

  “He needs a towel.”

  “No, I don’t. I need a brandy.”

  Toni and I sit it all out at the back of the barge. By 3.00 a.m., Life as we know it on this planet is over. The barge draws to the landing stage and they all stagger on to the Charabong. Chalky White is still manic with energy. “Knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road,” he sings. Why God? At the Leone Bianco I say goodnight to Toni. Soon I’m in bed. Safe at last! No, with stifled laughter some low-life bastard is trying to fart through the keyhole. Yes, dear reader, FART THROUGH THE KEYHOLE.

  I have a hangover. Someone has put a Lipton’s tea chest in my head and the corners are expanding. I get up, someone is revolving the Lipton’s tea chest. I look in the mirror, I am suffering a severe attack of face. My red eyes resemble sunset in Arabia; my tongue is a Van Gogh yellow, I have to push it back in by hand.

  Bornheim enters. “Someone’s made a cock-up.”

  “Then dismantle it. Here comes the Mother Superior,” I say.

  The hotel in Trieste is full, so we are to move to Mestre just up the road. Someone is chopping up the Lipton’s tea chest.

  “What’s up?” says Bornheim.

  “My head.”

  “Yes, I know it’s your head.”

  “What time is the Charabong leaving?”

  “Chinese Dentist.”

  “What?”

  “Chinese Dentist,* tooth hurtee!”

  ≡ Two-thirty.

  “Please leave.”

  I take two aspirins and a bath, feel a little better. I pack my suitcase with a man chopping up the Lipton’s tea chest. It’s nearly Chinese Dentist as I lug my case to the lift. Mulgrew is in it. “First floor,” he says. “Ladies underwear and drunks.”

  MESTRE

  MESTRE

  It’s a short fifteen minutes hop to Mestre and the Albergo Savoia, a large one-time country home. It’s rectangular, very roomy with floral curtains and matching furniture. Along the back of the house are french windows which open on to what once was a garden, but is now concreted over. After a cup of tea Toni and I sit outside in the sun.

  Toni wants to know if I’ve told my parents about her.

  “What they say, Terr-ee?”

  “My mother say I must be careful of Italian girls.”

  “For why?”

  “She thinks all Italian girls are tarts.”

  “What is tarts?”

  “Prostitute.”

  She bursts into a giggle. “Me, prostitute?”

  “No, no, she is just telling me to be careful.”

  “You tell her I am a good girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “What she say?”

  “I haven’t had any reply yet, maybe in the next letter.”

  I daren’t tell her my mother thought all foreigners were ridden with disease and you caught it off lavatory seats. “If you shake hands with them, try and wear gloves.” But then my mother thought that Mussolini was good for the Italians.

  Bill Hall clowning in Mestre – a dismal failure.

  Bill Hall is in a playful mood. He drapes a curtain over his shoulder and plays salon music, ‘Flowers in May’, etc.

  He is interrupted by the manager, Mr Marcini with his goatee beard and goatee moustache. In fact, he had a goatee head and goatee body. Bowing and nodding, he asks if we like to hear some folklore music. A chorus of ayes. He produces a mountain bagpiper. He’s like a man from another age: he wears a Tyrolean hat, a red shirt with a brocade waistcoat, navy blue breeches to the knee, then leggings bound with goat hide strips. He plays his bagpipes, which sound like the sweet-sounding Northumbrian and gives us traditional tarantellas, marches, etc. It was an hour of great music and I realized that I was watching the last of the old Italy. The old Italy that was to be swamped with tourists, deafened by pop music and Lambrettas. Eventually, Bill Hall joined in on the violin. It was great stuff. When he’d finished, we had a whip-round for the piper and he departed well pleased. Mulgrew thinks he is a Scottish soldier on the run from the Military Police. “It’s a perfect disguise,” he says. “I tell you the hills around here are full of squaddies on the trot from the police. You see those Italian women with hairy legs, they’re squaddies on the trot.”

  We are left to fossilize in Mestre while the powers that be plot our destiny. Meanwhile we live a sybaritic life, just mooching all day.

  MOTHER:

  Where have you been at this time of night?

  SPIKE:

  I’ve been out mooching, Mother.

  ∗

  “I think they’ve forgotten us,” says Hall.

  “Forgotten us, FORGOTTEN?” says Bornheim. “They’ve never heard of us.”

  I break the boredom by trying to snog with Toni whenever the opportunity presents itself, which is only all the time, and that doesn’t seem enough. Lieutenant Priest tries to find out what the score is. He phones Army Welfare Service in Naples and this is what it sounded like.

  ∗

  Lt priest: Yes, sir…yes, sir…Mestre, sir…but…yes, sir…yes, sir…yes, sir…very good, sir.

  He hangs up. “Christ,” he says. “That was Colonel Ridge-way.”

  “When do we go to Trieste?” says Hall.

  “Everything is in order,” says Priest. “We leave for Trieste tomorrow.”

  The news is well received. I watch fascinated as a dewdrop runs along Hall’s nose and extinguishes his dog-end. I suppose that somewhere someone loved him.

  TRIESTE

  TRIESTE

  It’s another bright sunny day as we board our, by now, dodgy Charabong. Lieutenant Priest has a quick roll call, and has a heart attack when Bill Hall answers his name.

  Trieste is a combustible city on the Adriatic, the Allies have a large force there to deter combustible Marshal Tito who is claiming that Trieste is Yugoslavian. It’s a hundred miles to go as we settle down for the trip. Our route runs across the Gulf of Venice – all agricultural land, very green, very lush. The cattle are fatter up here than their scrawny cousins in the Compagna.

  Behind me, on the bench seat, Bornheim says, “Who said ‘What the fuck was that?”’ We don’t know. “The Lord Mayor of Hiroshima.”

  “They should never have dropped it.”

  “What else can you do with a bomb but drop it? Can’t keep it in the fridge.”

  “They asked for it.”

  “Wot you mean asked for it? You think they phoned up Roosevelt and said please drop honourable bomb?”

  “OK, what would you have done to end the war?”

  “Well, something else.”

  “I think we should have dropped Cold Collation on them,” I said. “That, or watery custard. Can’t you see the headlines?”

  Cold Collation destroys Hiroshima. Thousands flee Custard.

  “If they’d have got it, you can be bloody sure they’d drop it on us.”

  “It still wouldn’t be right. What about us and Cassino?”

  “What about us and Cassino?”

  “We bombed it, didn’t we?”

  “There were Germans in it.”

  “No, there wasn’t.”

  So the argument raged. From atom bombs to wages is a big jump, but that was what they were on about next. In a sot
to voce Hall is telling Mulgrew and me that he thinks we should be on more money.

  “Aren’t you satisfied with ten pounds a week?”

  “No, we are the hit of the show.”

  “It’s ten pounds a week all found,” I said.

  “I’ve never found anything,” says Mulgrew.

  “We should be on twenty-five pounds a week,” says Hall.

  “If you’re going on what it should be, why not fifty pounds?” says Mulgrew.

  “Why stop at should be fifty?” I said. “How about should be a hundred?”

  And that was the end of the should bes. Bill Hall produces his violin and launches into an insane version of a very bad musician playing jazz. He crosses his eyes, puts on a fixed maniacal grin with his head shaking like a speeded-up metronome and plays ‘Honeysuckle Rose’. Every note is exquisitely sharp or flat. To musicians, it’s hysterically funny. He plays and sings Irving Berlin’s tune.

  Wot’ll I do, when you

  Are far away and I am blue

  Wot’ll I do

  Kiss my bottle and glass*

  ≡ Bottle and glass (cockney slang) = arse.

  Bornheim starts to conjure up tunes that have just missed being winners – like, ‘That’s Why the Lady Is a Tram-polinist’, or ‘Honeysuckle Nose’ again, ‘Saint Louis Browns’, ‘Tea for One’, ‘We’ll Meet Occasionally’, ‘On the Good Ship Lollibang’ and so on. He reverts to his Union Jack newspaper. It has a report on Dachau. “How can there be places like this and there be a God?” I told him that my mother used to answer that question by saying God works in mysterious ways.

  “Seven million Jews dead. That’s not mysterious, that’s bloody cruel,” says Bornheim.

  Seven million Jews killed, I couldn’t get it in perspective.

  “Perhaps it is God’s will,” says Hall.

  “I never knew he left a will,” I said.

  The coach comes to a halt in verdant countryside, we are just outside of a town called Portogruaro. “We are here for an hour for lunch break,” says Lieutenant Priest. We carry our packed lunches and the thermos of tea to the verge that backs on to a vineyard that is delirious with grapes. In the field opposite, a plough with great white oxen: they are identical to the cattle I saw in Roman sculpture.

  “They’re bullocks,” says Bornheim, our deipnosophist (look it up).

  “What exactly is a bullock?” inquires Mulgrew.

  “It’s when they had their knackers ofT,” says Bornheim.

  “Who would do a job like that?” I said.

  “Anyone on the farm. They do it when they are young.”

  “Why do you have to be young to chop ‘em off?” I said.

  “Tsu, the bullocks, Milligan, the bullocks must be young.”

  “Cor, what a job!” said Hall. “I can see his card now: Jim Dungley, knackers neatly nipped. Two pounds a hundred.”

  “Yes,” mused Mulgrew, “but I wonder what he put in the shop window.”

  The entire cast are now deep into sandwich munching, and it’s amazing how bovine they look. John Angove, our character actor and vegetarian, is trying to swop his sandwiches. “Anyone swop beef for cheese and tomato?” he shouts out. In those distant days a vegetarian was looked on like a freak – some of the cast are bleating and mooing at him.

  “Don’t worry, there’s a lovely field of grass just waiting for you.”

  Poor Angove, he specialized in make-up. He would spend up to two hours putting his old man make-up on. Alas, he didn’t look a day older.

  Mulgrew has a reddish stain around his lips. He appears to be drinking from a brown paper bag, the swine has got a bottle in there!! What’s the idea? He tells us that Harry Lauder always drank from a bottle in a paper bag, it gave him an air of respectability.

  “They’re all bloody strange in Glasgow,” says Hall. “As for ‘Arry Lauder, he was a mean bugger. If he was a ghost, he’d be too mean to give you a fright.”

  “He’s still top of the bill, mate,” says Mulgrew.

  Hall disagrees. “I think he’s bloody awful.”

  “Well,” says Mulgrew, “I saw him at the Glasgow Empire in Highland Follies. He was great.”

  “The best thing I’ve seen him in was Woolworth’s,” concluded Hall.

  Bornheim asks Mulgrew for a swig of wine. Before giving him it, Mulgrew says, “You haven’t any disease of the mouth, have you?” Bornheim assures him he hasn’t. “Well,” said Mulgrew, “I have.”

  Toni has finished her birdlike eating. She waves a handkerchief near her face. “Che stufa,” she says. “Oh Terr-ee, it so warm.”

  A lorryload of soldiers drives past. At the sight of our females they whistle and wolfhowl and make certain signs.

  “Oh no,” we all groan as Luigi the driver waves his arms in the air.

  “Una puntura,” he says. He, who has holy pictures pinned to his dashboard and a rosary affixed to the steering wheel, has a puncture.

  “He must be praying to the wrong saints,” said Lieutenant Priest.

  We all lend a hand. Luigi is pumping the jack while, in time, the joker Bill Hall plays sea shanties. We manhandle the wheel into place, all the while singing along with Hall, ‘What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor’.

  “Tutto bene,” says Luigi as he screws the last nut into place.

  “All aboard for turbulent Trieste,” calls Lieutenant Priest. We all troop into the Charabong with Mulgrew, Hall and Bornheim making mooing and bleating sounds.

  “You’ve all been out here too long,” says Priest.

  The journey is starting to drag. It’s hot and dusty. “Oh roll on demob,” says Bornheim. “Roll on Civvy Street.” Through the afternoon there’s considerable traffic of military vehicles, American and British, the American lorries ignoring the speed limit. They sport an upright broom tied to their vehicles.

  “Wots that mean?” says Hall.

  I explain it means they have swept all the opposition away. We pass a sign TRIESTE 20 CHILOMETRI. The Italian elections are coming up and the walls are daubed with signs – Partito Communisto or Christian Democrats.

  “Won’t it be a bugger if the Commies get in,” said Hall.

  “What do you mean?” says Mulgrew.

  “Well, after us fighting all the way up Italy – it would have been in vain, wouldn’t it? It’s like Poland: we went to bloody war for them and now the bloody Russians have got it.”

  Toni has fallen asleep on my shoulder and my arm now has pins and needles. I try clenching and unclenching the fist, but she wakes up with a start. “Where are we, Terr-ee?” I told her Italy. We now have the sea on our right – a cobalt blue, looks very inviting. We pass the ill-fated Castello Miramar, where some aristocrat shot himself- his ghost is seen on the battlements. As we enter the precincts of Trieste, lots of signs ‘Abbasso con Tito’, ‘Trieste è Italiano’. There are shrines to partisans murdered by Germans, faded bouquets hang on bullet-ridden walls, the partisans still strut the streets with great bandoliers of bullets and machine pistols. A Jon cartoon of the time sums it all up.

  The town is shabby, the people shabby. There was the occasional non-shabby person; there were even the mildly shabby and those with just a touch of the shabbies. We are driven to the top of the town on a slight rise and stop at the Albergo Frederico, or Hotel Fred. It’s another 1930s Mussolini modern, but turns out to be very comfortable. From my window the town is laid out like a carpet, with the tree-lined Via d’Annunzio stretching down to the waterfront.

  “I say, old man, haven’t you heard that the jolly old guerra is finito.”

  It’s good news, I have a room on my own! No Mulgrew or Hall coming in late and pissed. I strip for a bath. I look at myself in the full-length mirror and scream. My God, I’m thin. I look like a Belsen victim. God knows I had tried hard to develop myself. I’d done weightlifting until I hurt my back, so the least I could do was give it a bath. I’m interrupted by a tap on the door. It’s Mulgrew, he’s out of fags again and gasping. “You don’t k
now what real suffering is,” he says. I gave him one of my Passing Cloud cigarettes that came in a parcel from my mother. “My God, you’re thin,” he said. “Does it hurt?”

  “If you mean I’m painfully thin.”

  “Can’t you take something for it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like food.”

  “I’ve tried everything – Sanatogen, cod liver oil and malt, even Mellins Baby Food.”

  Mulgrew giggles. “Let’s see your biceps.”

  I flex my arms. He starts to laugh at two protruberances that look like golf balls. “Never mind,” I said. “A good tailor can do wonders for a body like mine. There’s padded shoulders for a start.”

  “With your body, you need a padded suit.”

  I repair to the bathroom, while Mulgrew lies on my bed blowing smoke rings. I scrub my body all the while singing like Bing Crosby. At the same time I am laundering my vest and underpants. I hear Mulgrew coughing his lungs up.

  “Don’t you bring that up in here,” I shout.

  “I’m awa’,” says Mulgrew. “I’m taking four more cigarettes. I’ll pay you back on NAAFI day.”

  I’m really into Bing Crosby now. “The bells of Saint Mary booboolum da did dee da,” I sing, refreshed. I towel down; next, I lacquer my hair with Brylcreem till it glistens like a fly trap. Now, a little read before tea. “Boo boo da de dum de dee.” Yes, I was definitely as good as Bing Crosby. I lay abed reading a poem by Francis Thompson, ‘To a Snowflake’.

  What heart could have thought you

  Past our devisal

  Oh filagree petal

  Fashioned so purely

  Fragilely, surely

  From what Paradisal

  Imagineless metal

  Too costly for cost

  “Boo boo boo da de dum, the bells of Saint Mary.” Yes, there was no getting away from it, I was the equal of Crosby. I sing as I dress. Singing and dressing at one and the same time, ladies and gentlemen. I pick up the intercom.