Home to dinner and we lay awake a long time yarning about Christmasses from yesteryear. Deans asks what the film was like.
“It was a film where suddenly! nothing happened all the time.”
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1943
Today was like Tuesday the fourteenth without the baths.
We have a new MO, a Captain Duggan from the RAMC; he was a pink-looking Irishman with freckles, about six foot, and tall with it, thin, and a hat that seemed to be loose on his head. He walked about a bit like Jacques Tati. At the sick parade all the men felt worse after seeing him. He had come from Kerry, and been a smalltown doctor, mostly farmers.
Gunner Bailey went sick with a twisted and swollen ankle; he was given aspirins. Gunner Musclewhite went in with Dermatitis and got Castor Oil, “Jock’ Wilson went in with a boil on his nose, and was told to ‘Run it under a cold tap.”
“It stands to reason,” said Bailey, “if you went in with appendicitis, he’d give you a holy picture and tell you to pray.”
A stickler for fresh air, Captain Duggan slept with the windows open. A week later he was taken from us with Bronchitis. As his stretcher was slid into the ambulance a Scots voice was heard to cry, “Don’t forget, run him under the cold tap.”
It’s mid morning, there’s lots of work everywhere, but nobody doing it. Where are we? A small shed among some trees behind the big Tower block. From it come low voices and palls of cigarette smoke. This is the hideaway, the inside reeks with gunners making tea and smoking; they are ignoring distant voices of sergeants calling, “Where are you, you bastards?!”
The game is to make occasional appearances. We always left a skeleton staff on maintenance while the bulk of the layabouts hid. It was Crown and Anchor with Dai Pool, he brought the board up with the rations, he doled out our cigarette allowance, one hour later he had won them all back. I think today he has a villa on Malta and lung cancer.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1943
Zounds! Great Grundles of Gerzolikon. It’s happened. I feared this day for many a month. There, in black and white in clear language on Part Two Orders. “Guard Commander: L/Bombardier Milligan. S. 954024.” So Milligan was trapped. There was one privilege; you got the afternoon off to prepare your kit. One could never place a brush to a boot without the remark, “After another bloody stripe, are we?” I blancoed my webbing, polished all my brass, then wrote a letter home. Major Evan Jenkins is driving his batman insane.
“He wants ‘ees battle dress ‘ung up to attention, ‘eees boots angled out at forty-five degrees, mustn’t put ‘is ‘at upside down, it’s an insult to the gun on the cap badge.”
As retribution, he used to swig Jenkins’ whisky then top it up with water, and Jenkins used to wonder why he could never get pissed on it.
“Very good turn-out, Bombardier,” said Captain Sullivan of the guard mounting.
“Yes, sir,” I said, “I wonder what’s gone wrong.”
I saluted him. He saluted me. We saluted.
“Dismiss the men, Bombardier.” I saluted, he saluted.
I saluted him. He saluted me. We saluted. They saluted. I turned smartly.
“Old Guardddd, officer on paradeeee—dissss missss…New Guard…to the Guard Room…Dissss…misss.”
Boots thumped on the cobbles and the men trooped into the guardroom, leaving Driver Alf Fildes on first stag picking his nose. Like a good guard commander I slept smartly to attention that night. I awoke once when Gunner Jock Hall knocked the tea bucket over. I leapt to my feet and saluted it.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1943
Next morning I wrote in the Guard Report, “0545 Hrs, Tea, buckets for the use of, knocked over, spilling contents. Took immediate action and returned bucket to upright position. Signed L/Bdr Milligan. S.”
The dawn was clear, and stars were still lingering in the morning sky, underfoot a hard white frost. The Billet was still and quiet, sleeping forms locked in their dreams. What better than to cheer them up, CRASH, CLANG, I dropped all my webbing and sang “God rest ye merry gentlemen, may nothing ye dismay.” Why then were they so dismayed?
Here I was awakening them, so that they would not be late on parade, and what do I get? But wait, what is Gunner White saying to me, his hands round my throat, “You cunt!…today’s SUNDAY…SUNDAY!”
The more religious had gone to mass at RHQ. I didn’t. I was a bad Catholic and I didn’t want to spoil my fine record. I wanted to be like my father. All his life he totally ignored his religion, but when he’s told he’s dying, suddenly! it’s Good Catholic Time! “Call a Priest,” he says. “No, wait, call a Bishop.”
In those moments before death he was re-baptised seven times, went to confession a dozen, and took communion six times. He used to say, “What’s the use of being a good Catholic for seventy years? All you need is one confession before you die and it makes up for all of it, and look at the time and money you’ve saved!”
The Sunday was all letter-writing, yarning, darning holes in clothes, reading, and fishing in the canal. I spent an hour feeding worms to the fish and gave it up. Gunner Miller of 18 Battery has a real line, and is catching Roach, Dab, etc…He gave me two. Ronnie May grilled them and I gave one to Edgington (who doesn’t remember the occasion), he complained bitterly, “It’s full of bloody bones.”
“Of course it is, everybody is, you’d fall down without ‘em.”
DECEMBER 20, 1943
“Looking forward to Christmas, Harry?”
Edgington looks up from his mess-tin. “I’m not sure, mate, in one way yes, in another no, the no part is spending it away from home. You can’t help feeling homesick, and it’s worse at Christmas.”
There is no place to be at Christmas except home. I thought of the Christmasses I remembered from boyhood days in Poona. I remember the little room I slept in at the back of the house in 5 Climo Road, the indescribable excitement of waking at four in the morning, with the world of adults all silent, finding the pillow-case full of boxes and toys, and the magic as you unwrapped each one…I remember waking up at the very moment my mother and grandmother were putting the pillow-case at the bottom of my bed, explaining how ‘Father Christmas had just gone’, and when I asked which way he went, they pointed at the window; as it was covered with chicken wire, I worked out that he was magic, had got through the holes and was now a jig-saw puzzle. All that and more was moving in the memory bank of my past, and I too knew that Christmas on a farm in Italy could never be the real thing. Ted Lawrence, the Don R, brings news of Kidgell; he’s in Naples at the REME Depot.
Driver Kidgell
“Lucky buggers, billeted in the middle of Naples for three bloody weeks.”
Edgington is reading a shirt. “Remember that girl in Bexhill with the hairy legs who played Chopin?”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s all I ever think of, she and her hairy legs playing Chopin.”
“I wonder what happened to her?”
“I suppose she’s shaved her legs and they now play Rachmaninov.”
“I remember the time we were pulling out of Bexhill—”
“You pulled out in Bexhill? What was the poor girl’s name?”
He ignored me. “…we were pulling out, and we were detailed to clean up the officers’ billets———”
“Trevissick?”*
≡ Name of officers’ billet in Bexhill.
“Very!…we were just finishing off, when you spotted a crate of booze in the back of the garage. I remember one bottle was rum, and you and I started to sip it, remember?”
“Yes, if I remember, I sipped half the bottle and you the other, we carried the bottle through Mill Wood, getting more and more pissed, we finally got out the other side on the Ninfield Road, and you remembered this bird because you’d tried to have it away with her, but she wouldn’t have it because she was getting married.”
“I know, I told her I was trying to warm her up for the honeymoon…”
“Helpful old you. Anyways, we arrived at her place, it was a
bout mid-day, she let us in and you insisted that she play some Chopin.”
“Yes, I remember. She didn’t half play me up, she took me home one night, straight into the bedroom and, laugh, she was a mass of Women’s Mag cliches. When I pulled her skirt up she said, ‘There was a flash of pink thigh, and a rustle of silk petticoat’, then when I kissed her, she turned her head away and said, ‘She turned her head away and felt his warm breath on her neck’. I began to think she was a dummy being worked by Barbara Cartland. When I gave up trying I got up to leave, and as I combed my hair, she said, ‘He stood, nostrils twitching, combing his plum-black hair’. I never saw her after that, though she did leave a message with the Battery office for me to contact her. ‘Tell him I’ve changed my mind’, was the exact communication; what it was she changed her mind about I’ll never know.”
Gunner White is sitting on an oscillating petrol tin, and reads from an old Bexhill Observer. “Listen! German raiders attacked several points along the SE Coast, a bomb was dropped on a farm, the explosion blew the door off the bull pen, the bull made his way to the cow pasture and the farmer had great difficulty in getting the bull back. He himself was attacked.”
Gunner Birch, shrouded in cigarette smoke, tells us that in a letter from home his father told him there was a theory that Hitler was insane as the result of piles.
“Hitler has piles?” chuckled Edgington.
“I don’t know,” said White, “it’s my father, he says—” here he picked up the letter and read, “Ron Lester, the publican, said that Hitler went mad through piles, he was operated on by a doctor, and the operation went wrong, and he still has them.”
“It was a Jewish doctor,” I said. “That’s why he had it in for the front-wheels.”*
≡ Front-wheel skid = Yid.
“Don’t tell me,” said Edgington sitting up, “don’t tell me World War 2 is due to piles.”
“What a sobering thought,” I said. “To think, a case of Anusol Suppositories could have stopped it.”
“It’s not too late,” said Edgington. “We should load a Lancaster and drop three tons of pile ointment on his Reichstag.”
“You see? Nothing’s sacred these days, even a man’s Reichstag.”
Birch blinked and listened at the conversation he had started. “What’s a Reichstag?” he said.
“Grub up,” is all someone had to say to empty the hut.
Drooling
Fildes has already mentioned this, let me amplify.
The Oxford Dictionary says it’s ‘To drivel, to slaver’. I give you the lie, in our battery Drooling had an entirely different meaning. It started on the farm and, in our case, the cause of drooling was sexual frustration. If you saw a lone gunner for no perceptible reason suddenly make a low groaning sound that sounded like OOOOLEEEEDOO-LEYYYYYY, at the same time appearing to grab an erect invisible phallus with both hands that by their position suggested a ‘chopper’ about five feet in length, which he then proceeds to thud against the nearest wall with a cry of OLLEEEDOOLEE, THWAKKKKK!! OLLEEEDOOLEEEE THWACK!!, this was the new Drooling craze. It was not abnormal to come into pre-parade gatherings of bored gunners all apparently holding mighty invisible choppers, thudding them against walls, trees and the ground. When Major Jenkins first witnessed this from a distance, he asked Sgt. Jock Wilson, “What are they doing, Sergeant?”
And Wilson said, “It’s something to do with the shortage, sir.” Jenkins parried, “The shortage of what?” Wilson replied, “We don’t know, sir.” Travelling on the back of a lorry, the sight of a pretty girl immediately erupted into mass drooling until she was out of sight. Of late, the song ‘Drooling’ had come to light; it was sung to the Flanagan and Allen tune, ‘Dreaming’.
Droooooooolingggg
Droooooooolingggg
Each night you’ll find the lads all Droooo-lingg
A little Drool don’t hurt no body
And if it does then we don’t give a Sod-dee
Droooo-ling
Droooo-ling
It’s so much better than Tom Foolingggg
A little drool can ease your heavy load
So keep Drooling till your balls explode. The author is unknown, he wants it that way. The farmyard square (now that it had been cleared of three hundred years of dung) displayed a fine cobbled courtyard; the farmer, who had lived on the farm since he was born, said he didn’t know it existed. The lovely tall tower of the main farm block afforded a good all-round view from its oval windows that was repeated all up the staircase at ten-feet intervals. The tower had nothing at all to do with farming, nor had the building. It was obviously some landed gentry’s country manor that had been vacated or sold cheaply to a farmer. The farmer kept horses and a few cattle and grew crops, along with a few fruit orchards.
Devine has returned from a fruitless fishing trip, “Are they sure there’s fish in this canal?”
“Where else, you silly sod?”
“Then why didn’t the fuckers bite? All I caught was this.”
“That’s a…er…it’s not a salmon,” said Liddell; not a bad guess, the creature was three inches long and black.
“It’s a nigger’s dick,” said White.
“Oh, great,” grinned Devine, “I’ll smuggle it back to Liverpool and hire it out to old ladies.”
“Oh dear,” said Deans in a female voice, “and I’ve cooked all these chips.” He stamped his foot on the floor, from which arose a cloud of coal-dust.
Bombardier Fuller has arrived, “There’s a little line-laying to be done—no panic it’s only a short one, about a quarter of a mile.” As we clamber aboard M2 truck, we witness the spectacle of a Driver Ron Sherwood of Reading, riding a bicycle backwards. Ask him to do a job and he’s gone in a flash, but ride a bicycle backwards, oh yes, he’ll do that all day. Sherwood was a lovely footballer on the wing with a slight tendency not to pass to anybody, and he wasn’t a bad pianist, no, he was terrible. He could get the right-hand melody going, but with his left hand he would hit any note, but he did it with such panache, a smile and a wink, that cloth-eared gunners would say, “Corrrrr, you can’t half play the piano.” and they were right, he could only half play that piano.
Very quickly we laid the line to RHQ. I opened the door to see a gaggle of our top officers all swigging whisky; among them was dear Major Chater Jack, now a Lt.-Colonel. It had not changed him, he was still knocking it back.
“Hello, Bombardier Milligan,” he said warmly.
“Nice to see you again, sir—can you see me?” He laughed.
With a few pleasantries exchanged, I connected up the D 5 telephone.
“There’s some of the lads outside, sir.”
“I’ll come out and see them…”
From the top he waved down to the lads on the truck, we all wished he’d never left us. It was the last time I would ever see him. The date was December 16, 1943.
I remembered the first time I’d seen him in Bexhill, a smallish, very dapper man, a weathered face, always ready to smile. I had noticed he was wearing a very fine brand-new pair of brogues.
“Very nice shoes, sir.”
“My batman doesn’t like them.”
“That’s because he has to clean them, sir.”
This Christmas Concert is bothering me, I tell BSM Griffin,
“If we don’t get a piano we can’t do the concert.”
“Oh, we can’t have that,” he said, his Welsh accent thick as the Brecon peaks. “It’s going to be alright, Spike. Lt. Walker’s going with you in a truck tomorrow to look for a piano.”
Great. I tell Harry. “Oh good,” he said, “pick a good one.”
“Pick one? They don’t grow on bloody trees.”
“A twenty-foot Beckstein, otherwise I refuse to play it.”
He and others were on ‘shit scraping’ duties. This was the general title given to any cleaning jobs, and as the farm and the buildings seemed never to have been cleaned since the Renaissance, the crap was everywhere.
 
; MONDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1943
MY DIARY:
0830. OFF WITH LT. WALKER LOOKING FOR A PIANO, SPARANISE FIRST, PLACE HAS BEEN HAMMERED TO BITS BY ARTILLERY BUT PEOPLE STILL LIVE IN IT. NO PIANO. ON TO CAPUA, NO PIANO. ON TO SANTA MARIA LA FOSSE, NO PIANO.
We weren’t having much luck. I went into the Teatro Garibaldi hoping we might knock off the piano. As I entered I hear someone playing a splendid rendering of the Liszt Concerto. No. 2 in B Minor. The pianist was a young American sergeant. Outside again, I walked around a street market and (so my diary says) for some unknown reason I bought an aluminium washing basin. On the off chance I asked the old vendor if he knew where I could get a piano. Immediately he said, “Si, vengo qui domani alla mezzo giorno.” I tell Lt.
Walker but he had already had a success, he too was to go to an address at two o’clock. We repaired to a restaurant.
Strange, the memories that exist for me from those days. The cities of the Campagnia seemed grey, dank, the streets permanently wet or muddy, the Italians looked drab. A sort of melancholia lay over the land. It didn’t affect me, as I was by nature hyperthyroid and mindlessly happy, but I remember those atmospheres as though it were but yesterday.
Meantime Back at the Farm!
We hear tales of Mussolini holding out in Northern Italy.
“Wot can he do?” says Gunner White. “I mean he’s what…sixty? He’s screwing this bird, wot’s ‘er name, Clara Petacci, he’s got a few Iti ‘erberts in black shirts on two-stroke motor bikes waving daggers on parades outside ruined Roman arches, wot’s he think it’s going to lead to? Hitler must have been off his nut to have him rescued.”