“Wireless operator.”
“Well, I’m sorry we don’t have a wireless set for you to play on—”
“Any job, sir, otherwise I will desert.”
“Desert? Look, go to the Q stores, see Bombardier Logan, tell him the Major says you are to help him.”
I saluted and left him to his aerograph. As I closed the door behind me, I heard him give a gigantic sneeze and say, “Bugger!”
Bombardier Logan turned out to be a Scot; he didn’t have a face, just an area under his hat. His eyes, mouth and nose were all in conflict as to who should be in the centre. It turns out he was an ex-boxer. By the look of his face, every punch had got through. His ears were mangled fragments of gristle and skin. He was partially deaf, but then he was only partially human. He was from Glasgow, and spoke with an accent no one understood, not even himself. He walked stooping forward, his arms hanging ape-like, a square head with real corners on it.
From eight in the morning to eight at night I worked. There was nothing else to do, if there had been I’d have done it. He took pity on me and said,
“Ye karn harve some T chaists tae mak yer sael a baed.” (“You can have some tea chests to make yourself a bed.”)
He permitted me to sleep in the same room. It was dry and had three hurricane lamps in, so at least one could read in bed. Having nothing to read didn’t help. By day he talked to himself in Scots gutteral—interspersed with snatches of Scottish folk songs—it nearly drove me insane.
The Scotts have taught the bagpipes to the Canadians, the Australians, the Indians, the Gurkhas, the South Africans, the Rhodesians; even the Chinese! they’ve got a lot to answer for. This Bombardier couldn’t converse—saying hello to him had him completely baffled. Every night he regaled me with stories of his boxing prowess. He’d had two hundred fights. I asked him how many he’d won, he said “Seven.” He showed me a picture of his wife. She looked like she’d had two hundred fights as well; she had—with him. What he really needed was a head transplant.
Suddenly, with no warning we have to move. A back-breaking twenty-four hours loading stores on to lorries, again in the pouring rain. The Major (his name escapes me, but I think it was Castle) must have felt pity, for as the Bombardier and I sat in the empty storeroom, soaked, he brought in a bottle of whisky, and poured a liberal amount into our tea mugs.
“You’ve worked very well, Millington, I appreciate it, it’s been a bloody hard boring time setting up this unit, we’ve had bugger all co-operation, all the stores, etc., have all been rushed up to the front lines, that’s why the food’s been so bloody awful, but this place we’re moving to, things will be much better.”
Well, that was nice. First comforting words I had had for weeks. Before he left he said, “Before we leave tomorrow, any questions?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “What’s Basenji?”
He frowned. Walked back a few paces towards me. “What’s what?”
“Basenji, sir, what’s it mean?”
“I’ve no idea…is it an Italian word?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
He stood a while, then turned and left in silence. The Scottish Bombardier drained his mug. “It’s an Afrrrrrican dog,” he said.
“What is?”
“Basenji…it’s an Afrrrrican Dorg…it can nay bark.”
My God…he knew what Basenji meant! “How did you know?” I said, desperate to find out.
“I wus bitten by one in South Afrrica.”
“Where?”
“I tod yer, South Afrrrrica.”
OCTOBER 10, 1943
We Move to a New Depot
The new depot was at the north end of a coastal town called Castelemare di Stabia. We were to occupy a great railway repair depot, now deserted. It had been hammered by our planes, but two-thirds remained intact. There were plenty of empty goods wagons which we immediately used for store-rooms and billets; They were ideal, about six men to a wagon. Now it was hard to go ‘off the rails’.
I spent two days putting up shelves and organising the stores. If I’d waited for the Scots lunatic we’d have been still doing it, he constantly kept getting lost amid the maze of railway lines. “Aw the bludee Carrrrriages luke the sam tae me.” We had to draw a white cross on our wagon so he could find it. Alas, those with a sense of humour painted white crosses on another twenty wagons, and he was lost for days. The Major’s promised improvement in living standards never materialised, it got worse, no guarantee of our seven a day cigarette ration, I went four days without a cigarette, I got withdrawal symptoms. The pupils of my eyes dilated to pinpoints; my night manipulations increased until the skin was rubbed off and I spoke in a high strained voice on the verge of a scream.
OCTOBER 14, 1943
MY DIARY NOTES:
DISGRACEFUL! I HAVE SEEN THE RSM WITH A FIFTY TIN, AND HE TOLD US NO FAGS WERE IN STORE. THEY ARE IN STORE…HIS BLOODY STORE. FOOD TERRIBLE, BULLY BEEF AND HALF A MUG OF TEA FOR BREAKFAST, HERE WE WERE NEARER TO INDIA THAN ENGLAND, AND ONLY HALF A MUG OF BLOODY TEA.
There was a revenge party on the RSM’s wagon. In the small hours, when he slept in nicotined bliss, the sufferers had pushed his wagon a mile out of the depot into a siding.
OCTOBER 15, 1943
Thank God!! “You are being transferred,” said the RSM, whose name was Death. (What happened if he was killed in Action? We regret to announce the death of Death?) “You are being transferred to the CPC.”
British infantry rowing boat up street in search of a river.
I envisaged another endless lorry journey, but no!!! It was in the same marshalling yard. I wrote home and told my folks I was now serving under Marshal Yard. This time I was billeted on the edge of the Complex. It was a building, one-time offices, I was in a basement with windows at ground level. Outside, the River Sarno ran past the window, looking left I could see the beach, and offshore the Isola Revigliano with the remains of a Roman lighthouse. Just what I needed! The difference in the lifestyle here was great. Regular fag issue, and good food, I even noted down the Menu!
MENU Breakfast: Bread, 1 pint tea
Sausage bacon onion and fried bully
Porridge
Biscuits. Marg and jam
Lunch: Cheese
Beans and tomato sauce
Potatoes (creamed)
Bread and jam
Dinner: Meat rissoles.
Fried potatoes
Spaghetti and tomato
Fried onions
Mashed potato
Peas
Fruit and cust.
Tea and biscuits
–and it never lessened in its constancy. Seven cigs a day and matches. Fifty fags from Naafi once a week (not free).
Towering above the countryside, with vines growing on its lower slopes, was the ominous shape of Vesuvius, like me it smoked heavily. At night, from my bed, I could see the purple-red glow from its throat, it looked magnificent. At one time it had looked so to those doomed people, the Pompeians, but I wasn’t a Pompeian, I was Irish, how could Vesuvius wipe out Dublin? No, I was perfectly safe, but Vesuvius wasn’t. I discovered that Pompeii was but three miles as the crow flies. This incredible relic of a Roman city free of camera-clicking tourists was a situation I had to thank Hitler for. Thank you, Hitler!
HITLER:
You hear zat, Goebbels? Milligan is visiting Pompeii. Keep all tourists out, and zer ruins in!
After roll-call, accompanied by a Private Webb, we hitched and walked till we arrived at the gates. There was no one about, save a sleepy unshaven attendant, who said he had no tickets and charged twenty lire to go in, which he put straight into his pocket. It was a day I shall treasure, a day I met the past, not only the past but the people from it, be it they were now only plaster casts. I had read Pliny the Younger’s account of that terrible day of destruction, Gells Pompiana and several text-books, so I was reasonably well informed. We had gone in the entrance that opened on to the amphitheatre and the Grande Palestra on our right. The e
xcitement it generated in me was unbelievable, and it stayed with me all day. I don’t think there are many sights as touching as the family who died together in the basement of their home, off the Via Vesuvio, the mother and father each side of three little girls, their arms protecting them this two thousand years. There were the lovers who went on banging away even though being suffocated. He must have been a Gunner. What a way to go!
All through that warm dusty day I wandered almost in a dream through the city, now almost deserted save for an occasional soldier.
It was late evening when we finally arrived at the Porta Ercolano that led into the Via de Sepolcri. We sat in the mouth of one of the tombs and smoked a fag. Webb was knocked out.
“Bloody hell,” he said. “I never heard of the place, I never knew it existed, they don’t say a bloody word about places like this at school. Alfred the Great, Henry the Eighth, Nelson, Queen Victoria and that’s the bloody lot.”
I discovered that the Americans had actually bombed it! They believed German Infantry were hiding in it! Not much damage had been done, museum staff were already at work trying to repair it. Bombing Pompeii!!! Why not the Pyramids, Germans might be hiding there? Or bomb the Astoria Cinema, Wasdale Road, Forest Hill, that’s an ideal hiding-place for Germans? Or bomb Mrs Grollick’s boarding house, Hagley Road, Birmingham?
Webb afforded me amusing incidents during the day; we approached the front of a house in the Via de Mercurio, another shabby unshaven attendant was standing outside. He looked like a bag of laundry with a head on. He indicated a boxed partition on the wall. “Vediamo questo?” he said, and the innuendo was that of something ‘naughty’.
“Si,” I said fluently.
We gave him ten lire each, and with a well-worn key he opened the door. It revealed a male figure dressed as a Roman soldier; holding up his kilt from under it was an enormous phallus that rested on a pair of scales, the other scale held a bar of gold. Very interesting, but the point of it all escaped me.
“Wot’s ‘ee weighing ‘is balls for?” said Webb, the true archaeologist.
“I think it’s something to do with wartime rationing.”
The Italian explains the message, the man is saying, “I would rather have my prick than a bar of gold.” Wait till he’s sixty, I thought.
Another diversion is the Lupanarium.
“‘Ere, isn’t that a man’s prick sticking out over the door?”
“Well, it certainly isn’t a woman’s.”
It was a monster made of concrete and about a foot long.
“What’s it doin’ up there?” says Webb.
I demonstrate by hanging my hat on it.
“A hat-stand? Get away.”
“Well, it’s a stand of some kind,” I explained, “and this is a house of ill repute.”
Webb grinned from ear to ear. “Ahh, that’s why they got that bloody great chopper sticking out, then.”
“You should have been a Latin scholar,” I said.
The Lupanarium: around the walls were paintings, or rather a catalogue of the various positions that the clients could have; there was everything but standing on the head. I observed that the cubicles the ladies had to perform in were woefully small, one would have to have been five foot four or a cripple. It must have been an interesting sight that day of the eruption, all fourteen cubicles banging away and suddenly Vesuvius explodes, out the door shoot men with erections and no trousers followed by naked screaming tarts.
’Screwsville—Pompeii’: when we got there the girls had gone.
You don’t get that stuff in the film versions.
The sun was setting when we retraced our footsteps. I was loath to leave but I was to return here again in exciting circumstances. We hitched back on several lorries including one American with a coloured driver, yellow.
“Ain’t you limeys got any fuckin’ transport?” he said.
“Yes, we have lots of transport, trams, buses, but they’re all in Catford.”
He didn’t know what I was talking about and he said so. “What are you talkin’ about, man?”
He hated me. I hated him. It was a perfect arrangement. We were just in time for dinner. I took mine to the billet (the walk did it good) and ate it in the semi-reclining position; when in Rome.…Another occupant of our billet stumbled in. Corporal Percival, he’s smelling of beer.
“Where have you been?”
“I been to Naples,” he said.
Naples wow! The big time! The Catford of Italy.
“I went to the Pictures, I saw…Betty Grable and Cesar Romero in Coney Island. Bai she’s got lovely legs.”
“What about his?”
“Fook off.”
“Of course, I’ll pack at once.”
Percival was a North Country lad, all ‘Eeeee bai Gum’. He doted on Gracie Fields.
“Gracie Fields,” I guffawed, “she’s as funny as a steam roller going over a baby.”
“You must be bludy thick, she’s a scream.”
“Yes, I scream every time I hear her sing.”
“Ooo do you think is foony then?”
“W. C. Fields, Marx Brothers.”
“Oooo?”
He’d never heard of them.
“I bet they’re not as foony as Gracie, you put ‘em next to her and she’d lose ‘em.”
The mind boggled, Gracie Fields meets the Marx Brothers! Help! I tried to demonstrate to him how Groucho walked.
“Wot ee walk like that fur? It looks bludy daft.”
“It’s supposed to, you Nana, look! North Country humour is all bloody awful, all Eeeee bai Gum, flat hats and boiled puddens. I mean, you must be all simple to think George Formby’s funny, I get the same feeling from him as if I’d been told my mother was dead.”
The onslaught silenced him, then he spoke. “Milligan? That’s Irish isn’t it.”
“Yes, well I’m half Irish.”
“That’s bludy truble…that’s what keeps you simple minded.”
“Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were Irish.”
“What bludy good did they do?”
“They were recognised as great writers.”
“Not by me, fook ‘em.”
“Listen, mister, the worst thing in life I can think of is being tied to a post and forced to listen to George Formby…”
“Alright, ‘oo do you think is a gud singer?”
“Bing Crosby.”
“‘Im? ‘ee sounds like ‘ee’s crapped ‘imself and it’s sliding down wun leg.”
“Yes…he would sound like that to you; I suppose you think Gigli is a load of crap as well.”
“Gigli? Who’s she?”
“He’s a great opera singer.”
“Gracie Fields could sing opera standing on her head.”
“If she did, it would be the first time I’d laugh at her.”
Arguments like this were frequent, there seemed to be a love-hate relationship between the North and South, the South loved themselves and the North hated them for it. Percival had been down with sandfly fever like myself.
“Were you on the landings?”
“Nay, we cum in ten days after to lay Sumerfield Track for fighter planes ter land on, but ship with the stoof on were soonk by Jerry radio-controlled bomb.”
Percival had once brought me to the verge of tears; one night, he came in pissed as usual.
“Ever seen a white-eared elephant?” he said.
No, I hadn’t. Whereupon he pulls the linings of his two trouser pockets out, opens his flies and hangs his willy out. I cried with laughter, who in God’s name invented these tricks? and all the others like the swan flies East, sausage on a plate, sack of flour, the roaring of the lions, there was a touch of obscene genius about them all.
Life at this camp was very cushy, but I discovered that there was no guarantee of me getting back to my Battery and this really shook me. I wrote to Major Jenkins saying if I wasn’t taken back soon, I’d desert. Back came a letter from the Battery Office. “Don’t
desert, truck on way.” Signed Bdr. Hamer (Battery Clerk). One morning after roll-call, I was exploring the environs of the camp when I discovered the remains of what had been a large bonfire. The surviving pieces were interesting: Fascist uniforms worn by school-children during indoctrination training, Bambini della Lupa (Children of the Wolf), and along with them were little wooden rifles and kindergarten books praising Mussolini, Il Duce nostra Buona Padre…etc. etc. How in God’s name can adults do this to children? To pervert their minds, and yet even today the indoctrination goes on. China. Russia. Our own democracies corrupt with pornography and Media Violence. As my father once said, “It will only last for ever.” Among the ashes are numerous erotic photos of pictures of statues from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Altogether a very strange mixture.
OCTOBER 17, 1943
Nice sunny day, not too hot. Roll-call at 7.30. Good breakfast. EGGS!!! It was this day Lance-Corporal Percival says, “Ah feel like a shag, I got an address of a safe place, do you fancy a nibble.”
“Not me,” I said, “I don’t fancy a bird that half the 5th Army has been through.”
“It’ll do you gud, lad, loosen yer braces and stiffen yer socks.”
I decline. “We’ll come and wait, then we can go for some grub in town.”
The walk into Castelemare is a dead straight road, dusty, and flanked by unending walls, like walking down a corridor with no roof on. Percival stops.
“Ah, this is the place,” he said, looking at an address.
It wasn’t exactly a brothel, it was rather like a middle-class block of those bloody awful 1930s faceless flats. We go up polished stone steps to the third floor. We ring a doorbell, it opens revealing a fat fifty-ish woman. She wears a loose cotton dress to her knees, bare legs and rope slip-on sandals, she has a typical brown Southern Italian skin, her black greying hair is pulled back behind her head in a bun, she is absolutely unattractive but has magnificent huge brown eyes.
“Ah Vengo,” she says with a broad smile, and ushers us in.
I couldn’t help notice Percival respectfully take his hat off, or was he starting to undress? She walked ahead, rattling off a stream of Italian in Neapolitan dialect, she takes us to what looks like a dentist’s waiting-room.