Before we had time to sit down, another door opened and in came a young girl, about nineteen, very plain, bobbed black hair, a short denim skirt and a white blouse, bare legs and high-heeled cork-soled shoes. She was a little on the Junoesque side. She smiled and nodded her head in the direction she came. Percival left his hat on the chair, went all soppy, and followed her out of the room. The door closed and I heard the key turn in the lock. The fat lady, I now noticed, had her left hand and wrist bandaged.
“Tedescho, boom boom,” she said, and made like a pistol. “Tedescho Molto Cativo,” then she sat down in the chair opposite, lifted her skirt and showed me her fanny, which had so much hair on it looked like a black poodle on her lap.
I had never had such a thing happen to me before, and I was nonplussed. She stayed like it and smiled. “Jig a Jig,” she said.
Unable to rise to the occasion I said, “No, me no Jig a Jig, I Roman Catollica.” she burst into laughter and pulled her frock down and left the room laughing, with one hand over her mouth.
She came back again, lifted her skirt up (My God she was proud of it), “Non Costa Niente,” she was telling me it wouldn’t cost me anything, so I told her that may be so, but it would cost her ten thousand lire.
She had a good sense of humour, with her figure she needed it, and she laughed heartily as she realised that she wasn’t going to get it. She left me. I picked up a paper from the centre table, Corriera della Sera, a dramatic front-page drawing of Italian Paratroops attacking ‘La Armata Inglise in Tunisia’, it was full of such heroic drawings, why didn’t our papers have some like that? Valiant British Troops eating Bully Beef. Heroic British Troops shaving, etc.?
It’s all over, Percival comes into the room, much redder than I’d seen him before, the girl’s demeanour hadn’t changed. She indicated that I was next, I said, “No gratizia, Io Molto stanco.” I might just as well have had it away with her because Percival now borrows a hundred lire off me to pay her! “Is this still your North Country bloody humour?” I said.
He grinned. “I’ll pay thee back—right now I’m bludy ‘ungry.”
“That’s you isn’t it? The three Fs.”
“Three Fs?”
“Fucking, Food and Fags.”
Postcard of Castelemare
We set off and as we leave, the fat lady gives my arm one last squeeze. “Per Niente,” she whispered.
“After the war,” I said.
We approach the town proper, a modest seaside resort, a Blackpool of Italy, but more elegant. We trudge around the streets looking for a reasonable cafe. We find one on a wide one-time populous street, now rather run down, on it is a Trattoria Tuscano, ‘Alied Solders Welcomes’. Inside, about twelve tables, all covered in white paper, sparsely laid out with cutlery. A few tables are occupied by what look like potential Mafia recruits, all huddled over their tables talking in low voices, an act of great self-control for Italians.
MY DIARY:
HAD THE FOLLOWING: SPAGHETTI, FISH AND CHIPS, MEAT AND VEG, WINE AND GRAPES ALL FOR FIFTY LIRA (2/6!) ABSOLUTE BARGAIN. HOW DO THEY MAKE A PROFIT?
During the meal an old Italian in shabby clothes and a greasy felt hat shuffled in, and sat at a chair just inside the door (he had a guitar wrapped in a cloth). He smiled a sad tired smile at us, tuned the guitar with his ear on the side of the instrument, then launched into ‘O Sole Mio’. I even remember the key was F; this was lovely, I’d never had a meal to musical accompaniment before. He next played ‘Oh Za Za Za Maddona Mia’, and finally ‘The Woodpecker’s Song’. All his harmonies were meticulously correct.
“George Formby cud play ‘is bludy ‘ead off,” says Percival.
The thought of a headless George Formby fills me with delight.
“Ask ‘im ter play ‘In the Mood’.”
“You ask him.”
“Aye, banjo player, sonari ‘In the Mood’.” He then sings several bars of unrecognisable crap.
The old musician smiles and shrugs his shoulders.
“Silly bouger, ‘e don’t recognise it.”
“Listen, Glen Miller wouldn’t recognise it.”
“Gid aht of it,” he’s getting pissed now. “Ah use ter play in t’local dance bund.”
He got thoroughly nasty, I paid the bill and left him asking the old man to play ‘When the Poppies Bloom Again’. I for one didn’t want to see him again till they did. I walk back in the cool dark evening, and just my luck, a jeep with two redcaps pulls up.
“Where you going, Corporal?” They smell of recently consumed whisky, I suppose this was their post-piss-up Let’s-go-out-and-do-somebody trip. I tell them I’m walking back to the CPC.
“Where’s your paybook?”
To their dissatisfaction I produce it.
“Where’s your unit?”
“Lauro.”
“Where’s that?”
“Italy.”
“Don’t be funny with us, sonny,” says the second one, who has to angle his head back at forty-five degrees to see out from under the peak. The first one smiles with triumph.
“You haven’t signed your will,” he beams.
“How silly of me,” I said.
“Sign it at once.”
I wrote my name painstakingly across the will ‘Corporal Hugh Jympton’.
They roared away breaking the speed-limit. It was a delightful surprise to reach the billet to find their jeep in the ditch, upside down, and an ambulance loading on the two redcaps. I find the billet empty save for Webb.
“Where’s all the lads gone?”
“Lorry arrived this morning and took them away. Some kind of draft.”
I slept well that night; as I blew out my little oil lamp, it started to rain, it poured, it deluged, and lightning played about the crown of Vesuvius…
OCTOBER 19, 1943
I was getting twitchy, doing nothing positive for so long. I had started talking to myself, and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers. I had rearranged my billet so many times that my bed had been placed in every position except the ceiling, and I was working on that. There were days when I’d try and see if I could get both legs into one trouser leg, and both feet into one sock. I was carrying out this exercise when Percival comes in.
“There’s a bloke in a truck waiting fer you.”
“Is he wearing a white coat?”
“He looks bloody daft so he must be from your mob.”
I couldn’t believe it. I packed my humble belongings and dashed outside. There was my Cinderella’s coach in the shape of a 15-cwt truck. The driver is Ted Wright, a short, very dark, good-looking lad with large brown eyes, and eyebrows so perfectly arched that they looked as though Jean Harlow had drawn them on him.
“I’ve come to take you home,” he said with a grin.
In sheer delight I give him five cigarettes.
“What’s this for?”
“That’s for picking me up, Ted.”
“I must pick you up again.”
“You saved me from going mad.”
He put the truck in gear and off we drove. It was an over-cast day, with an occasional peep through by the sun. We are driving along the narrow coastal road. It takes us through small towns—Torre Annunziata, Torre del Greco, Resina,
Portici—all built on the new coastline formed by the earth-shaking disaster of AD 79, possibly by those very people who fled Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and other dead cities not yet discovered. It was easy to imagine these short swarthy inhabitants as their direct descendants. Wright gives me news of the mob.
“We’ve had our first casualty.”
At once I prayed that it wasn’t my mate Harry. “Who was it?”
“Rumble, he was killed…”
“How?”
“Very unlucky really—”
“Yes, it is unlucky to be killed.”
“He was writing a letter home* when suddenly Jerry sent over one lone shell, it burst behind him, a piece went in the back of his head, he died at once.”
≡ Some say he was having a wash.
“Poor bugger…”
Strangely, I didn’t feel that moved. Had it been peacetime and I’d been told he was killed by a tram, I’m sure I’d be desperately sad; somehow in wartime all those feelings were reduced. Strange.
“We’ve all been flooded out.”
“Weak bladder?”
“Shut up or I’ll take you back; no, we’re all dug in on a plain in front of a river, what’s it called, the—er—Vallerbo or something—”
“Volturno,” says clever.
“Yes, well, you know that bloody thunderstorm we had last night.”
“Personally,” I said.
“Well, the bloody lot fell on us, the river flooded, and Christ, in ten minutes all the dug-outs were like sunken baths!”
Coming down the road towards us are two tank transporters. The front one is carrying an almost intact fuselage of a FW 109, and the one behind, a Mark IV Tank with a neat hole drilled in the turret.
“Wonder where they’re takin’ them,” says Wright.
“I think they test them out for information, then they send them for exhibition in London.”
“Christ, I wish they’d put me on exhibition in London.”
We ride in silence. We go through the Salerno Gap, and are soon nearing the outskirts of Naples. Lots of pretty girls. Soon we are in the thick of the Via Roma traffic, we move at a snail’s pace. People are as thick as flies, some thicker. It takes us nearly an hour to get through the chaos.
“Never think there was a war on here, would you, shops full of stuff, all the squaddies buying knickers for their birds, mind you the prices are going up like lightning. It’s the Yanks, they pay anything for stuff, they’re loaded with money.” He stopped, and said, “Cor, I forgot,” he started to feel in his map pocket. “Got some mail for you.”
Mail! MAIL! I hadn’t had any for a month. It was like being five years old on Christmas morning. Ten letters! I read my mother’s first. My father has now been transferred to the Command RAOC Depot, Reigate, where he has decided that the standard Infantry ammunition pouches are useless. They helped win Alamein but that’s not good enough for father. He has designed some strange things that are strapped round the leg that, my brother later told me, made it impossible to walk or run. In other words you could carry twice as much ammo but had to stand still all the time.
Thank God he wasn’t running the war like he wanted to. My mother was apparently doing little for the war effort except pray for the death of Hitler. If he didn’t die soon, her knees were going to give out. My brother has won the South London Poster Design prize, for which he got a certificate saying ‘You have just won the South London Poster Design Prize’. After six dusty hours we arrive at an Italian farmhouse near the village of Cancello just across the Volturno on the 46 Div. front. It’s dark and I can’t get a picture of the lay-out, looming around are vehicles draped with camouflage nets, looking like strange grotesque monsters. It started to drizzle. The Wagon Lines are billeted in various buildings, the central one being the farmhouse. I noted in my diary, “People living in and about look nervous and strained.” I was very happy to be back with the lads, though my real pals were at the Gun Lines where I would journey on the morrow.
After dinner in a small room, I was brought up to date with Battery news by Bombardier Tibbies. He told me Gunner Rumble has been killed. Poor Rumble, killed twice apparently.
The ominous sound of Jerry bombers directly overhead.
“Making for Naples,” said Tibbies.
“Are you sure?” I said from under the table.
We stood in the blackened courtyard of the farm and watched the spider’s web of tracer shells etching the night sky, behind them the red tongue of Vesuvius. Inside the farm an Italian baby was crying, and the mother was trying to calm it in a hysterical high-pitched shriek, which eventually outdid the child, so it packed it in. Then we heard the husband come in and in a low voice try and soothe the wife, who answered in a high-pitched hysterical voice. Gradually his low voice raised itself to a high shout, reawakening the baby, who joined in again with an even higher voice.
“No wonder Mussolini turned it in,” said Tibbies.
The row abated as we drank tea by the light of an oil lamp. The German bombers were returning and the Ack-Ack re-awoke the baby and the whole mad trio were soon yelling at each other again. It sounded like a vegetable shopping list.
“Too-ma-toeee!…Poo-ta-toeee!” they shouted, “Minestrone!!”
I reflected, as I lay in bed, that I’d had a cushy few weeks behind the lines, but from the stories the war was not going to be a gentleman’s one like we had in North Africa. Since those distant days I have actually met one of the German lads who was in the line opposite us in North Africa, Hans Teske. In fact, I organised a small reunion at the Medusa Restaurant in December ‘76 for those who had been involved in fighting in and around Steam Roller Farm, February 26, 1943. An officer present, Noel Burdett, hearing Teske and me stating that we must have actually fired at each other that day, said, “Your survival indicates you must both be bloody awful shots.”
Later Hans Teske dispelled the belief that Germans had no sense of humour by inscribing my menu:
“Dear Spike, sorry I missed you on February 26, 1943.”
As I lay dreaming, an unbelievable experience happened. In the dark a farm dog had got into our room. I heard him sniffing around. I made friendly noises and in the dark his cold nose touched my hand. I patted him and left it at that, the next thing the dirty little devil piddled on me. Was he Mussolini’s Revenge?
MY DIARY:
0600 AM: DRIVEN FROM WAGON LINES TO GUN POSITION.
It was sunny, but everywhere wet, damp and muddy. Cancello is a small agricultural town on the great plain that lies on the North bank of the Volturno. I’m in a three-tonner with Driver Kit Masters. At seven we arrive at the gun position, the guns have gone, and all that is left are the M Truck Signallers who are to reel in the D5 lines.
“This is it,” said Driver Masters, pulling up in a morass of mud.
I leap from the vehicle and land knee-deep in it.
“It’s all yours,” says Masters, and speeds away like a priest from a brothel.
Emerging from holes in the ground are mud-caked troglodytes. I recognise Edgington.
“Why lawks a mercy,” he said in Southern Negro tones, “welcome home, massa Milligan, de young massa am home, praise de Laud and hide de Silver.”
“Good God, Edgington, what are you wearing?”
“Mud, it am all de rage.”
“I can’t tell how good it is to be back, mate,” I said.
“Oh what a pity—now we’ll never know.” I offered him a cigarette.
“You must be mad, why in God’s name did you come back?”
“I ran out of illness.”
“Get out! All you got to do is a pee against a Neapolitan karzi wall and you get crabs.”
“Where’s the guns?”
Edgington countenanced himself as a Red Indian. “White men gone, take heap big fire-stick and fuck off.”
More mud-draped creatures are issuing from what had been the Command Post. I suddenly remembered!
“Where’s all my kit?”
“We had to auction it off—it started to smell.”
Jam-Jar Griffin alone and unafraid, his BO having driven the Germans from the Volturno plain.
“Don’t bugger around, everything I treasure is in my big pack.”
Harry shook his head. “Sorry mate, yer big pack has gone AWOL*, but yer kitbag’s safe in G Truck with Alf Fildes.”
≡ Absent without leave
“Where’s Alf Fildes?”
“He’s at the new gun position, last time I saw him he had the shits, anyhow your kit’s in his truck.”
My big pack, lost! It was a major disaster.
“You can report it missing killed in action,” says Edging-ton.
All that I held dear was in there,
things close to a soldier’s heart, like socks, drawers cellular, worst of all my Nazi war loot, a dagger, an Iron Cross, an Afrika Korps hat, and a set of pornographic photographs taken lovingly from a dead Jerry on Long Stop. I was going to send them back to his home. Now never would his mother hold those photographs of three people screwing close to her heart and say, “Oh mein dear son.” Bombardier Fuller is approaching.
“You’re just in time, we’ve got to reel in the OP cable.”
“Oh,” I groaned, “I can’t do that, I’m convalescing from sandfly fever, they’ve got all the sand out but there’s still a lot of flies left.”
He shoves me forward. “On that bleedin’ truck.”
There was no escape. The M Truck signallers start to reel in the line. We travel North along a tree-lined road; ahead in the distance lie a range of mountains, some snow-capped: these are the ones we will have to cross to gain access to the Garigliano plain. Jerry has pulled back into them and is waiting.
“He knows a good thing when he sees it,” says Fuller, looking at them through his war-loot binoculars.
OCTOBER 21, 1943
Reeling in a telephone line is very simple. A 15-cwt ‘Monkey’ truck has a hand-operated cable drum on a mount, you walk along disentangling the line and the lucky Gunner stays on the truck and winds the drum. It was a fiercely contested position, bribes were offered, money and cigarettes exchanged hands. It never worked.
“I know just how a trained chimp feels,” ‘Ticker’ Tume was moaning. He was in a ditch untying the line from a stake. “We’re just trained bloody monkeys,” he went on. “Once you’re caught by a circus, that’s it, they can do what they bloody like, make you ride bicycles, jump through hoops, it’s all to humiliate. I never thought I’d see the day when I was a performing bloody monkey.”
There were cries of encouragement from the lads.
“This isn’t a war,” he continued, “this is a bloody chimps’ tea party.”