Memoires 05 (1985) - Where Have All The Bullets Gone Read online

  March 5

  DIARY:

  HIGH TEMPERATURE REPORTED SICK

  “You’ve got Gingivitis,” said the M.O.

  “Gingivitis?”

  “It’s inflamed gums.” I see. A sort of Trench Foot of the mouth.

  “It was very common in World War One.”

  “Is it a better class now?”

  “Do you clean your teeth regularly?”

  “Yes, once a week.”

  “You’ve got it quite badly, you can pick it up anywhere.”

  “Not in the legs surely?”

  He smiled. “I’m putting you in the 70th General.”

  The 70th! I’d done the 92nd, now the 70th! BINGO! “Gunner Milligan, you have just won the golden thermometer!”

  70th General Hospital Pompeii

  A long cool ward full of military illnesses. Through the window I see a wall with faded Fascist slogans:

  OBBIDIRE, CREDERE, LAVORARE, MUSSOLINI HA SEMPRE RAGGIONE.

  Obey, believe, work. Three words that would send a British Leyland worker into a swoon.

  A gay nurse leads me to my bed. “Put those on.” He points to some blue pyjamas. Each side of me are two soldiers with bronchitis. They are asleep. When they wake up they still have it. One is from Lewisham, the other isn’t. The gay nurse returns and takes my temperature.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a thermometer,” he says and minces off.

  A doctor appears escorted by a Matron with a huge bosom. She tapers away and disappears at the waist. She has Eton-cropped hair and a horsy face and if you shouted ‘Gee up’, she would gallop away. They stop at bed-ends to check patients’ records. Who will be in the top ten? Last week it was Corporal Welts with Ulcerated Groin, but coming up from nowhere and coming in at Number two is Gunner Milligan and Real Disease with Gingivitis! My God, it’s the drunken sandy-haired Scots doctor from Volume II! How did he find his way into Volume V?

  “See,” he mused, “I know yew, see, Salerno wasn’t it?”

  “Yes sir, last time I had Salerno.” Matron hands him my . chart which is lost from sight as she heaves it from under her bosom.

  The gay nurse arrives. “I’ve got to paint your gums.” “I want someone better than you — Augustus John, Renoir…”

  He applies the scalding Gentian Violet. It tastes like cats’ piss boiled in turpentine. A brilliant purple colour.

  The days pass. A parcel delivery. By the shape it must have been a Caesarian. Now the hot weather has arrived, my mother has sent me a balaclava and gloves, plus three socks. She explains: “One is a spare, son.” I lay them on my bed to rest.

  “There’s one short,” says Lewisham.

  “No, no, they’re all the same length,” I say.

  “I mean, shouldn’t there be four?” says Lewisham.

  “No, my mother always makes three, you see, I have a one-legged brother.”

  Lewisham goes mute, but he has his uses: he has a bird who visits him with a pretty sister who is soon onto me. I hide my three socks in case she thinks I’ve got three legs, or two legs and a willy warmer. She is short plump and pretty. Her name is Maria. (All girls in Italy not called Mussolini are called Maria.) Tea and biscuits are being served. We sit and talk broken Italian and biscuits. In the days that follow she brings me grapes, figs, oranges and apples. I get clinical dysentery.

  March 10

  DIARY:

  CURED!

  I can leave today. A tearful farewell with Maria. She loads me with another bag of diaretics. “Come back soon,” she says.

  An ambulance drops me off at my little grey home in the marquee where Guardsman Rogers is waiting. “Thank God you’re back,” he says. I promise as soon as I see him I will. He’s been snowed under with office work, he’s been working his head to the bone, etc., etc. All this was to pale into insignificance at what was to come.

  Volcanoes, Their Uses in World War II

  Yes, Vesuvius had started to belch smoke at an alarming rate, and at night tipples of lava were spilling over the cone. Earth tremors were felt; there was no more inadequate place for a thousand bomb-happy loonies. An area order: “People at the base of the Volcano should be advised to leave.” Signed Town Major, Portici, a hundred miles away. Captain Peters is telling me that as I speak the ‘Iti’ to “take the jeep and tell those people,” he waves a walking stick out to sea, “tell them it’s dangerous for them to stay!” Bloody fool, it was like telling Sir Edmund Hillary: “I must warn you that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world.”

  It was evening when I set out in the jeep. Due to the smoke, it was dark before sunset. A strange unearthly light settled on the land, reminding me of those Turner chiaroscuro paintings. Up the little winding roads through fields of dark volcanic soil. I did it, but I felt bloody silly shouting out “Attenzione! E pericoloso rimanere qui!” I stopped at the last farm up the slopes. It was dark now, the mountain rumbling and the cone glowing scarlet like the throat of a mythical dragon. A yellow glow in a window. A little short weathered farmer is standing at the door. At my approach he waves. I give him the message. He appears to have got it already: “Vesuvio, molto cattivo.”

  “Si,” I said. I was fluent in ‘sis’.

  Would I like some wine?

  “Si.”

  He beckons me into his home. Accustomed to the gloom, I see a humble adobe room. An oil lamp shows simple things, a table, chairs, a sideboard with yellowing photos; a candle burns before the Virgin, possibly the only one in the area. In the centre of the room is a large circular stone, hollowed out and burning charcoal. Around it sit the farmer’s twin daughters.

  As I entered, they stood up, smiling; identical twins, about five foot four, wearing knee-length rough black woollen dresses, black woollen stockings to the knee and wooden-sole sandals. Madre? “Madre morta. Tedesco fusillato.” Killed by a stray shell which he blamed on the Germans. The girls were fourteen, making a total of twenty-eight.

  We sat and drank red wine. Motherless at fourteen, a war on, and the mountain about to blow. It was worse than Catford. The girls sat close together, heads inclined towards each other, they radiated sweetness and innocence.

  The farmer is weatherbeaten. If not the weather, then someone has beaten the shit out of him; he has hands like ploughed fields. He is telling me his family have been here since — he makes a gesture, it’s timeless. I could be talking to the head gardener from the House of Pansa at the time of Nero. His trousers certainly are.

  I drove back by the light of Vesuvius, it saved the car batteries. The lava was now flowing down the sides towards the sea, the rumbling was very loud. The camp was all awake and in a state of tension. Men stood outside their tents staring at the phenomenon, their faces going on and off in the volcano’s fluctuating light. It was all very exciting, you didn’t get this sort of stuff in Brockley SE26.

  The volcano claimed its first victim. A forty-year-old Private from the Pioneer Corps dies from a heart attack. Captain Peters was not a man to worry about such things. “He’ll miss the eruption,” he said, under great pressure trying to calm the camp of loonies. “Keep calm,” he shouted to himself, popping pills all the while. Men were running away from the camp. It presented a problem.

  REX vs VOLCANOES

  COLONEL:

  What is the charge?

  CAPT. P:

  Desertion in the face of volcanoes.

  COLONEL:

  Has he deserted his volcanoes before?

  CAPT. P:

  No, sir, his volcano record is spotless.

  Earth tremors are coming up the legs and annoying the groins but nothing falls off. Naples is in a state of high anxiety; church bells ringing, Ities praying, dogs barking, alarmed birds chirping flitting from tree to tree; some of the camp loonies are also chirping and flitting from tree to tree.

  Diary: March 21

  Very dark morning, heavy rumblings. Is it Vesuvius? No, it’s Jock. It was my day off. I hitched a ride to Naples and t
he Garrison Theatre to see Gracie Fields in ‘Sing As We Go’. Having never sung as I’d been, I was keen to see how it was done. It was terrible, so terrible that I thought that at any moment she would sing the bloody awful Warsaw Concerto. She was on to her hundredth ‘Eee bai gum’ when the shit hit the fan. The whole theatre shook, accompanied by labyrinthine rumblings. Vesuvius had blown its top. The audience became a porridge of screams and shouts of “What the fuck was that?” all the while hurtling towards the exit. It coincided with Gracie Fields, followed by spanner-clutching extras, marching towards the screen singing ‘Sing As We Go’. It looked as if the screaming mass were trying to escape from her. I alone was in hysterics. Outside was no laughing matter — the sky was black with ash, and Vesuvius roaring like a giant monster.

  Rivulets of lava, like burst veins, were rolling down the seaward side. The streets were full of people walking fast with the shits.

  I thumbed a lift. “Torre Del Greco?”

  “You must be bleedin’ mad,” said a driver.

  I assured him I was.

  “That’s where all the bloody lava’s going.”

  “Yes,” I said, “lava come back to me.” Not much of a joke in 1985, but at the time I was an amateur soldier, not a professional comic, and it wasn’t a bad joke for an earthquake.

  No lifts, so I walk; it starts to rain a mixture of ash and water, bringing with it lumps of pumice the size of marbles. So this is what Dystopia was like. I trudge wearily down the road to Pompeii. But wait! This was the very road trod by Augustus, Nero, Tiberius, even the great Julius Caesar, and I thought ‘Fuck ‘em’ and was well pleased. All the while people are running in and out of their homes like those Swiss weather clocks.

  A black American driver pulls up: “Wanna lift?”

  I don’t need a lift, I need a lorry and he has one. Yes, he’s going to ‘Torrey Del Greckoe’. He offers me a cigarette, then gum, then chocolate. I wait for money but nothing comes. The fall of ash has turned his hair grey. He looked every bit like Uncle Tom. I stopped short of asking how little Eva was, or how big Eva was now. When we arrived at the Loony Camp it was pitch-black and so was he. “Goodbye,” said his teeth.

  The camp was in a state of ‘chassis’. Half the loonies had bolted, and the Ities were looting the camp. Captain Peters has organized the sane, issued them with pickaxe handles, and they were somewhere up the slopes belting the life out of thieving Ities. The guard were alerted and roaming the perimeter with loaded rifles.

  “Captain Peters told us to shoot on sight,” they said.

  “Shoot what on sight?” I said.

  “Oh, he didn’t go into details,” they said.

  There was nothing for it but to lie back and enjoy it. What am I waiting for? — there is the jeep unoccupied. I put it in gear and drive off, headlights full on to penetrate the viscous gloom. I stop to purchase two bottles of Lachryma Christi, and on to the gates of Pompeii Veccia, La Scavi! A short walk to the Porta Marina, down the Via Marina, the Via Abbondanza, then square on in the Strada Stabiana and there at the end pulsates Vesuvius! I swig the wine. It’s all heady stuff. I’m in a time warp, this is AD 79. The streets are rippling with fleeing Pompeiians, except, I recall, the plaster cast of the couple screwing. What courage, banging away with red hot cinders bouncing off your bum. What courage, the first case of someone coming and going at the same time. The roar of the mountain is blanketing the countryside. More wine. I make my way to the house of Meander, the wall frescos dancing in the fibrillating light, Fauns, Nymphs, more wine, Leda, Bacchus, more wine, Ariadne, Lily Dunford, Betty Grable, someone with big boobs. I finish the wine and it finished me. What a night! For three hours I had been Pliny. I had also been pissed. I drove back to the camp in great humour. The camp guard is Polish. He gets it all wrong.

  “Health my friend! What goes on there?”

  “The green swan of the East meets the grey bear,” I said.

  “Pass it up,” he said.

  I’m told that Captain Peters has gone to the Portici to ‘An Officers’ Dance’. “What is it?” I said. “Firewalking?”

  I fell asleep knowing I’d never have another day like that.

  I was wrong. I awoke and it was another day just like that.

  The cooks had ‘buggered off’. We raided the cookhouse and made breakfast, porridge and volcanic ash. The grey powdery fall-out was everywhere. It looked like a plague of dandruff.

  Captain Peters approaches, waving his stick and cracking his shin in the process. “Ah! Milligan, I’m putting you and phnut! Rogers in charge.” Why? There isn’t anybody else. “I’m off to the Town Major’s. If any of the cooks come back, phnut! put them under arrest.”

  “Is that for cooking or deserting?”

  The eruption reached its zenith that day, and then all was quiet; but the breakdown of all organization at the camp must have reached the ear of someone who decided that loonies need peace and tranquillity to recover, and so it came to pass.

  Map showing Baiano

  “We are moving to a place called Baiano.” The Guardsman has spoken. The farming village of Baiano lay N-E of Naples, by about twenty kilometres, on a bad day thirty (see map).

  “I will, phnut, drive,” said Captain Peters, talking to the steering wheel of the jeep. A dry sunny day, the Captain dons dust goggles, thinks he’s Biggies. “Hold tight,” he shouts, and with the engine roaring, engages every gear and stalls.

  We lurch away, our bodies rocketing back and forth like hiccuping drunks. Simple single-storey buildings line our route, in clusters, then occasional spaces like missing teeth.

  Now and then an affluent neo-classical villa. Dust has us putting handkerchiefs round our faces; we look like an armed posse after Billy the Kid. Midday, we reach Nola, a dusty working/middle-class city.

  “We’ll stop here for phnut! refreshments,” says the Captain, pulling up outside a trattoria. We sit at an outside table, sipping coffee and brandy. The lass who served us, Oh! help me! she’s lush, dark, boobs, buttocks, a smile like a piano keyboard, eyes like Bambi, and oh! those dimples on the back of her knees. A line of Shermans on tank transporters rumble and clank through the Piazza. There was still a war on.

  “I suppose some of those will become coffins for some poor bastards,” says Sergeant Arnolds, himself an ex-tank man.

  Having unwound his neck from staring at the waitress, Captain Peters says: “This used to be a phnut! Roman garrison town.” This remark brought forth absolutely no response, in fact the silence became positively an embarrassment. I tried to help.

  “That was very nice of you to tell us that this was a Roman garrison town.”

  “Oh,” he said, smilingly, “think nothing of it.” In fact we didn’t think anything of it.

  The bill. Captain Peters carries out a vigorous patting of his pockets, the best display of overacting I’ve ever seen. “Damn,” he says, “I’ve come out without any money.” He was a known mean bastard. On pay day, before his money even saw the light of day, it was into an envelope on its way ‘To the little woman who needs it’. He would have had us believe it was an impoverished female dwarf.

  Revenge is sweet, but not fattening. After the war I was about to open an account at Lloyds of Lewisham and I was to meet the manager. My God, it was Captain Peters. “Milligan,” he said joyfully.

  Hurriedly I started patting my pockets. “Damn,” I said, “I’ve come out without any money, the little woman needs it.” To my lasting joy I still have an unpaid overdraft there — ten shillings since 1949.

  Early afternoon, and we arrived at the little village of Baiano with its paved grid-orientated streets lined with two- storeyed buildings. The affluent lived in the outskirts in cool villas. Set in flat farming country with a range of low hills running east-west along the north side. The main street had shops cheek by jowl with goods on show outside — sacks of lentils, grain, beans, flour. The butcher displayed miserable bits of meat, but fish was plentiful — squid, octopus, prawns, mussels — and
occasionally the monger throws a bucket of water to freshen them up and drown the flies. There’s an old-fashioned pharmacy with large glass jars of red and green water; more anon.

  BAIANO

  The Baiano Rehabilitation Camp

  The camp is half a mile outside the town adjacent to a cemetery. The entrance is flanked by two Nissen huts, one the general office, the other the Captain’s office. A whitewashed logo of stones spells out REINFORCEMENT REALLOCATION AND TRAINING CENTRE. It’s laid out on a tented grid system and the camp centre has a large dining tent. Across the road in a light green villa is the new ‘Officers’ Wing’, made necessary by the increasing number of bomb-happy officers. “It would be demoralizing, phnut, for the officers to be bomb-happy in front of the phnut! ORs,” says Peters, who is bomb-happy in front of us all the time.

  The setting was very tranquil, away from noise, war and volcanoes. “You see,” said my Scots prophet, Rogers, “we’ll never be bloody heard of again.”

  WHITEHALL 1952

  The Scene:

  CHURCHILL lays on a couch being massaged with brandy by a GENERAL.

  ALANBROOKE:

  Isn’t it time we brought them home?

  CHURCHILL:

  No, they’re loonies — they’ll vote Labour.

  ALANBROOKE:

  We’ve had letters from Milligan’s mother and father.

  CHURCHILL:

  It’s more than he has.

  ALANBROOKE:

  They want to thank you for keeping him out there, and to announce a room to let with gas ring and kipper fork, twelve shillings per week.

  CHURCHILL:

  Tell General de Gaulle we’ve found him an embassy.

  Orginisateum

  A complete office and service staff have arrived, including Private Dick Shepherd, a medical orderly from Rochdale. His knowledge of medicine goes like this: “Soldiers laying down are sick ones.” A clerk in the form of Private ‘Bronx’ Weddon of the Berkshires, both misnomers — he had been neither to the Bronx nor Berkshire. He was from Brighton, but you couldn’t go around saying: “I’m Brighton Weddon.” He said he was ‘A journalist who worked for Marley Tiles’. I didn’t get the drift. Another addition was the Camp ‘Runner’, Private Andrews; that is, at the mention of work he started to run. He had an accent like three Billy Connollys, he hated the army, he hated the job, he hated the world and all the planets adjacent.