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

  Sgt. Steve Lewis A Yewish soldier taken in colour because he had money (N.B. due to the publishers’ lack of money, it’s black and white after all.)

  Help. A giant Yewish bedroll appeared, followed by a Yewish Brigade kitbag, table, chair, tea chest, camouflaged Minorah, and a secondhand copy of the Talmud. He then proceeded to erect the most complicated Heath Robinson network of strings, pulleys, hooks, weights and counter-weights. He wanted to be able to switch lights on and off, raise or lower them, drop his mosquito net, manoeuvre his mess tins and mug near or far, boil a kettle, make tea, toast bread, and open Tower Bridge, all without moving from his bed. I asked him, was he training to be a cripple? He had enough food by his bed to outlast an Atomic War and still open a shop in Golder’s Green. If he had been at Masada it would never have fallen; he would have sold it to the Romans. I pointed out that his wasn’t the only persecuted race. There were the Irish.

  “Spike, the Irish got off light.”

  “We took as much stick as you did.”

  “Listen, we Jews have been persecuted since Egyptian times.”

  I told him I had never read the Egyptian Times.

  “All you suffered from was a shortage of spuds.”

  “Steve, in 1680, there were eleven million Irish. Now there’s only two. We lost nine million.”

  “Nine million. Oh what a terrible accountant.”

  “Don’t joke, they were starved, killed, deported or emigrated.”

  He laughed. “You sure they weren’t Jewish?”

  We had unending arguments. “The Irish? What did they ever have? We had Einstein, Disraeli, Pissarro, Freud. What have the Irish got? Pissed!”

  “We got the Pope and Jack Doyle.” “Jack Doyle the boxer? He’s useless!” “Yes, but we got him.”

  “And there’s never been an Irish Pope. How come?” “It’s the fare.”

  In the shower Steve noticed I’d been circumcised. “Why?” I didn’t know. “To make it lighter? You know, Milligan, if Jerry took you prisoner, that could have got you into a concentration camp.” It was really something when your prick could get you sent to a concentration camp. “Believe me, Spike,” says the Yew, “anyone that sends someone to a concentration camp is a prick.” Amen.

  This was the beginning of an ongoing Judaeo-Christian hilarity. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs, I’d call, “Is that the Yew?” I could hear his stifled giggles.

  “Listen Milligan,” he’d say. “Believe me, the Irish are famous for nothing.” And so to Christmas.

  Yes, Christmas, bloody Christmas. We decided to do our shopping in Naughty Naples. All up the Via Roma urchins are grabbing us and singing, ‘Lae thar piss tub darn bab’. Why in the land of opera do they descend to this crap? If the reverse were to apply in London, little Cockney kids would be singing ‘La Donna e Mobile’ as they begged. We make our Christmas purchases and retire to the Royal Palace, NAAFI, where, God help us, we are assailed by God bless her and keep her…away from us…Gracie Fields. She’d had a bad press at the beginning of the war about living in America, leaving poor Vera Lynn and Ann Shelton to face the bombs. Now she was making up for it. Every day she’d leave her Capri home and bear down on unsuspecting soldiers. “Ow do lads.” Then, without warning, sing ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’.

  After a while the lads had had enough of ‘Ow do lads’ and ‘Sall-eeee’ and the sight of her looming up the stairs would start a stampede out the back, with cries of “Christ! Here she comes again.” Nothing personal against the dear lady, who had a big heart and an enlarged liver, but she did overdo the “Eee ba gum, ‘ave a cup o’ tea lads.”

  Sometimes you wouldn’t know she was in, until from a distant table, you’d hear ‘It’s the biggest Aspidistra in the World’. To get rid of her we directed her to a table of Goumiers (Rapists by appointment to the Allies) by telling her they were Gurkhas. “Sallyyyyyyy, Salleeeee,” she sang at the baffled Moroccans. They didn’t even try to rape her.

  A look-out on the Royal Palace NAAFI roof, watching for signs of Gracie Fields’s boat

  December

  It’s cold, cold, cold. You can strike matches on ‘em. My family have had a photo taken that sends a chill of horror through me. Were they dead or stuffed? My brother has the sneer of a high-born Sioux Chief, my mother has had a bag of flour thrown at her face, and my father looks as though he’s just been asked to leave for an indiscretion.

  A Christmas card from my mother gives my brother second billing, and poor father! Dad is spelt with a small d. Is he getting shorter? There are no traditional Christmas cards in Italy, so I send those available.

  For my father I did a funny drawing of a man with a revolving wig. You see, my father wore one. His fear was that any gale over force three lifted the front and transferred it to the back. People wondered why he wore his hat in the Karzi.

  O2E Christmas Arrangements

  The Welfare Department had made a Christmas tree that stood by the concert stage. A wonderful effort dressed in crepe paper, cotton-wool balls and little candles. Pity about the fire.

  We are putting up snow scenes with make-do commodities.

  My brother, mother and father, Desmond, Florence and Leo Milligan

  A Christmas card from my parents in Brentwood, posted October 10 1944

  To my parents

  To my brother

  We ask the Sick Bay for six rolls of cotton wool and are told that no one can be hurt that bad and live. I pack my presents. Mother has a small glass bubble enclosing Virgin Mary and Child; a good shake and they are obscured in a snow-storm, and death by hypothermia. Father will have his favourite King Edward cigars, but brother Desmond? What do you send a squaddie in the front line? Of course, a slit trench. No, I send him a sandbag, and, just in case he doesn’t laugh, a box of preserved fruit.

  Christmas Eve

  Pouring, ice-cold rain. Steve and I are sitting in the festively decorated canteen. We feel seasonal but would rather feel an ATS. We are taking a little wine for our stomachs’ sake, also for our liver, spleen and giblets. The strains of Sergeant Wilderspin and his O2E choir are approaching. They enter, singing ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ and sneezing. They are collecting for ye Army Benevolent Fund and are soaked to ye skin. At eight o’clock we all file into the concert hall to see the Nativity Play. It’s very good, except the dialects jarred. An Angel of the Lord: “Thar goes t’Bethlehem, sither,” and his sidekick answers, “Weail off tae sae him right awa.” It didn’t detract from the finale around the manger, the choir singing ‘Adeste, fideles’. In that moment all minds were back home by the fire, screwing on the rug. Numerous curtain calls, the Brigadier makes a speech “…a great deal of effort…a special debt of gratitude…not forgetting…screwing on the rug…also like to thank…A Merry Christmas to all our readers…has anyone seen Mademoiselle Ding?”

  Stop the festivities! The Germans have broken our lines in the Ardennes, all our washing is in the mud! Yet another it’s-going-to-be-over-by-Christmas-promise gone. Still, it could be worse. Like poor old Charlie Chaplin who was in a paternity suit — unfortunately it fits him. Steve Lewis looks up from his newspaper, stunned! How can this happen? Will Hitler win after all? Should he telegraph his wife and say, “Sell the stock, only take cash.” Stay cool. Help is coming. Is it John Wayne? No, it’s Sheriff Bernard Law Montgomery. He is going to ‘tidy up’ the battle, which ends with him claiming he’s won it, and he will shortly rise again from the dead. Eisenhower is furious. He threatens to cut Monty’s supply of armoured jockstraps and Blue Unction. Monty apologizes: “Sorry etc., etc. You’re superior by far, Monty.”

  Christmas came and went with all the trimmings, tinned turkey, stuffing, Christmas Pud, all served to us by drunken Sergeants. Now we were all sitting round waiting for 1945. It had been a good year for me. I was alive.

  January 1945

  Cold and rain.

  Letter from home.

  Very quiet month.

  Then, on 23 February 1945, this
drastic message was flashed to the world from the pages of Valjean, the O2E house magazine.

  Trumpeter. Is there no stylish trumpeter in the ranks of the Echelon ? At present the O2E Dance Orchestra is handicapped to a certain extent by the lack of one of these only too rare musicians.

  Ex-trumpeter ‘Spike’ Milligan, who has now gone on to the production line, had to hang up his trumpet on medical grounds, so if there is a trumpeter in our midst please contact SQMS Ward of R/O.

  Milligan has hung up his trumpet! A grateful nation gave thanks!

  It started with pains in my chest. I knew I had piles, but they had never reached this far up before. The Medical Officer made me strip.

  “How long has it been like that?” he said.

  “That’s as long as it’s ever been,” I replied.

  He ran his stethoscope over my magnificent nine-stone body. “Yes,” he concluded, “you’ve definitely got pains in your chest. I can hear them quite clearly.”

  “What do you think it is, sir?”

  “It could be anything.”

  Anything? A broken leg? Zeppelin Fever? Cow Pox? La Grippe? Lurgi?

  “You play that wretched darkie music on your bugle, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You must give it up.”

  “Why?”

  “I hate it.” He goes on to say, “It’s straining your heart.”

  Bloody idiot. It’s 1985, I’m a hundred and nine, and I’m still playing the trumpet. He’s dead. At the time I stupidly believed him and packed up playing.

  The band without me. As you can see, they don’t sound half as good

  The first Saturday Music Hall of the New Year was a split bill. The first half Variety, the second half, a play Men in Shadow. It was seeing the latter that prompted me to do a lunatic version of our own. We timed it to go on the very night after the play finished, using all the original costumes and scenery.

  Men in Gitis.

  Tomorrow the chief attraction at the Concert Hall will be the super, skin-creeping, spine-tingling production ‘Men in Gitis’. In it are the craziest crowd of local talent that one could imagine. Spim Bolligan, the indefatiguable introducer of this new type of show, describes it as ‘colossal’.

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  I wrote the script with Steve Lewis and Len Prosser. It was total lunacy, starting the play before the audience came in; several of the actors outside the hall doing the first act to the queue; the curtain going up and down throughout the play; the orchestra coming into the pit calling out “Bread…give us bread,” then proceeding to tune up every ten minutes. Bodies were hauled up to the ceiling by their ankles asking for a reduction in rent; people came through trap doors, and all the while a crowd of soldiers done up as Hitler tried to get a grand piano across the stage, and then back again. It ended with the projection of the Gaumont British news all over us, with the music up loud, while the band played ‘God Save the King’ at speed. As the audience left we leapt down among them with begging bowls, asking for money, and shouted insults after them into the night. How were we received? See below.

  ENTERTAINMENTS — contd. from Page 1.

  Music Hall

  Last Saturday’s Musical Hall was one of the best ever presented. The highspot was undoubtedly ‘Men in Gitis’ — a satirical sequel to ‘Men in Shadow’. This type of show is either liked or hated, and quite a few did not care for it at all, but the majority of people present gave the distinguished performers a really good ovation. ‘Spike’ Milligan was at his craziest and the show was a cross beween ‘Itma’ and ‘Hellzapoppin’.

  The entry of Major Bloor, Major New and the RSM added to the enjoyment of this burlesque which culminated in the ‘Mass Postings’ poster being exhibited.

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  I love that ‘good ovation’ as against a bad one, however it wasn’t bad for lunatics. Spurred by success, like vultures we prepared to wreck the next play. This was…

  Future Attractions

  Tonight and tomorrow there is the well advertised ‘White Cargo’ showing in the Concert Hall. This play, which some may remember seeing in pre-war days, has a first class story running throughout and should definitely not be missed.

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  The innocent actor-manager putting it on was Lt. Hector Ross. No sooner was White Cargo over than Black Baggage was on its way. With maniacal relish we went on to destroy the play piecemeal. The best part of it was that we had persuaded Hector Ross to keep appearing and saying lines from the original show, then bursting into tears and exiting. It was uproarious fun. I didn’t know it, but I was taking my first steps towards writing the Goon Show. For this I have to thank Hitler, without whose war it would never have happened.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 1984

  NINETY-YEAR-OLD HITLER IS SHOVELLING. SHIT AND SALT.

  HITLER:

  Hear zat? You must let me be free. I am zer inventor of zer Coon Show. Ven zer Queen hears zis she will giff me zer OBE and ein free Corgi.

  Black Baggage in progress. X marks Spike

  Romance Three

  To brighten up our winter gloom, we have been sent some thirty ATS ladies. Scrotum Agitators. No longer shackled by the band, I could stay on the dance floor, dazzling them with my masterful command of the Waltz, which I had perfected ever since I learned to count up to three. Among this new clutch of steaming females are two little darlings, Rosetta Page and ‘Candy’ Withers. I have my eyes on them, and hope to get my hands on later. Stage one: the chat-up-in-the-dance. Rosetta is a great dancer. Oh she’s from Glasgow? How interesting! Isn’t that where Harry Lauder appeared? I didn’t get far with Rosetta. Candy. Good evening, do you come here often? Only during wars. Ha ha. Why had I given up playing the trumpet? I daren’t tell her it was a suspected coronary. I mean, no respectable ATS wants to be found under a dead gunner. No! I wanted to concentrate on Buddhism. Oh really? Yes, I’d always been into Buddhism. It explored the upper ventricles. The ventricles? Yes. I couldn’t go into that now, but would she like to come outside, strip naked, and see what happened? No? Did I hear right? Did she say No to a handsome waltzing 1-2-3 gunner Milligan? Yes. Oh fuck! She’s going out with a Sergeant, but she does ‘like me’. I said could I see her in between? In between what? Sheets. Don’t be silly. OK, can I see her in between Sergeants? Sergeants? She’s only going out with one. Good — could I see her in between him? OK, Sunday. Sunday we’ll go to Caserta Palace. We’ll walk through the gardens then I’ll try and screw her; then we’ll have tea at the Palace NAAFI and I’ll try and screw her; we will then go to the cinema, where certain delights will accompany the Clark Gables! A Sunday came…and went. I tell you folks, holding hands is no substitute. I returned to my bedroom bent double with strictures from the waist down. Steve is up late reading the Jewish Chronicle. He’s deep into an article about Hitler never having been seen in the nude, but I’m not interested in nude Hitlers, I want nude Candy. How could I bend her to my will? Then the words of my friendly district visiting rapist camed to me. The hot weather! Of course! Heat made women more available, hence the invention of Central Heating. So I planned it all. Next time I met the little darling I’d take her to a warm room, close the windows, turn up the heating, make her drink boiling Horlicks then massage her with Sloane’s Linament. If that failed I’d set fire to her, then leap on. I kept sending her billets-doux and my measurements.

  The Printed Word in Maddaloni

  Our Librarian, Corporal John Hewitt, tried to foster the written word. Till he arrived our library had no one in charge of our book. He put it to rights by procuring numerous volumes. “This,” he said, holding up a ragged book with covers hanging like limp wings, “this is the Bible of the masses.” No Orchids for Miss Blandish. He points to the drool stains. I’m above this, I have borrowed Darwin’s Origin of the Species, which my father had said was ‘Rubbish’. He was the origin of the species. Hewitt wants to know why I’ve had Dante’s Divine Comedy for
two months. I daren’t tell him it’s a counter-weight on Lewis’s mosquito net. ‘Twas Hewitt, himself a poet (silly to be not yourself and a poet) who introduced poetry contests, which he lived to regret.

  LONDON

  Oh London, none sufficiently can praise

  The courage fowering ‘mid your smoke maze

  Of Limehouse alleys and suburban streets;

  From every home unfailing humour beats

  Each newer outrage with a newer jest,

  And death has never claimed but second best.

  This deathless spirit freed from shattered bones

  Scarce sheds a tear above your broken stones

  Scarce pauses far a moment longer than

  It takes to snap the slender life of man,

  ‘Ere taking stand within another heart,

  Doubling the measure of its counter-smart

  Until today your limitless reserve

  Of courage, breaks the Nazis’ vaunted nerve.

  W.J. O’Leary, Pte.

  “That was the winner,” he said sobbing on my shoulder. “You should have seen the bad ones,” he lamented.

  Furlough

  Yes. “We’ve been furloughed,” said Steve, holding up Part Two Orders. Why had we been furloughed? In appreciation of our Men in gitis efforts. One whole week in the Capital again. We are away next morning, Sgt. Steve Lewis, Private Eddie Edwards and Gunner S. Milligan. It looked like an old joke. “There was this Englishman, this Irishman and this man of the Hebrew persuasion and they were all in the Army, and then one day, ha ha ha, they were all given leave to Rome, ha ha ha.” Once again it’s the 56 Area Rest Camp. Steve, being senior, signs us in. “You realize I’ve signed for you bastards. For God’s sake please avoid the following: rape, murder, arson, little boys, gefilte fish, Mlle Ding.” We queued for a dinner of Irish stew, sponge roll and custard.