Where Have All the Bullets Gone?

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First published by M & J Hobbs and Michael Joseph 1985
Published in Penguin Books 1986
Reissued in this edition 2012

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BULLETS GONE?

Spike Milligan was one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1918, he was educated in India and England before joining the Royal Artillery at the start of the Second World War and serving in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he forged a career as a jazz musician, sketch-show writer and performer, touring Europe with the Bill Hall Trio and the Ann Lenner Trio, before joining forces with, among others, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, to create the legendary Goon Show. Broadcast on BBC Radio, the ten series of the Goon Show ran from 1951 until 1960 and brought Spike to international fame, as well as to the edge of sanity and the break-up of his first marriage. He had subsequent success as a stage and film actor, as the author of over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children’s stories, and with his long-running one-man show. In 1992 he was made a CBE and in 2001 an honorary KBE, and in 2000 and 2001 he received two Lifetime Achievement Awards for writing and for comedy. He died in 2002.

In my previous war books, alas, to my sorrow, some of those mentioned took offence at some of the references, which of course were intended to be humorous. But then you can’t please everybody, as the late Adolf Hitler said, so in this book I have used fictitious names. I would still like to add that the book is intended to be humorous.

Spike Milligan

Foreword

The title of this book is a phrase remembered down the years. As I was lying on a makeshift bed in a rain-ridden tent alongside a Scots Guardsman, Jock Rogers, in a camp for the bomb-happy miles behind the firing line, I realized that for the first time in a year and a half, I was not worrying about mortar bombs, shells or Spandaus, and I said to him ‘Where have all the bullets gone?’ I had totally forgotten this utterance until one night, during a visit to South Africa, I was arriving at the theatre and there outside the stage door was the tall lean Scots Guardsman, now grey but still as positive as ever. ‘Where have all the bullets gone?’ he said. A quick drink and we were back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us, and Jock taking a drag on his cigarette and saying, ‘I think we’ve got grounds for a rent rebate.’ He was one of many who entered and left my life in the years 1944 and ’45, and in this book I have begun the story with my leaving the front line Regiment (19 Battery 56 Heavy Field RA) and frigging around in a sort of khaki limbo until someone found a job for me to do. It was all to lead to my making the world of entertainment my profession, but when you think that you have to have a world war to find the right job, it makes you think. Here it is then.

Afragola

What is an Afragola? An Afragola is a small grotty suburb of Bella Napoli. Named after a Centurion who performed a heroic deed against Spartacus and Co: he hit one of them and in return was killed. A grateful Emperor named this spot in his honour. It was a spot I wouldn’t give to a leopard. A field adjacent to this ‘spot’ is now a transit camp for ‘bomb-happy’ soldiers and I was now ‘bomb-happy’, having been dumped here, along with some untreated sewage, following treatment at No. 2 General Hospital, Caserta. After several medical boards, I was down-graded to B2, considered loony and ‘unfit to be killed in combat’ by either side. My parents were so disappointed.

It’s a bleak misty day with new added drizzle for extra torment. Mud! How did it climb up your body, over your hat, and back down into your boots? The camp’s official title is REHABILITATION. Oxford Dictionary: Rehabilitation: Dealing with the restoration of the maimed and unfit to a place in society. So! Now I was maimed, unfit, and about to be restored to a place in society! The camp was a mixture of ‘loonies’ and ‘normals’. One couldn’t tell the difference, save during air-raids when the loonies dropped everything and ran screaming in the direction of away, crying ‘Mummy’. Today mud and men were standing around in huddled groups or sitting in the tents with the flaps up; our camp emblem should have been a dead hippopotamus. A Sergeant Arnolds appears to be ‘running the camp’ … into the ground. He was to organization what Arthur Scargill was to landscape gardening. Would I like to be a unit clerk? Why? He had spotted a pencil in my pocket. The job has advantages – excused parades for one, and I sleep in a large marquee, which is the office. Having a tilly lamp put me in the ‘that rotten bastard can read in bed’ category.

At ten of a morning, a lorry would arrive bearing the latest intake of ‘loonies’. I would document them on large foolscap forms that were never asked for, nor ever seen again. The weather is foul, or more, duck. The damp! Matches, like Tories, wouldn’t strike, fags went out and never came back, paper wouldn’t crackle, blankets had the sickly sweet smell of death. Men took their battledresses to bed to keep them dry and, sometimes, for companionship.

February 14

From the pelting rain a lone guardsman reports to the tent, wrung out – he could become a tributary of the Thames. He’s got fish in his pockets and is going mouldy. Tall, thin, a dark Celtic image, a Scots Guard, though covered in so much muck he could well be a Mud Guard. He dumps his kit in the marquee. It goes Squeegeee! Sergeant Arnolds cautions him: ‘Yew, kinnot sleep hin ’ere.’ The guardsman’s face screws up: ‘I’m fuckin’ stayin’ in here Jamie, and no cunt is gonna ha me oot.’ Arnolds exits muttering threats. Guardsman ‘Jock’ Rogers becomes resident and, to save face, Sergeant Arnolds appoints him ‘Runner’, even though he only walks.

Helping lose the war is the army food. Cordon Brown. Bully beef! The meat in these tins was from beasts, proud descendants of cattle introduced by the Conquistadores of Cortez to graze and grow fat on the lush sunlit pastures of the Aztecs. Now lukewarm bits of them were floating around my mess tin, in watery gravy. ‘I’ve seen cows hurt worse than this and live,’ says Guardsman Rogers. I had never seen trasparent custard before. Rogers is convinced that the cooks will be tried as war criminals. A camel couldn’t pass through the eye of a needle, he says, but his breakfast could.

I say I’m doing my best. He shoots a glance at my sleeve. ‘My stripes are at the cleaners, sir, getting the blood off.’ I tell him I’m here because I’m a ‘loony’. He departs for the UK.

I never saw him again. I wonder if he survived. He never attended Battery reunions. Perhaps he was killed, which is one way of avoiding Battery reunions.

News

Fighting on the Cassino front is savage, like World War I. My God! They’ve bombed the Monastery into rubble. I can’t believe it. It’s true. We must be bloody mad … I know the head Abbot was, oh the bill for repairs …

New intakes are arriving. All ask that haunting question. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ I try and reassure them. ‘You’ll be OK here, chum.’ I wished I could have said: ‘I see a dark millionairess who will soothe the swelling and lay hands on you.’

Hope is coming! An ENSA Concert Party! Strong men broke down and cried, others knelt and prayed, the rest faced England and sang ‘Jerusalem’. Would it be sing-you-to-death Gracie Fields? Michael Wilding and his wig? In anticipation we all waited in a muddy field for its arrival. It appeared in the form of a large American lorry which backed towards us. On the tailboard a sign: ENSA PRESENTS THE TAILBOARD FOLLIES. The tailboard is lowered by a dwarf-like driver (cheers). The back flaps still hanging, the bottom half of a piano and a pianist are revealed, also the bottom half of a man in evening dress who throws up the flaps (cheers). He is a middle-aged man who has been dead ten years. He wrestles a microphone down to his height. ‘Last man was taller than me,’ he says in the embarrassed tones of a comic who will never make it. ‘Well,’ he chortled, ‘here we are.’ Bloody fool, we all knew where we were. ‘First, to cheer you up, is our pianist Doris Terrible!’ (Cheers). This is the old dear whose top half now reveals that she’s about sixty-five, and also dead. Heavily rouged and mascaraed, a masterpiece of the embalmer’s art, she plunged into the piano as if it were a wash tub. ‘Ma, he’s making eyes at me’, ‘Blue Birds over the White Cliffs of Dover’. On she thundered, the lorry shaking under the assault. We give her an ovation. ‘Now boys,’ she yodelled, ‘what would you like to hear next?’ A Cockney voice: ‘We’d like to hear some bloody music.’ She pretends to laugh, but we notice her hands are clenching and unclenching like the Boston Strangler’s, whom she later became. Again the mike-wrestling compère. He tells a few crappy gags. I suppose he meant well, but then so did Hitler. Ah, this is better! The Rumpo Twins! Two blondes, dressed as sailors with short skirts, tap dance and sing through ‘The Fleet’s in Port Again’. Big cheers, whistles, and ‘Get ’em down.’

‘Here to sing melodies divine is Gravard Lax.’ A time-ravaged middle-aged very fat tenor comes forward. ‘Lend us yer ration book,’ comes a cry.

‘Good evening,’ he says in a high catarrhal voice, like snails had crawled up his nose. ‘Itt-isser, a greattt pleasurererrr, to beee-er here-er to-nightttt-er.’

‘Ha ha ha-er’ says the singer, meaning ‘You Bastard-er.’ ‘I would like to sing the Bowmen of England-er.’

Mrs Terrible thunders the intro. Now, it so happens, at that very moment, a squadron of Heinkel bombers, with the engines cut, were gliding in to bomb Naples and/or Mrs Terrible and her piano. The engines roar into life, followed by the ascending banshee wail of the sirens, which synchronize with the opening of the tenor’s mouth. ‘My God,’ said Guardsman Rogers, ‘he’s singing the air-raid warning.’ Bombs start to drop, the entire audience vanishes and the driver slips the lorry into gear and drives away. I watched transfixed with laughter as the tenor, still singing ‘The Bowmen’ was transported to safety, staggering and holding the sides of the lorry as they turned left and drove up the road to Afragola. He was still in full song as he disappeared into the darkness and I could only wonder when he stopped – did he reach Cassino? They don’t write songs like that any more.

HITLERGRAM NO. SINS

HITLER: Hello Goering? How did zer air-raid go?

GOERING: Ve are breaking up zer Tailboard Follies, for zem zer war is over. Next time, Tommy Trinder, Ann Shelton and Micheal Wilding and his wig!

HITLER: Gut. Soon Vera Lynn and zer White Cliffs of Dover Sole will sue for peace.

February 30

The day after, a notice appears on Part Two orders: ‘The ENSA Concert is cancelled until further notice.’ The war seems to have stopped, the weather and casualties have ground our advance to a halt. If no news is good news, we must all be delirious with happiness. Guardsman Rogers has been posting little pieces of mud home. ‘Dear Mother, This is a piece of mud. When you have enough, stand on it, and have a holiday in sunny Italy.’ The days pass, life is like a clock with no hands. – Wait! Excitement beckons. An Inspection? INSPECTION???? HERE??? Everybody’s covered in mud! We’re ankle deep in it! We are all shit order! Yet, somewhere the British Army have found a Colonel suffering from I-must-have-an-inspection withdrawal symptoms. A BBC documentary of what followed, would go thus:

It was a proud day for the British Army and a hysterical one for me. If only Hitler had known.

HITLERGRAM NO.3MEI

HITLER: If only I had known.

GOEBBELS: If only you had known vat?

HITLER: That’s vat I don’t know.

92 General Hospital Naples

Mud and trench foot have triumphed! We move to 92 General Naples! Here we are in warm dry billets and for a time the administration was taken over by the hospital, so Jock and I were ‘spare wanks’ but were told to ‘Stand by’. We did. We ‘stood by’. What we were standing by for we knew not, but whenever we were asked. ‘What are you men doing?’ we replied ‘Standing by, sir’ and it sufficed.

Naples, land of Wine, Women and Syph. The Borsa Nera! My parents sent me all my post office savings – no good leaving it mouldering in England when here I could become rich, rich, rich! In time it arrived, smuggled in a box cunningly marked Pile Suppositories. My parents were no fools. Six pounds! Wait till this money hits the black market! Next evening, on the Via Roma, I made contact.

‘Hey, Joe,’ (he’d got my name wrong!) ‘you wanna change money or a fuck?’

He shook out the money. ‘Six pounds?’ he said. ‘Is datta all?’ He was joking, he was just trying to play it cool.

I nodded like James Cagney and I made with the shoulders. ‘What’s the rate?’ I said, this time as George Raft. Two thousand lire. Great. The hit man looked up and down the street. ‘You waita here, wid my two a friends.’ He indicated two young urchins and made off.

I waited. We all waited. ‘He takea longa time,’ said one urchin. ‘I go see whata happen’ and left. Three down, one to go. We wait.

And none to go. I waited ‘herea’, the evening dew settled on me, midnight, I waited ‘herea’ for three hours. Technically I’m still waiting. James Cagney, George Raft and Bombardier Milligan have been conned. I walked back down the Via Roma as Charlie Chaplin.

Yes! I’ll get my own back! I’ll buy cigarettes cheap! Twenty Philip Morris. It was strange – the ship bearing my six pounds in a Pile Suppository box had risked U-boats, dive bombers, all that bravery for nothing.

Back at the 92 General, Rogers is waiting expectantly. ‘Well, ha’ you got spondulicks?’ he said, rubbing his hands. I tell my woeful story, he laughs at each revelation. Never mind, have a real American cigarette. I open a packet like John Wayne, give the base a flick, sawdust spurts out. Rogers laughs out loud. Sawdust! ‘Why not start a circus?’ he says, ducking a boot at his head.

Torre Del Greco

Torre Del Greco was a dust and rags village astride the Salerno-Naples Road on the south side of Vesuvius. It was adjacent to this that a new tented camp had been erected for our ‘loonies’. A short journey by lorry saw us settling in. It was life as per Afragola. The warm weather had come and we watched as the sun dried out our mud-caked men, making them look like fossilized corpses of Turkish Janissaries. The office tent is in among olive groves, yes. Olive Groves, the diva that sang with Ivor Novello. Who could christen a child Olive Groves? Why not Walnut Trees?

A letter from my mother gives dire warning of the coming shortage of underwear in England. ‘You would be wise to stock up now, son,’ she urges. ‘It’s already started. Neighbours have stopped hanging their laundry out and your father sleeps with his underwear on for safety.’ Obeying my mother’s warning, I bought, stole, cajoled a mass of underwear, from a series of holes on a waist band to heavily patched beer-stained transparent long-johns.

From the medical board I had received my ‘U are now officially down-graded’ papers. I was still glad to see on the certificate that I had Hernia … Nil, Varicose Veins … Nil, a draw! I also noted that I had No Gynaecological disorders. I wrote and told my mother I was B2. She wrote back: ‘Your father and I are so proud, none of our family have ever had the B2 before.’

March 1944

It was spring, the sun shone and the mud disappeared. Banging his boot on the ground, Guardsman Rogers exclaims: ‘My God! I think I’ve found land!’

The New Broom Cweeps Slean

The camp is to be run by a loony officer; he’s been blown up on the Volturno and blown down again at Cassino. Captain Peters of the Queens. Tall and thin, large horse-like face, pale blue eyes with a rapid blink and a twitch of the head; all done with a strange noise at the back of the nose that goes ‘phnut’. He is balding and has a fine head of hairs. Speaks very rapidly due to an overdraft at Lloyds.

To date one had the feeling that the Rehabilitation Camp was totally unknown and unrecorded in the Army lists. With the coming of Captain Peters all that changed. The camp went on being unknown and unrecorded, but now we had an officer in charge. The camp had a turnover of about a thousand men, all in a state of coming and going, unlike me who couldn’t tell if I was coming or going. Under Peters the food improved. He indented for twice the amount, and sent scrounging parties to buy eggs, chicken and fish, all of which the cooks dutifully boiled to shreds. ‘I think they put it in with the laundry,’ said Peters. He also allowed men out of an evening, but the effect of alcohol on some of the loonies who were on tranquillizers was alarming. It was something to see the guard commander and his men holding down a half naked shit-covered, wine-stained loony alternately being sick, screaming and singing. Some loonies tried to climb Vesuvius. God knows how many fell in. A resident psychiatrist arrived. He immediately dished out drugs that zombified most of the inmates, who walked around the camp staring-eyed, grinning and saying ‘Hello’ to trees.

March 5

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.

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.

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.

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

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.’

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 the 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.

‘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.

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.

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?’

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

SPIKE MILLIGAN