PEACE/WAR AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOL. 7
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published by Michael Joseph 1991
Published in Penguin Books 1992
Reissued in this edition 2012
Copyright © Spike Milligan Productions 1991
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-24-196621-1
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Verona
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Hip Hip Hoo Roy (1)
PENGUIN BOOKS
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 forced 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.
Indeed, we won the war, but I lost five precious years. I was to mourn and still do, the physical break-up of my family; it was a sort of time-warp Belsen. As my ship left Naples harbour – it was the cool end of autumn – the year 1946; time, like the ship, was slipping away, an azure twilight glazed the Campania, lights enumerated along that seemingly timeless shore, now lifeless, Vesuvius was turning into a faded amber silhouette. I stood aft on the promenade deck, seamen still fussed around the ship’s limits, other passengers leaned out at the rail. I watched the oncoming pollution, as they tossed their cigarette ends in the sea.
Goodbye, here was I saying ‘Goodbye to all that’ though I was only twenty-eight, here I was saying goodbye, I hated goodbyes, they gave me the same haunting sadness every time. Wherever I had put down emotional roots, it was painful to bid it adieu; I am still haunted by all the homes I have had to leave. What was it like to live in a cottage in a village in the sixteenth century, and never say goodbye to it? Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write:
I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born.
I don’t even know what mine looked like! I stayed on deck, smoked a Capstan ‘full strength’, one of my last NAAFI-issue cigarettes. On the portside, we passed what were then isles of magic memory, Capri and Ischia, scarlet and bronze in the sunset; the sea was turning to ink, our propellers churning up a Devonshire cream wake, the ship’s siren sent out a long mournful departure note – it echoed across the bay.
Eddy Molloy, who had been below, joined me; he’d run out of cigarettes, sure enough, ‘I’ve run out of cigarettes,’ he said. In the ‘Central Pool of Artists’ he had been known as Virgin Pockets as no human hand had ever entered there for money. Ashore, somehow he had the franchise for the weekly NAAFI Ration. He would sell anything, half of Italy was walking the streets in overcoats made from his army blankets. When asleep, one only had to whisper ‘How much?’ in his ear, he would leap to his feet and sell you his bed. ‘Yes, I’ve run out,’ he reconfirmed, puffing away; ‘I’ve got to cut down,’ – on mine I hoped. ‘It’s getting chilly,’ he said and all his blankets ashore. ‘I’ve got a nice cabin,’ he said. I waited for him to sell it to me. It was dark, better go below before he sells me a torch.
The four-tone dinner xylophone had gone, ‘First dinner sitting,’ called the white-uniformed steward.
‘I’m first sitting,’ said Molloy, referring to his seating card.
Good, I was second sitting.
‘Why don’t you change to first?’ he said. ‘No, wait, I’ll change to second.’
So while I waited he did. We sat at the purser’s table, or was he sitting at ours? Mr Greenidge. ‘Yes, twenty years with P & O and Union Castle, “nearly” torpedoed twice.’ He was a man in his middle fifties, or a woman in her late sixties, a repressed homosexual with a wife and one daughter. He was possibly the first human gynandromorph*.
Next to him, Eileen Walters, Queen Alexandra Nursing Sister – a fine, cheery, plump, sweaty matron, passing forty, at great speed, and mostly uphill. ‘I came out via the Cape, on the er – the er.’ Oh dear, she can’t remember. Never mind, she came out on the SS The-er.
Two officers at the table, one in mufti, Carlton D’eath, tall in a rigid Eiffel Tower way, saturnine, his jet eyes incredibly close together, a forceps delivery I’d say. Before we had finished soup, he let slip he was Coldstream Guards and ex-Eton. I heard myself saying I was a Lance Bombardier and ex-Brownhill Road School, Catford, ‘Not many people can say that, you see the school burnt down,’ I concluded.
There was Captain Manning O’Brien, a wayward romantic Irishman, who had produced some of our shows at CSE* Naples; how does a man who claims he was dropped with fellow drunk Randolph Churchill into Yugoslavia to ‘organise’ Tito’s guerrillas and Alcoholics Anonymous get posted back to an entertainment unit and Alcoholics Anonymous? His first effort was to call a parade. ‘Any Irishmen here?’ he said. Two of us held up our hands. ‘You four step forward,’ he said. ‘We need schum more – hic,’ he shed. It was only 8 a.m. His ‘show’, Shamrock Review, was unbelievable. The entire cast were untrained Italian POWs. Their sallow complexions done over with a pale make-up, red lips, pink cheeks and the occasional red wig, each one dressed in green breeches smothered in red shamrocks (red?). Every victim had been taught the songs parrot-fashion. The curtain went up on a tableau of an Irish village, harps, jaunting cart, shillelaghs, and the opening chorus ‘Begin The Beguine’. Efforts had been made to parachute him back to Yugoslavia, or Greece, or anywhere. He ordered drinks for the table, and I think for the chairs as well. ‘God, you should have seen Tito and Randolph together,’ he said. I said how sorry I was not to have.
‘Apropos of that,’ our Matron said, ‘I met General Montgomery;’ had I? No, the nearest I got was General Motors. Colonel D’eath too had met General Montgomery and Churchill, but was loath to mention they fired him – he ended his ‘career’ as a military prison governor in the Dolomites.
‘Ah yes! the ship!’ she remembered. ‘The SS Ascanius, it was the worst ship I ever travelled on.’ With her on board it must have been. My travelling companion Eddy Molloy was eyeing her up and down, it was quicker than going across, she was a large woman – plain, but sexually attractive, to Molloy that is. It would be like sleeping with a side of beef, even a football side.
Finally, Captain The Reverend Father Peter Fairchild, Army Chaplain with the ‘Jocks’, was ‘Going home at last,’ sixty-one, quite old to have been in a war; going home was Dundee. ‘It’s a nice wee place,’ he said in a slow drawl. ‘It’s been a long time, fourrr years.’ He went on to say, ‘Aye, fourrr is a long time.’
Château des Aygalades
Five is longer, I said.
‘Aye, five is longerrrr,’ he agreed.
You can’t argue with a man of God, but Molloy, ‘I ain’t bin ’ome for twelve, I was servin’ in India.’
‘Oh aye, twelve is a verrry long time.’ Something else was going to be very long, this bloody trip.
Thankfully, we didn’t stop at Malta, I think Malta was thankful too. We docked at Marseilles; ashore for the evening with Molloy and Matron Walters, I had last come ashore at this port in the arms of my mother* in 1919. I knew we had been billeted at the Château des Aygalades, was it still standing? It was, so let’s go see. French taxis—when I mentioned the place he threw his arms in the air, I waited till they came down, ‘Mon Dieu, sacré bleu, etc.’ It was très distance. He believes the world is flat, outside Marseilles you fall off, but he will risk it for twice the fare.
So, a voluble driver plus thirteen kilometres. He wants to know, ‘Why are you going there?’
‘It’s a nostalgia – I was here when I was one.’
‘When you were one what?’
‘A baby.’ (Silly man.)
‘A baby? … well, now it is an old folks’ home.’
I didn’t get out of the taxi, it was just, well, I don’t know. What was I doing there, never go back they say, well, I had. I would be a lifelong nostalgic fool.
That evening Matron Walters, Molloy and I sat in an estaminet, ‘Café du Port’, at a dockside, redolent with Gauloise and fish. My mother told me, that distant day in July, 1919 she and my father too had drunk wine in a dockside café, was this the one? Never go back. My God, Molloy has let go a Butlers*, (Butler’s revenge) and he’s looking at me.
Dominion Monarch sailed at midnight, by which time Molloy had been rogering the lady who had met General Montgomery. I had fallen asleep trying to read Le Matin; I could read the date in French fluently, le 2nd, de November.
Evenings, after dinner, were spent in the saloon; the decor was appalling, someone thought pink, green, black and blue curtains and carpets were acceptable. ‘Yes, we have a lady who does our decor,’ said Mr Greenidge, ‘she worked for Hardy Amies.’ Not for long I’d say. We played cards, at the insistence of Molloy we terminated whist and played pontoon.
‘Oh dearrr,’ said the Reverend Fairchild, ‘I shouldn’t be playing carrrrrds,’ as he cleaned us all out.
‘You sure you never played this before?’ said Molloy.
‘Oh no, no, neverrr,’ said the holy man, ‘it’s more than my job’s worth,’ and pocketed the winnings which did look more than his job was worth.
The days were sunny but cool, the evenings were starry and cold. Winter started as we reached Gib, very brief, we docked at 6 p.m. ‘Will passengers please return by midnight,’ said the notice. What about the bloody crew! It was they who were being driven back crammed into horse-drawn landaus, insane with Spanish wine and vomit; did the victorious Trafalgar fleet really bury their dead here? They must have missed this lot. I think our ship left the Rock with only the captain on duty.
The event of the voyage! Ta-raa!!! The Captain’s cocktail party, first-class passengers only – ‘Fuck ’em – we’ll still go,’ said Molloy. At the party was Colonel Philip Slessor, ‘Saw your act at the Bellini Theatre, jolly good, you going to do it back home?’ Yes, I was going to do it back home and her name was Lily Dunford. ‘Haw-haw-haw,’ he said. ‘Jolly good.’ I next met Slessor at the BBC, a good place for unemployable people to go.
In Biscay unexpected calm weather, cold, brisk walks around the promenade deck early mornings. Lascars sanding the decks, seagulls overnight, where from? Took picture of porpoise.
Coming towards me, rather bearing down, Matron, doing her constitution, white plimsolls on chubby legs. While down below in his semen-ridden bed, Molloy is recovering from her. ‘Good morning, Mr Milligan,’ she warbled, ‘change in the weather.’
‘Yes,’ I grinned in time-honoured clichéd reaction.
‘Did you see my porpoise?’
Yes, I said, still with the fixed grin.
‘He was up there a moment ago,’ she pointed a suturing finger forward. ‘Oh, he’s gone, never mind,’ she said, ‘he’s bound to show up.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and away she went; she really was a very nice woman. I wished her and ‘her’ porpoise well, he in the deep Atlantic, she on the ship, if only it were the other way round, oh God, here she comes again.
‘Seen him again?’
No – grin.
‘Well, I must be getting below.’
Yes, she must, I insist, right down to the very keel then out through the bilges! Why did I hate ordinary people? If only she had said, ‘Good morning Mr Milligan, I had a good shag last night, nothing like it for a good night’s sleep.’ If only.
Head of Christ by Leonardo da Vinci, bought in a shop in Naples
‘See you at breakfast,’ she yodelled as she heaved a door open and went.
Yes, I wanted non-clichéd conversation. ‘Good morning, Captain, like to join me for nine-a-side porridge? Good; better get your knee clips and quoffle spoons, or would you rather a twosome with cronk-plates?’
The night before Tilbury, the Cordon Bleu gourmet dinner turned out Cordon Brown. Six out of ten to the chef for trying and ten out of ten to us for eating it, Basically roast beef, but! not two but three veg! However, we were well served with red Chianti; amazing how wine transforms a meal, that night it transformed me, I was such fun, as Molloy told me next morning. ‘Yes, they put you to bed after you did the white-eared elephant.’
My father, Leo, trick riding in Belgaum, India
No, did I do that?
‘Yes, not only but also early days of aviation.’
Never mind that, did they clap?
We would dock at high tide – mid-morning. I packed my lone suitcase, with a few war souvenirs, some purchased in Napoli, a drawing of the head of Christ by Leonardo da Vinci – after two thousand years of standardised Jesus, he was something different, a Jewish Jesus.
After two years away I had precious little to show for it: an Italian medal intended for a victory in Egypt, a pocket Belgian .32 pistol, my webbing belt and £80.
Weather was chilly as we moved slowly to berth, I had no demob overcoat – I sold it in Bologna to an Italian footballer, he was a top goalscorer, 3. Military Police and Customs came aboard from the pilot’s boat, we queued in the Saloon with our documents – documents, bloody documents, paper, paper everywhere and not a bit to read! ‘Milligan,’ the passport officer reads my name, ‘I knew a Leo Milligan in the Indian Army, any relation?’
‘Yes, he was any relation, he was my father.’
‘It’s a small world,’ he said.
‘Yes, I nearly fell off it,’ I said.
‘Yes, I remember he was a very good horseman.’ Indeed he was.
His name was George Guy, my name was Spike Milligan, he had befriended my father back in 1919 on leave from India and got him a job as Tally Clerk at East India Docks. ‘Good luck,’ he said as he stamped the passport. Down the gangplank to the gloomy, unwelcoming luggage sheds, with equally gloomy people. Since I last saw England it had gone prematurely grey, or had I been disorientated by the sun of Africa and Italy?
Molloy is up the platform waving and pointing at a carriage. What a great mime artist he was. ‘It’s a non-smoker,’ I said.
‘Fuck ’em,’ he said; the likes of him would proliferate in the land and become football fans.
Shock horror, Matron Walters has joined us. ‘Oh, I don’t mind if you smoke,’ she said, followed by England’s only porter, a little tiny chap, who couldn’t reach the luggage rack – or didn’t want to.
Molloy took them and with eyes popping got Matron’s two bursting cases on the rack. ‘Wot you got in there, pianos?’ he said.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ she twittered, eyelashes flickering.
‘God, it’s a wonder I’m not ruptured,’ he said, lighting up a cigarette.
‘Do you know?’ said Matron. ‘The first operation I attended was a rupture,’ she giggled; ‘when I saw it I fainted.’
To add fuel I said, ‘I suppose you’re used to it now.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen a lot of it,’ she said.
I daren’t look at Molloy.
Two middle-aged officers with luggage struggled into the compartment, they were both portly, with heavy army overcoats. The rack was now a-glut with luggage. After the traditional struggling and straining and the ‘Is anyone sitting here,’ silly sods, they could see there was nobody sitting there, they sank into their seats. The platform is a criss-crossing of civvies, and servicemen, two soldiers are carried by on stretchers. ‘Now that’s how I’d like to travel,’ said Molloy. The guard’s whistle; we are leaving for lovely London. One portly officer leaned towards Molloy. ‘I say, this is a non-smoker you know.’
What does politeness matter?
‘Is it annoying you then?’ says Molloy, accelerating the puffing regretfully; simmering with hatred, he stubbed it on the floor. Picking up the stub he made a great display of straightening it out before pocketing it, true grit, as most of the stub now was. I don’t recall much more of the journey and I’m glad.
At Waterloo I took the tube through the rush hour to London Bridge – being very sunburned, I turned a few girls’ heads, the bodies would have to wait. St John’s Station where I alight, now where the hell was 3 Leathwell Road, what was a Leathwell? It doesn’t appear in any dictionary or place name – okay, let’s say it was a ‘well’ but what is a leath? Who are these creeps who choose our street names? Yoxley Approach, Zenoria Street, Yabsley Street, Cronk Avenue, Gonson Gardens, Gonson? GONSON? Who, where, why???? By asking a hundred people who were each ‘a stranger round here’, I arrived at Leathwell Road, a terrace of factory workers’ houses that backed on to Elliot’s Factory and a shunting yard.
I had not informed my parents of my return, I wanted it to be a lovely surprise; it was, for me, they were away. It was evening, cold and foggy, a Mrs Hicks, the lodger, answered the door on the chain, a shivering old Victorian in black, ‘Yerss, they are awaine.’ Who was I, how did she know I was their soldier son Terence back from the wars? ‘Oh, I done know, you might be anybody …’ I showed her my passport, my army paybook, my bank statement, my laundry list, my scar on my right shin, I sang God Save the Queen, finally I was allowed past this centurion who was heartbroken I wasn’t a rapist.
I walked down an unlit passage, the only light from the landing above. In the gloom I fell down a half step. I’d never said ‘Oh fuck’ in the dark before. Groping, I opened a door, lino was crackling underfoot, I struck a match, what a terrible thing to do to an innocent piece of wood. By its light I saw a twin-mantled gaslight; pulling down a tabulated metal chain, I applied the match. Soon the room was an unearthly green, a small rectangular room, against the wall a dining table covered with a blue cloth edged with little dangling balls. Into the opposite wall was let a magnificent black iron stove – with the faintest glow of fire from under kitchen peelings – a large, bulging, blue moquette armchair and, above me, a triple drying rail, hung with underwear; it could have been 1880. I wished it was, I wouldn’t be here. Outside I found a coal box, and made up the stove, I rustled some tea, and toast from mildewed bread. In this setting I stared into the fire, sipped tea, and suffered the trauma of having left behind what was the good life …
This was home! Off the front passage there was a ‘parlour’ and a bedroom with my parents’ double bed covered in a pink padded eiderdown, which inevitably slid off in the night as Molloy had done. The WC was outside in the garden; upstairs next to Mrs Hicks was a back bedroom twelve feet by twelve with a single bed, this would be mine, all mine! The time was 10.30. In the kitchen, I boiled two eggs for dinner, fiddled with the battery-operated wireless, it was Harry Roy and His Band, with Ivor Moreton and Dave Kaye – all very hot-cha-ma-cha-cha; having heard new players like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, this all sounded dated. Harry Roy, 1939, and the world I knew would be coming to an end. A week-old copy of the Daily Herald, which suggested how long my folks had been away; wouldn’t it be silly if they’d gone to Naples to surprise me, oh ha ha ha eh?
I lit the gas in my little bedroom, unpacked my worldly goods, put them in a small chest of drawers, and hung my clothes in the wall cupboard that flanked the Victorian fire-place, the grate filled with red crepe paper. The fog had increased in density and so had I; I drew the flimsy curtains on my window. I was in bed, smoking; I had left in 1940 – all the while my head lived in 1939 and the years up to it, in those Thirties’ days I was in a dream, I learned the guitar – to knock out chords like D9th & 11 & 13 made me feel giddy at their sound. Eddy Lang was God, then I heard Crosby, a vibrant light baritone, different from the appalling English nasal singers like Brian Lawrence, Kitty Masters et al. I had to sing like him, and by God I did, I won Bing Crosby contests.
Bing Crosby Cup won in a crooning contest at the Lady Florence Institute, Deptford
Local bands like the New Era Rhythm Boys had me sing with them – there was no money in it, I did it just for kicks so I got nowhere*, but loved it, couldn’t wait to put on my 50/- tailor’s suit, Brylcreem my hair and get on to the mike at Ladywell Baths to sing ‘Temptation’. My friend Geoff Smith recalls those days:
On the evening I was present at the Ladywell Baths when you were asked to sing a number with the band, I do not recall any hesitation on your part. You sang ‘Temptation’ in a Bing Crosby style. He was all the rage at the time and you received quite an ovation, partly because this was a tricky song. When leaving these dances, you found leaflet distributors outside advertising coming dances in the district. They must have wondered who the young unknown singer was, and where from.
Next morning I slept late, mild ‘ship lag’. I bumped into Mrs Hicks on the landing, what do you say to someone you don’t know? ‘Good morning,’ I said, and with all the warmth of old England she said, ‘Morning? huh, more afternoon.’ A few letters were on the mat, ‘Captain L.A. Milligan, Mrs Florence Milligan.’ Food! I found some Shredded Wheat, the milk had just gone off – not enough, by adding mounds of white sugar I neutralised the taste – tuned in the wireless. News is all about rationing, no one’s getting enough of.
What to do? First I had to contact Bill Hall the violinist from our trio – 6 Legard Road, Highbury. After a spaghetti of buses and trams, through grey, grotty, postwar streets, I was knocking on the door of a Victorian terraced home, had I gone in a circle? It looked like 3 Leathwell. A dying female circa 1880 opened the door, ‘Oo?’ she said. ‘Spike Milligan.’ What did I want? I didn’t want anything, I wanted to see Bill Hall, her son, ‘Ee’s out gettin’ some fags.’ Could I come in and wait or rape her? Grumbling, she let me into the kitchen of 6 Legard Road, with identical laundry overhead.
Seated in an identical blue moquette armchair was Bill Hall’s father Albert. ‘Oh yes, Spike Millington, Bill told us you might be cummin’, didn’t ’ee Vera?’
The living dead Vera said, ‘Yer, but I dinn knowed wot ’ee looked like, ’ee could ’ave been anybody; I done like lettin’ stranglers in.’
‘She means strangers,’ said Albert.
A dog has appeared, an old English mongrel with a huge nose. ‘It swooled up when the cat bit ’im – here, Rex, Rex, good dog.’ Good dog Rex, good dog, ignored him and started to sniff my balls. It happens not only in working-class families, I was at a black tie dinner with Lady Nethersole – among the guests were Kenneth Tynan, Sir Bernard Miles, Field Marshal Montgomery – post-dinner a poodle was released under the table and sniffed all our balls.
The front door slamming announced the return of Bill Hall. ‘Oh, ’ello,’ he said with a smile, his lips parted, a cigarette stuck to the bottom. We shook hands, ‘When you get back?’
I gave him chapter and verse, spicing it up with Molloy’s extra-marital bunk-ups – Bill frowns, looks at dying mother and puts his fingers to his lips. ‘Shush! me muther,’ he whispers; ‘me muther is in the back kitchen making a “nice cuppa tea”, I don’t want her to hear about Molloy’s bunk-ups, it’s bad enough ’er ’earing about mine.’ Hall and I are making arrangements to get our postwar career started. We have to get an agent. ‘Fosters,’ says Bill; ‘Fosters are the biggest.’ I like big agents, they’re easier to see. Bill has Johnny Mulgrew’s address, 13 Linden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate. Park 3535, thank God a phone!!! We’ll leave all messages there.
We have an appointment with Leslie MacDonnell, one of the agents at Fosters’ agency in Piccadilly; fancy, me in Piccadilly! I remember before the war simple-minded me thought of Piccadilly in the same distant terms as Moscow. Piccadilly, oh no, that was where special people went, the toffs, you had to dress up to go there – have money – I recalled my father did a speciality song and dance:
Picc-a-dilly – London West
That’s the place – that I like best
There’s the place to drive you silly
Willy-Nilly dear old Picc-a-dilly.
But the army, the war and Toni Pontani had changed me, now I would go anywhere with or without money, mostly without.
Hall and Mulgrew met me in Lyons Corner House, Coventry Street, at eleven. We sat around, the Nippies flitting between tables, ‘Pot of tea for three, please Miss.’ A palm court trio are playing a medley of tunes from Ivor Novello’s Perchance to Dream, which was showing at Wyndham’s Theatre. ‘ ’E can write tunes can’t ’e,’ said Mulgrew with witty smile.
‘Never mind,’ said Hall, ‘if we are as popular in England as we were in Italy, mate – we might be in the dibs.’ As a prophecy it was disaster. All this time Harry Secombe was appearing at the Windmill in a nude review; he was the one with clothes on, though had he been offered more …
Being there gave us ingression to the stage door in Archer Street – ‘Yes?’ said the Stage Door Keeper. ‘I’ve come to see Mr Harry Secombe.’ I thought the Mister bit made me sound respectable, whereas all I wanted to see was birds’ tits. Harry took me to the ‘green room’, where all the girls were in dressing gowns; yes, yes, yes, yes, he liked it here, yes, yes, yes, all the girls, yes, yes, yes, was he allowed to stand in the wings, yes, yes, yes, yes, he had to get on the stage, was he going blind, yes, yes, yes. He gets me a free seat; doing comedy at 11 a.m. can’t be easy. I watch with popping eyes, and aroused loins, as naked women, NAKED WOMEN, a tableau, ‘Spring In Arcadia’; the nudes stay stock still as the waiting onanists vibrate our row of seats, the only moving entertainment on stage is premier danseur Peter Glover, who is leaping everywhere to the Spectre de la Rose. Curtain.
Enter one who a while back was a Lance Bombardier in a hole in North Africa, he comes on like a dynamo carrying a table and shaving kit – ‘Everybody’s got to shave,’ he says. He is hypnotically funny – the energy could light a city, in eight explosive minutes he’s finished, a few wankers laugh, and they’ve got five more shows. Between shows, Harry and I visited Poppa Allens, a first-floor ‘club’ on Windmill Street, others from the Windmill were Jimmy Edwards, Frank Muir, Michael Bentine. ‘Have a drink, Spike,’ said Harry, over the moon at being in the West End. He was on £20 a week, and I wasn’t.
It was Harry who gave us an introduction to the nightclub circuit. The first one was the Florida in Carnaby Street; it was six phone-boxes square, the ‘house band’ was the Ike Isaacs Trio, unbelievable Ike was at school with me in Rangoon, they took one corner, the bouncer Mike Noonan the next, the rest were customers. We appeared in a serving hatch. It was our first appearance in England, and by God we tore ’em up folks, oh yes, here was an unusual comedy act, literally in rags but playing like the Hot Club de France. We were soon inundated with work, we did the circuit: the Blue Lagoon, Panama, ending up in Edmundo Ros’ Coconut Grove, featuring his and Syd Phillips’ bands. We were kept on for an extra week. Rawicz and Landau came regularly to see us, so did Eugene Goosens and Eileen Joyce.
Syd Phillips took us on one side, he couldn’t manage two, and said, ‘Now listen, I’m going to make a lot of money out of you boys.’ Another disastrous prophecy. Syd was Jewish, how did he go wrong? What did we do in the day? To start, I was living with my parents, who weren’t at home when I had returned from the war, and the surprise was extended. They had been staying with ‘Aunt Nance in Sittingbourne, whose husband is a builder you know,’ so when they got back from Aunt Nance in Sittingbourne, whose husband was a builder you know, I was out. I left a note saying I was ‘back from Italy and was now in Catford’ visiting Aunty Kath, whose husband was an insurance agent you know. So during the first days I was back, I tried to revive 1939. I had to see Lily, Beryl, Ivy and anybody but! Lily Dunford had been unfaithful to me, she’d married!!!! So had Beryl Southby and Ivy Chandler, yes married, but to someone else! Why hadn’t they waited for beautiful me – me with my five times a night, had they all forgotten the one and threepenny seats at the Rialto, Crofton Park? Those dinners of egg, chips, tomatoes, bread and butter and pot of tea for two in Reg’s Café – opposite Brockley Cemetery? And I used to change my hair oil every three-hundred miles. Very well, they’d regret it – in gloom over the loss of Lily I wrote this bizarre letter of farewell, which I never posted:
Publicity postcard drawn by Bill Hall
Dear Lily,
Remember this – one day in years to come, you will cry – cry for the fool that you were and are – cry for me, Lily – remember that – No one will ever love like me – You will come back to me one day. Love has many children – one is called HATE – you will smile when I say ‘I hate you – want to kill you – see you with your face blue and black and the eyes I love to see – sightless.’ I mean that – all that. To finish this – I will make you hate me – hate me till your mind is full of poison – hate me till it hurts –
And I will still love you.
Goodbye, Lily.
God, what a monster! No wonder she didn’t marry me. Ex-soldier kills ex-girlfriend, paints her face black and blue then does her in. When I read the letter after forty years, it made me wonder what kind of person I used to be. Well, for a start, I liked to choke and blind people. I could have been another Neville Heath; help!! When I eventually booked a room at 13 Linden Gardens, I discovered the previous occupant had been the murderer Neville Heath himself, I mean, who else could he be? ‘’E was a real gentleman, ’oo would ’ave thought it of ’im?’ said Blanche the lady cleaner who ‘did the place’. Dear Blanche, about forty-five, with a face that could have modelled Palaeolithic man – she was still a virgin. ‘I still got it – an’ no one’s ’aving it,’ mainly because no one wanted it.
I wasn’t earning, so I had to budget, to-ing and fro-ing from 3 Leathwell to London was boring and expensive so I moved to 13 Linden. Aren’t we strange. Two years away from home, come home, leave. It was one room with sit-up bath, top floor at back, it was £1.15.0 a week with breakfast, usually a kipper. If you stand in Notting Hill High Street next to Lloyds Bank, look up, you can see the window of my bedroom.
Margo, the landlady, was a short, plump, prettyish, midforties, dark, feline, very rouged with dark red lipstick. She reminded me of Theda Bara, in that she was dead. Margo spoke so slowly, people dozed off in her presence. She lived in the basement in Stygian gloom with the smell of cats and Mansion polish, a widow, but there came into her life a humpty-backed lodger, Mr Len Lengths, an insurance broker who ‘worked from home’. He was about five feet six inches, an inch taller than Margo, he had a face like Charles Laughton’s and Boris Karloff’s superimposed on his, he wore pebbledash glasses which magnified his pop eyes, giving him the countenance of a man being garrotted, yet Margo was attracted to him. She had him down for supper and while there he had her down for screwing.
‘What does he see in her?’ I said.
Mulgrew, who is evil, says, ‘His hump turns her on.’
‘Hump, my arse,’ said Hall, ‘I bet he’s got a huge chopper, lengths by name, lengths by nature.’ How did Hall deduce this?
‘Listen mate – admit the number of good-looking wimmin with ugly blokes, well, it’s a big prick, wimmin will stand anything as long as the bloke’s chopper is big.’ All these theories seem to clash with medical evidence, but neither Margo nor Lengths had heard of them. All we knew was he wasn’t paying rent.
Yes, what did we do in the day? One time at the Windmill canteen, Harry introduced me to ‘Jimmy Grafton who owns a pub’; he was to figure in my life in those immediate postwar years. He had served as an officer in the infantry and was at Arnhem. He was now serving behind the bar; he had, somehow or other, become a scriptwriter to Derek Roy, a would-be comic appearing on Variety Bandbox, so Jimmy had an ‘in’ into broadcasting.
Michael Bentine introduced Harry to Jimmy, as Harry recalls, ‘Mike told me of this pub in Strutton Ground where I got a drink after hours, and somehow Jimmy became my manager and scriptwriter.’ He started back to front by me telling him what bloody awful scripts Derek Roy had, and Jimmy said, ‘Well I write them’. A strange start to a forty-year relationship.
‘I’ve got a week for you at the Hackney Empire,’ the words fell from the mellifluous lips of Leslie MacDonnell, our agent, sitting behind his desk at Piccadilly House, Piccadilly Circus.
We were overjoyed, I could see our name in lights. MacDonnell then added, ‘I’ve arranged for Val Parnell to see you on the Monday performance.’
Val Parnell!!!! This was something. If Parnell was coming to see us, MacDonnell must have thought pretty highly of us; for giving us this break, Bill Hall proffered his thanks, ‘Ta,’ he said.
I burst out laughing. ‘Bill,’ I said, ‘Ta? Ta? Excuse him, MacDonnell, Bill is a man of few words and that was one of them.’ I then thanked MacDonnell more formally, ‘Like this, Bill,’ I said. I knelt in the grovelling position, my head on MacDonnell’s shoe, ‘Oh a thousand thanks, oh great wise one.’
MacDonnell was highly amused. ‘Is he always like this?’ he said.
‘Only when the money’s right,’ said Mulgrew, pulling me away. ‘There, there boy,’ he said, patting me on the head and feeding me pretend sugar lumps. So to the big time.
‘Oh, we’ll be there* son,’ said my dad when I told him. My parents, especially my father, were very proud, he having been a stage performer. ‘I never knew you had it in you,’ he said. I told him I myself had never had it in me, but I had had it in other people, the opposite sex, well that’s where they were at the time.
That fateful Monday night, the night of February the 3rd 1947. Heavy snow had been falling, it was very cold – up to then it was the worst recorded winter in living memory. Our dressing room was on the fifth floor. ‘They must think we’re bloody eagles,’ said Mulgrew humping his double bass. Dressing room six feet by ten: a cracked mirror with dabs of greasepaint, a surround of forty wall bulbs, three fused, a leaking washhand basin – ‘Warning, do not stand in the sink, one of the girls did and was TERRIBLY INJURED’. It must have been something to see. Before the show started we peeped through the front curtain. My God, there were only three people in and two of them were Val Parnell. Even by curtain-up there were only twelve customers. Serious. The pit band struck up. I strolled on the stage alone, started to tune my guitar, Bill Hall runs on backwards as though being cheered on – he collides with me – looking directly at me he places the hair of the bow over the string and with the bow underneath the violin saws through ‘Organ Grinder’s Swing’, until then a popular tune, during which Mulgrew brings his bass on. The diminutive audience don’t laugh, one person applauded, which made it sound even worse, in the box we could see the chair-oscuro figure of Val Parnell. We went through our repertoire, after each number there was the lone clapper. In desperation I ad-libbed, ‘Please sir, you’re spoiling it for the other people.’ This got the only laugh of the evening, it would go on to be the only laugh of the month. We died the death. The pit band played us off with ‘Where’s That Tiger?’; if I’d have found it I would have shot it.
We stood there in the gloom. ‘Never mind, lads,’ said the Stage Manager, ‘it’s Monday, they’ll be better by the middle of the week.’
‘They’re not staying here till then are they?’ I said, always cheerful Spike.
We sat in our dressing room. In silence, in unison, we lit up a cigarette. ‘Where the fuck did they get that audience?’ ‘It’s the Nazi Party.’ Never mind eh? Val Parnell had seen us, he knew a good act when he saw one. We never heard from the bastard again. Tuesday night only eighteen people in, the next night it snowed heavily. ‘This’ll kill the business,’ said the manager. On the Saturday night we did well; why, oh why did Val Parnell come on a Monday? ‘He’s a perv, that’s why,’ said Mulgrew. ‘I bet he feels little girls’ bicycle saddles.’ However, from that week we received £75! Who would have dreamed such wealth existed! It meant £25 each, but each of us had to pay £2.10.0 commission. Mulgrew rolled his wages into a tight roll then wedged it into his wallet with a rubber band around it; I think he was marinating it.