Peace Work by Spike Milligan Read Free Book Online Page B

leaving?”
    “Chinese Dentist.”
    “What?”
    “Chinese Dentist,* tooth hurtee!”
≡ Two-thirty.
    “Please leave.”
    I take two aspirins and a bath, feel a little better. I pack my suitcase with a man chopping up the Lipton’s tea chest. It’s nearly Chinese Dentist as I lug my case to the lift. Mulgrew is in it. “First floor,” he says. “Ladies underwear and drunks.”

MESTRE
MESTRE
    I t’s a short fifteen minutes hop to Mestre and the Albergo Savoia, a large one-time country home. It’s rectangular, very roomy with floral curtains and matching furniture. Along the back of the house are french windows which open on to what once was a garden, but is now concreted over. After a cup of tea Toni and I sit outside in the sun.

    Toni wants to know if I’ve told my parents about her.
    “What they say, Terr-ee?”
    “My mother say I must be careful of Italian girls.”
    “For why?”
    “She thinks all Italian girls are tarts.”
    “What is tarts?”
    “Prostitute.”
    She bursts into a giggle. “Me, prostitute?”
    “No, no, she is just telling me to be careful.”
    “You tell her I am a good girl?”
    “Yes.”
    “What she say?”
    “I haven’t had any reply yet, maybe in the next letter.”
    I daren’t tell her my mother thought all foreigners were ridden with disease and you caught it off lavatory seats. “If you shake hands with them, try and wear gloves.” But then my mother thought that Mussolini was good for the Italians.
Bill Hall clowning in Mestre – a dismal failure.
    Bill Hall is in a playful mood. He drapes a curtain over his shoulder and plays salon music, ‘Flowers in May’, etc.
    He is interrupted by the manager, Mr Marcini with his goatee beard and goatee moustache. In fact, he had a goatee head and goatee body. Bowing and nodding, he asks if we like to hear some folklore music. A chorus of ayes. He produces a mountain bagpiper. He’s like a man from another age: he wears a Tyrolean hat, a red shirt with a brocade waistcoat, navy blue breeches to the knee, then leggings bound with goat hide strips. He plays his bagpipes, which sound like the sweet-sounding Northumbrian and gives us traditional tarantellas, marches, etc. It was an hour of great music and I realized that I was watching the last of the old Italy. The old Italy that was to be swamped with tourists, deafened by pop music and Lambrettas. Eventually, Bill Hall joined in on the violin. It was great stuff. When he’d finished, we had a whip-round for the piper and he departed well pleased. Mulgrew thinks he is a Scottish soldier on the run from the Military Police. “It’s a perfect disguise,” he says. “I tell you the hills around here are full of squaddies on the trot from the police. You see those Italian women with hairy legs, they’re squaddies on the trot.”
    We are left to fossilize in Mestre while the powers that be plot our destiny. Meanwhile we live a sybaritic life, just mooching all day.
    MOTHER:
    Where have you been at this time of night?
    SPIKE:
    I’ve been out mooching, Mother.
∗
    “I think they’ve forgotten us,” says Hall.
    “Forgotten us, FORGOTTEN?” says Bornheim. “They’ve never heard of us.”
    I break the boredom by trying to snog with Toni whenever the opportunity presents itself, which is only all the time, and that doesn’t seem enough. Lieutenant Priest tries to find out what the score is. He phones Army Welfare Service in Naples and this is what it sounded like.
∗
    Lt priest: Yes, sir…yes, sir…Mestre, sir…but…yes, sir…yes, sir…yes, sir…very good, sir.
    He hangs up. “Christ,” he says. “That was Colonel Ridge-way.”
    “When do we go to Trieste?” says Hall.
    “Everything is in order,” says Priest. “We leave for Trieste tomorrow.”
    The news is well received. I watch fascinated as a dewdrop runs along Hall’s nose and extinguishes his dog-end. I suppose that somewhere someone loved him.

TRIESTE
TRIESTE
    I t’s another bright sunny day as we