Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (27 page)

Here I was in a room in Bologna. I couldn’t get it together. Outside there is roistering. Not me. I knew tomorrow there would be no stocking at the end of my bed. Father Christmas was a casualty of World War Two.

FLORENCE

Florence

C
ity of Medicis, Savonarola, and chattering raspberrying Secombe, now freezing without his leather ‘love gift’ jerkin. This is the city of the artist, the artisan, the connoisseur. Our Hotel Dante is just round the corner from the Piazza del Signoria. I would be able to see places that I had only read about. The hotel is one built for those rich Victorians doing the Grand Tour. Sumptuous rooms, a wonderful double bed with duck eider, like sleeping in froth. Putting my egg-stained battledress in the bevelled glass and walnut cupboard was like wearing a flat hat in the Ritz. Secombe flies past chattering and farting up the Carrara marble stairs with its flanking Venetian balustrades topped with cherubim holding bronze lanterns. He looks totally out of place, he belongs at the pit head.

I am standing on the spot, explaining that this is where Savonarola was burned. “Oo was Savonarola?” says Gunner Hall. I tell him ‘oo he is’. “They
burnt
him?” Yes. “Why. Were they short of coal?” I explain that he was at odds with the Medici and the state of Florence. “Fancy,” says Hall. “Why didn’t ‘e call the fire brigade?” The same indifference applies to see Cellini’s Perseus. With the head of Medusa, Hall wants to know why statues are erected to people being burnt or having their heads chopped off. “Why not someone normal like Tommy Handley?” Yes, of course: “Here is Cellini’s statue of Tommy Handley from ITMA.” That would look really nice in the Piazza.

The Pitti Palace leaves me stunned; masterpiece after masterpiece, there’s no end to it. From Titian to Seguantini. You come out feeling useless and ugly. On the Ponte Vecchio Secombe and I ask Hall to take a photo of us. It comes out with the wall behind us in perfect focus, two blurred faces in the foreground. He was well pleased.

Now a divertimento. An English lady living in Florence has invited us to tea. She is Madame Penelope Morris, a ‘relative’ of William Morris, “the man who invented wallpaper’. She was sixty-nine, tall, thin, a white translucent skin with the veins visible; her neck looked like a map of the Dutch canal system. She wore swathes of bead necklaces — to the value of two shillings. Two pale blue eyes, very close together, sat atop a long bulbous nose. She had no waist, no bottom or bosom; she went straight up and down like a ; phone box. A small crimped rouged mouth like a chicken’s bum. She spoke with an upper-class adenoidal voice that put her next in line to the throne. She ushered us into a cloying room that’ smelt of stale unemptied sherry glasses and tomcat piss. We sat in well-worn chairs with antimacassars. She rang a brass bell, the clanger fell out. “It’s always doing that.” The summons brought a thousand-year-old butler carrying a papier-mache tray loaded with what looked like papier-mache cakes. The tea ritual. “The cakes are made locally,” she said, and should have added ‘by stonemasons.” It was all a ploy. She is a spiritualist in need. So, would we boys like a seance? So saying she pulls the curtains and we sit at a circular table not knowing what to expect. Now, would anyone like to get in touch with a loved one? Yes, says Marine Paul Robson, one of our shanghaied dancers. “I’d like to get in touch with my mother Rosie.” Mrs Morris goes into a trance. “Are you there Mrs Robson, are you there Rosie…” A little louder. “Are you there Mrs Rosie Robson…” She opens her eyes. “She’s not hearing me.” What Robson hadn’t told her was that his mother wasn’t dead, but was living in Brighton. “She won’t be able to hear from here,” he said to a slightly bemused Mrs Morris.

Does anyone else want to get in touch? Yes. Bill Hall would like to contact his grandmother Lucy.. Forewarned, Mrs Morris asks, “Is she dead?”

“I hope so,” says Hall. “They buried her.”

“Are you there, Mrs Lucy Hall?” she intones, eyelids fluttering, as she places a collection box on the table, giving it a shake to agitate the coins inside. Suddenly Paul Robson lets out a scream and runs from the room. Mrs Morris calls a halt; he has ruined the ‘balance’. We must all leave now as she is expecting another ‘tea party’. In the hall we meet a group of unsuspecting soldiers who can’t understand our stifled laughter.

We ask Robson why he had run out screaming. He says, “I felt there was something nasty in the room.”

“There was,” says Bill Hall. “The cat done it.”

Secombe and I have hit it off with two waitresses at the hotel. One fat, one thin. He calls them Laurel and Hardy. They weren’t exactly beauties, but then neither was Secombe or I.

Hardy (mine) 12 stone 3 lb Laurel (Secombe’s
) 7
stone 3 lb

We would meet them ‘dopo lavoro’. They will show us a ‘nice Boogie Woogie Club’. It sounded like a weapon. By the kitchen we waited, our romantic interlude broken only by the slops boy emptying rubbish into the reeking bins. Finally they appear, smelling of cheap perfume and washing up water. Secombe give me Hardy. She’s too full for him. We were taken to what by day was a sewer. An Italian trio are trying to catch up ‘with the jazz scene. Through a fug, a blue-chinned waiter shows us to a table the size of a playing card. By intertwining knees we are seated, we appear glued together. Secombe is chattering in Anglo-Italian: “You molto bello,” he tells Laurel. There’s another fine mess he’s got us into. We drink some appalling cheap red wine that leaves a purple ring round the mouth; Secombe looks like a vampire.

Laurel takes Secombe to do the ‘Jitterbuggery’ and they are lost in the steaming melee. I too am sucked in by Hardy. I am trying to move her bulk round the floor, but I really need a heavy goods licence. Still, it was nice holding a girl, even if her load had shifted. A gyrating, arm-pumping, steaming, farting and chattering, all teeth and glasses Secombe zooms past. “Having fun?” he shouts. So that’s what it is. Away he goes in twenty different directions. It’s getting on for two a.m. The girls say they must ‘andare a casa’, they have work in the morning. There follows the traditional groping and steaming in the doorway.

A mist has risen from the Arno, infiltrating the town and Secombe’s trousers. I can hear the hiss of steam as cold air hits his boiling body. We depart virgo intacto, trousers bursting with revolving testicles and dying erections. We retrace our steps to the hotel. We are lost. “Fancy,” says Secombe. “Who in the Mumbles would dream that I was lost in Florence?” I tell him I gave up: who in Mumbles would know he was lost in Florence.

A tart hovers by. Lily Marlene? She knows the way to the hotel. Do we want a shag? It’s only fifty lire after ten, she’ll do us both for forty. Sorry dear, we’re training for the priesthood. OK, we can find our own fucking way back. Finally we did. “Home at last,” says Secombe, “and forty lire to the good.”

No, not home at last, locked out at last. “Open up landlord, we are thirsty travellers.” We rang the bell. We hammered on the door. We tapped on the windows. We shouted upwards. We hammered on the bell. We rang the door. We tapped upwards. We shouted on the windows. “How much did she say for the two of us?” says Secombe. A sliding of bolts, a weary concierge opens the door. “Molto tardi signorini,” he says. We apologize. I press a ten lire note in his hand. A low moan comes from his lips. “What did you give him?” says Secombe. “A heart attack.”

I crawl into my dream bed. Peace. Relaxation, but no, wait!!! Something wet and ‘horribule’ is in my bed. It’s a terrible soldier joke, there in my bed is an eight-inch ‘Richard the Third’, made from dampened brown paper. Wait, there’s a note, a chilling message. It says: “The phantom strikes again.” It bears all the hallmarks of Mulgrew, or is it the Mulgrew marks of Hall? I fell asleep laughing.

RETURN TO NAPLES

Return to Naples

D
ays seem to go by like water rushing over stones. We leave Florence, having visited every possible sight. It was a city I can never forget. We are to return to Naples, with an overnight stay in Rome. There we dine again with the Eton-cropped manageress, whom we now know to be a lesbian. The discovery was made by Lt. Priest who had put his hand on her leg and had it crushed in a vice-like grip, all the while smiling sweetly at him. I got a bit worried when she said to me, “You are a very pretty boy.” After dinner she asked the trio to come to her room and play. Drinks had been laid on, including a Barolo 1930! She asked us to play ‘You Go to my Head’, then sang it in Italian in a deep baritone voice. If we weren’t certain before, we were now. Yes, there was the shaving soap on the windowsill. The more she drank, the more masculine she became, giving us thumps on the back like demolition hammers. “Let’s get out of here,” said Hall, “or she’ll fuck the lot of us.”

The last leg to Naples. All the while Secombe entertains us with insane jokes and raspberries. Does anyone know the Big Horse Song? No. He sings Big Horse I love you. The Hook and Eye song? No? He sings Hook and I live without you. The Niton Song? Niton day, you are the One. The Ammonia song? Ammonia bird in a gilded cage. There was no stopping him, he was like a dynamo.

“Are you on anything!” I said.

“Yes, two pound ten a week. Hoi Hup, raspberry.” He used to be a pithead clerk.

“Were you good at figures?”

“Well, as long as I got within three or four shillings.”

If what he told me was true, miners who hadn’t shown up for a week ended up with double wages and the reverse. The day he joined the army, the miners held a pithead Thanksgiving Service.

Back in the old routine. Hall has been missing for days. During his absence, we transform his army bed into a magnificent four poster with a Heraldic Shield, satin drapes and a scarlet velvet bedspread. We time it to perfection. Hall comes in five minutes before the once-weekly roll call and inspection. He walks in a moment before the Inspecting Officer. Stunned, he stands by his bed. Enter Captain O’List. He too is stunned.

O’List couldn’t contain himself. Weak-legged he walked rapidly from the room. On the stairs we could hear him choking with laughter.

Bari

Y
es, we are to ancient Barium where the meal-enema was invented. We are to entertain the bored soldiery. First thing, chain Gunner Hall to the bed. Louisa Pucelli, our Italian star, has dropped out of the show, and in her place we have Signorina Delores Bagitta, an ageing bottle-blonde Neapolitan old boiler, with a voice like a Ferrari exhaust. She looked OK from a distance, about a mile I’d say. She did a Carmen Miranda act, her layers of cutaneous fat shuddering with every move. “Amore, amore,” she’d croak. It was monumental tat.

Bari is a dusty seaport on the Adriatic. There’s Bari Vecchio and Bari Nuovo. No hotel this time, but a large hostel that seemed to be under permanent siege by lady cleaners. Even as you sat on the WC a mop would suddenly slosh under the door. The streets are heavy with bored British troops, and a heavy sprinkling of Scots from the tribal areas. The old city is really a museum piece, it’s a time capsule dated about 1700: the Moors were here and left their mark -many a dark skin can be seen.

Secombe appears to be inflating his head; he is even inflating his face. Somehow the wind is escaping upwards. No, the man is in real trouble. Poor Gunner, struck down in his prime! Of all things he has illness of the face. It’s true, folks, he has been using cheap Italian make-up which has affected all the cuts he gave himself during his screaming farting and shaving act. It gets bad, and the swelling closes both eyes. There was little pity. We had warned him if he didn’t stop it, this is what would happen. The dramatic situation of temporary blindness gives Secombe a great chance for histrionics: he becomes Gunner King Lear. “I’m sorry lads, to have let you down like this, but remember the show must go on.” He lay in his bed, not knowing that we had left the room. He develops a high temperature which speeds him up. When the ambulance arrives to take him, he is chattering, screaming and farting at twice the speed. “I’m sorry I’m leaving you lads, but I’ll be back, the show must go on, thanks for all your help, remember me when you’re on stage, tell the lads I did my best, Cardiff 3 Swansea Nil. Lloyd George knew my father, saucepanbach, Ivor Novello, when I come home again to Wales.” As they drove him away we could hear snatches of Welsh songs, rugby scores, rasp-berrying and screaming. When he arrived at Bari General Hospital they took him straight to the psychiatric ward where he gave three doctors a nervous breakdown.