Milligan’s war memoirs

The same year that Eric Newby published his memoir of being an escaped prisoner of war in ‘Love and Death in the Apennines‘, Spike Milligan published his own contribution to the roster of Second World War memoirs, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’.

In the preface Milligan says it was intended to be the first part of a trilogy about his war experiences, covering the period from his conscription in 1939 till the time his regiment landed at Algiers. Volume 2 would cover from going into action till VJ day. Volume 3 would cover from his demobilisation in 1945 to his eventual return to England. In the event, according to Wikipedia, Milligan ended up writing no fewer than seven (!) volumes of war memoirs:

• Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall
• ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’
• Monty: His Part in My Victory
• Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall
• Where Have All the Bullets Gone?

The Goons

A few year after the end of the war, Milligan would be central to setting up the fantastically popular radio programme, The Goon Show, which ran from 1951 to 1960 and created characters and catchphrases which entertained a mass audience during the decade of Austerity. (He has a brief passage explaining the origin of the word ‘Goon’ which he took from a US TV series about Popeye, on page 77 and further references to proto-Goon writing on pages.) In theory I ought to like The Goons, and I sort of enjoy the silly voices, but between my youth and the Goons lies, like an Iron Curtain, the vast presence of Monty Python, like an impassable barrier.

Monty Python

The thing about the Pythons, for me, was their intelligence and cultural capital; it was the logic and thoroughness of the thinking, where an idea is worked through with a thoroughness which takes it beyond the everyday and far into the surreal, such as the dead parrot sketch or ‘is this the right room for an argument’ sketch, combined with their easy familiarity with advanced cultural knowledge, for example the confidence with which they handle the material in the Philosophers’ Song. It’s written by someone who really has done a degree in philosophy and really knows what they’re talking about and it shows. They also had tremendous variety due to all the members being capable of writing material.

By contrast, The Goons always seemed very thin to me. It relied entirely on Milligan as the main writer and, although he has a fertile way in creating characters many of whom became popular figures, and it has silly voices and absurdist scenarios, for me it lacks the conceptual depth, the twisted logical thoroughness and the cultural confidence of the Pythons.

I’ve never met anyone who quote Goon Show sketches but all through my life I’ve met lots of bores who can reel off entire Monty Python sketches, and this is why. The Goons relied on silly voices and quickfire gags, whereas Python was all about very clever concepts worked out very cleverly, so that anyone repeating them not is not only funny but experiences the deep logic many of them follow.

So that’s why I feel the way I do about this book – that the comedy aspects of it depend entirely on the textual equivalent of him doing funny voices and pulling funny faces, and these are, frankly, pretty limited tricks and quickly become over-familiar.

Types of Milligan joke

What I mean is he has a limited number of types of gag and you quickly come to recognise and expect them. Most of them are types of wordplay. For example, over and again he quotes a common or garden English locution then takes it to extremes, exploiting its latent absurdity:

I heaved at the weights, Kerrrrrrissttt!! an agonised pain shot round my back into my groin, down my leg, and across the road to a bus stop. (p.19)

Father and son were then shown the door, the windows, and finally the street. (p.16)

The walls once white were now thrice grey. (p.27)

Very closely related is taking a common or garden phrase and taking it literally and/or giving it an unexpected (and therefore comic) spin.

I was put in Lewisham General Hospital under observation. I think a nurse did it through a hole in the ceiling.

The fog was very dense, as were Signallers Devine and White.

Sergeant Harris was a regular. He went every morning without fail. (p.50)

He said I couldn’t climb a tree for toffee. I said, ‘Who climbs trees for toffee? I get mine in a shop.’ (p.94)

We had arrived at a hundred-year old deserted chalk quarry. How can people be so heartless as to desert a hundred-year-old chalk quarry?

The dance was held in a large and comfortable countrystyle lounge: chairs and sofas clad in loose floral covers, plenty of polished wood, a few Hercules Brabizon-Brabizon water colours on walls, standard lamps with silk shades, a few oriental curios, traces of visits to foreign climes. (What are foreign climes? Waiter! A pound of foreign climes, please!) (p.98)

A deliberate misunderstanding can be worked up into a bit of repartee:

A worried officer rushed up. ‘Can you play “The Maple Leaf Forever”?’ ‘No sir, after an hour I get tired.’ ‘You’re under arrest,’ he said. (p.48)

[The cook] doled out something into my mess tin. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Irish Stew,’ he said, ‘Then,’ I replied. ‘Irish Stew in the name of the Law.’ (p.141)

There’s the verbal trick of offering a clichéd phrase then doing a comic reversal of it:

Occasionally he sang ‘Mighty Like a Rose’ in a quavering light baritone (or mighty like a baritone, in a quivering rose).

Taking words intended metaphorically literally:

The Catholic priest warned, ‘Avoid loose women.’ I never told him the women I knew were so loose they were falling to bits. (p.49)

These all strike me as variations on the same idea, the deliberate misinterpretation of an everyday phrase for comic effect, or the revealing of the comic implications laying dormant in a phrase which he makes explicit, or the taking of a common phrase to absurd extremes. Puns, in other words.

Another strand is what you could call English suburban surrealism like the jokey stuff at the beginning about his mum making an air raid shelter in the garden or his dad putting a road block across their street, silliness of a very ‘Diary of a Nobody’ kind. It’s surrealism but of a very mundane flavour. Of the statutory cross country run in the army he knocks off a quick one-line gag:

Many tried to husband their energy by running on one leg.

Or:

‘Silence when you speak to an officer,’ said Battalion Sergeant Major. (p.29)

All of his humour depends on a kind of rapid, quickfire delivery which, once it gets going, keeps you permanently off balance, vulnerable to the next gag, then the next one then the next one.

It can become quite painful. 1) Milligan’s humour is very hit and miss. On the radio it didn’t matter too much because the script was made up entirely of absurdist scenarios which carry you with them, and in whose chaotic context a barrage of one-liners worked. Plus, crucially, 2) the performance was shared between Milligan and two performers of genius, Harry Secombe and especially Peter Sellers.

But in static prose Milligan doesn’t have any of those resources. It’s just him and the written word, no silly scripts, silly voices or silly collaborators egging each other on.

Read cold on the page this reveals a number of things. One is that, after an opening flurry of silliness – taking the mickey out of Neville Chamberlain, the silly stories about his father and older brother trying to get the Ministry of Defence interested in patently absurd inventions, getting into trouble with the police for erecting a barrier across their road on the day war is declared and so on – the book settles down and becomes more factual and this is generally to the good.

Behind the tiresome gags is an interesting account of being conscripted and sent to join a gunnery regiment on the south coast. There’s all kinds of stuff about men in the army but what really comes over is how he set up a jazz band with three like-minded blokes and managed to play gigs and parties around the region, sometimes picking up hefty fees. The story of him being invited to the BBC studios in Maida Vale to play with a scratch band and actually record some tracks is memorable because it is sincere; his love of music and of performing shines through.

A second thing which emerges is that his style is wildly uneven, veering from semi-illiterate, passing through competent enough, and on to the extremely idiosyncratic. Here he is, struggling to write a sentence.

From motor vehicles we went on to Bren Carriers, they were marvellous, they’d go anywhere, and didn’t we just do that. (p.111)

At the other end of the spectrum his attempts at normal prose are liable to be interrupted by his fondness for staccato and/or telegraphese: he is very partial to one-word sentences, verbless sentences and abrupt transitions.

At six o’clock we arrived at the night rendezvous, a field of bracken resting on a lake. We got tea from a swearing cookhouse crew, who took it in turns to say ‘piss off’ to us. We were given to understand we could have a complete night’s sleep. Good. We tossed for who was to sleep in the truck. I lost. Sod. Rain. Idea! Under the truck! Laid out ground sheet, rolled myself like a casserole in three blankets. I dropped into a deep sleep. I awoke to rain falling on me. The truck had gone. Everybody had gone. (p.85)

There’s one particular passage where he attempts to describe the simple beauty of lazing around in the sunshine on the South Downs and his attempt to write descriptive prose is so weird it’s worth quoting in full:

No matter what season, the Sussex countryside was always a pleasure. But the summer of 1941 was a delight. The late lambs on springheel legs danced their happiness. Hot, immobile cows chewed sweet cud under the leafchoked limbs of June oaks that were young 500 years past. The musk of bramble and blackberry hedges, with purpleblack fruit offering themselves to passing hands, poppies red, red, red, tracking the sun with open-throated petals, birds bickering aloft, bibulous to the sun. White fleecy clouds passing high, changing shapes as if uncertain of what they were. To break for a smoke, to lie in that beckoning grass and watch cabbage white butterflies dancing on the wind. Everywhere was saying bethankit.

All that said, I liked the descriptions, right at the end, of going aboard ship. The vividness of the experience has obviously stayed with him and brings out some of his best description.

Nobody wanted to sleep. I worked out we were waiting for the tide. About one o’clock the ship took on an air of departure. Gangways were removed. Hatches covered. Chains rattled. The ship started to vibrate as the engines came to life. Waters swirled. Tugs moved in. Donkey-engines rattled, hawsers were dropped from the bollards, and trailed like dead eels into the oil-tinted Mersey. We were away. Slowly we glided downstream. To the east we could hear the distant cough of Ack-Ack. The time was 1.10 a.m., January 8th, 1943. We were a mile downstream when the first bombs started to fall on the city. Ironically, a rosy glow tinged the sky, Liverpool was on fire. The lads came up on deck to see it. Away we went, further and further into the night, finally drizzle and darkness sent us below. (p.130)

Q TV

In the 1970s when I started watching TV as a boy, Milligan wrote and presented the Q series of absurdist, surreal comedy sketches. He seemed to have a lot more fun making them than it was to watch them. Even as a boy I felt there was something wrong about them. I wasn’t surprised, later on, to learn that Milligan had had a mental breakdown towards the end of the war and that it was the start of a lifelong battle against depression. He didn’t seem to be master of his material but letting it gush out and master him. Well, the same feels true of the passage I’ve just quoted – he’s letting the first things that come to mind, the gags, verbal fizzes and bangs, have their way. Possibly the text took ages to compose and revise and hone but I’m talking about the final effect, which is of a man carried away by the exuberance of his own deranged antics.

Class and education

What also comes over is a class thing, that Milligan was lower-middle class with little or no higher education. His humour, and this text, entirely lacks any cultural or intellectual depth. Most male British writers of the twentieth century went to a) public school and b) Oxford or Cambridge, where they were pumped full of the Latin classics and English literature’s greatest hits. Those kinds of authors (and their fictional protagonists) feel perfectly at home dropping quotes and references from the standard Western canon of poets, playwrights, philosophers and so on. These kinds of knowing references are the natural accompaniment of the smooth narratives, rounded sentences and well-shaped paragraphs which they were taught to write at school and which are so enjoyable to read in their novels, poems, autobiographies and so on.

Milligan has absolutely none of this. There are no literary or intellectual or cultural references of any kind anywhere in the book (actually I spotted two things: one where he paraphrases ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ by Lewis Carroll, and another occasion where he spoofs the style of the King James Bible. That’s it as far as cultural references go.) Lacking any literary or cultural depth, there’s just the basic narrative of events during his period of service in a gunnery battery based on the south coast of England, which is continually interrupted by the incessant fizzing and banging of his literalism, puns and wordplay.

This inability to create larger structures or develop a flowing narrative is connected to the way the text isn’t structured in chapters (which you strongly suspect he wouldn’t have been able to plan and flow over a long stretch) but into short sections given blunt headings such as RELIGION, FOOD, SPORT, BARRACK ROOM HUMOUR and so on. Rather as the Q TV series was almost like notes for a comedy show, with the half-finished chaotic nature of the notes left in full view, so ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’ feels like notes for an autobiography, a ramshackle rummage of sections devoted to specific themes, pasted together in roughly chronological order, with no attempt to join them together into a coherent narrative.

And all of this is connected with what I mentioned earlier about class. Although Milligan was in the army there’s surprisingly little about the army as a career – nothing like the earnest engagement in the RAF of Geoffrey Wellum, for example. Instead, army life is depicted from the classic perspective of the non-officer class, as a predicament to be mocked with work and duties to be dodged whenever possible.

Spike is determined to make you see life and the Army from the squaddie’s point of view, as an organisation characterised by mismanagement and shambles, as an opportunity for pranks and practical jokes, and a set of rules and enforcers (for example, scary sergeant-majors) to be broken, dodged and avoided – all with the aim of furthering the three classic interests of uncultured working class life – grub, booze and shagging.

Anti-romance

He warns us in the preface that it’s going to be ‘bawdy’ and it is, indeed, crude bunk-up-behind-the-bike-sheds stuff.

If we take John Buchan in his Sir Edward Leithen books, as a type of the very upper-class, tight-lipped, chivalrous view of women and romance, then Spike is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. He, like, one suspects, many of his fellow 20-something conscript soldiers, is permanently on the lookout for sex. Whichever bars, pubs or clubs they visit or his band plays in, he’s always got an eye open for the birds, makes a point of chatting them up, is constantly aware of then. The main reason he applied to join the RAF in 1940 was that men in RAF uniform were always surrounded by the best birds in pubs (‘All the beautiful birds went out with pilots’) and he wanted some of that. Nothing to do with wanting to fly let alone serve his country. Birds. Women. Chicks.

Whereas Eric Newby’s war memoir contains a chaste and sensitive and romantic portrait of the woman who helped him on the run and went on to become his wife, a typical Milligan anecdote describes the way the high-minded Jehovah’s Witness in his unit, Bombardier MacDonald, was slowly degraded by military life until one night the guard on duty, Gunner Devine, was puzzled to hear a funny rhythmic thumping noise coming from the back of the coal sheds. Upon investigation he found Bombardier MacDonald, his trousers round his ankles, ‘having a late-night knee-trembler with a local fat girl.’ But that’s not the end of it.

Gunner Devine watched until the climax was nigh, then shouted, ‘Halt! Who comes there?’ The effect was electric. MacDonald ran into the night shouting ‘Armageddon’. The girl, still in a sexual coma, was given Gunner Devine’s rifle to hold, while he terminated her contract.

The picture of the local fat girl holding the gunner’s rifle while he took his turn screwing her is about as far from the upper-class nobility of Buchan or the romantic love affair of Newby as it’s possible to get.

But ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’ is packed with incidents like this – blunt descriptions of crude practical jokes, awful food, the odd characters you’re forced into proximity with in the army (the soldier who turned up on parade naked, the hypochondriac, the madman), silly escapades and shagging stories – only Milligan’s love of jazz and the regular playing of his band offer any sort of escape, the one place, you feel, where he can be himself and stop having to be the relentless gagster.

Happiness was a mug of tea, a cigarette, and a record of Bunny Berrigan playing ‘Let’s do it’.

It’s a great feeling playing jazz. Most certainly it never started a war. (p.135)

Birds

We had three [observation posts]: Galley Hill, Bexhill; a Martello Tower, Pevernsey and Constables Farm on the BexhillEastbourne Road. Most of us tried for the Martello on Pevensey Beach as the local birds were easier to lay, but you had to be quick because of the tides.

After a quick drink in The Devonshire we ended up at the Forces Corner to finish off the evening. I started chatting up the birds, one especially, Betty Aspnel, a plain girl who made up for it with a sensational figure, man has to be satisfied with his lot, and man! this girl had the lot.

In the evenings after dark, one or two of our favourite birds would visit us and bring fish and chips; once in we bolted the door.

That night there was an Officers’ and All-Ranks’ dance in the Drill Hall. We all worked hard to extricate all the bestlooking A.T.S. girls from the magnetic pull of the officers and sergeants. Alas, we failed, so we reverted to the time-honoured sanctuary of the working man – Drink.

Sex

At this new billet we received morning visits from a W.V.S. Canteen Van. A very dolly married woman took a fancy to me and one night, after a dance, she took me home.

Sometimes he tells what you could call a straightforward anecdote, without the odd prose style and quickfire gags. Probably the best example is, again, about sex.

It was all sex in those days it was that or the ‘flicks’ and flicks cost money. There was a lovely busty bird called Beryl, who had hot pants for me. During the interval of our first dance at Turkey Road I took her to the lorry park, into the back of a fifteen hundredweight truck. We were going through our third encore when the truck drove off. Apart from the jolting it must have been the best ride we’ve ever had. It stopped at Hastings. Through the flap I saw our chauffeur was Sergeant ‘Boner’ Hughes who hated my guts (I don’t know why, he’d never seen them). He backed the truck up an alley and left it while he went into The White Lion for a drink with his bird who was barmaid. Slipping into the driving seat I drove it back, and arrived in time to play the second half of the dance. ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ asked Edgington, sweating at the piano. ‘I, Harry, have been having it off in the back of a lorry, and I got carried away.’

Pranks

These include:

• the variety of farting skills in the unit, including the man who had an assistant light his farts
• the gunner who always reeled back to barracks blind drunk and had a piss in a corner of the dorm, till a new recruit asked where to sleep and they all told him to put a bunk in the corner with the result that that night he got covered in a stream of pee
• the bombardier they all hated so when he passed out drunk one night they removed his trousers, then loaded him, in his bed, into a lorry and deposited him in Bexhill cemetery
• the soldier who did impersonations with his cock and balls, arranging them to produce tableaux with titles such as ‘Sausage on a Plate’, ‘The Last Turkey in the Shop’, ‘Sack of Flour’, ‘The Roaring of the Lions’ and, by using spectacles, ‘Groucho Marx’

Spike worked in the signals part of the regiment.

One of the pleasures of Duty Signaller was listening to officers talking to their females. When we got a ‘hot’ conversation we plugged it straight through to all those poor lonely soldiers at their OR’s and gun positions. It was good to have friends.

Army foolishness

Allegedly when he arrived his unit had some Great War-period 9.2 inch artillery pieces with only one drawback. There were no shells. This didn’t stop their commanding officer insisting on training the correct drills over and over except, when it came to the crucial moment, the entire gun crew was trained to shout BANG in unison.

The actual war

The narrative does follow a simple chronology describing him and his family hearing Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war, the repeated official letters announcing his call-up and then, once he’s in the army, the months leading up to Dunkirk (26 May to 4 June 1940), the rest of 1940 and into 1941. During this entire period he and his battalion are shunted from one south coast posting to another.

In the passages about Dunkirk an unusual degree of seriousness breaks through:

Next day the news of the ‘small armada’ came through on the afternoon news. As the immensity of the defeat became apparent, somehow the evacuation turned it into a strange victory. I don’t think the nation ever reached such a feeling of solidarity as in that week at another time during the war. Three weeks afterwards, a Bombardier Kean, who had survived the evacuation, was posted to us. ‘What was it like,’ I asked him. ‘Like son? It was a fuck up, a highly successful fuck up.’

The same is even more true of the Blitz, which historians date from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941. Milligan and his mates lie in their dormitories on the south coast and hear the German bombers fly over night after night. Sometimes they go outside and can see the sky to the north lit up orange as London burns. Lots of them are Londoners, so they lie awake at nights trying to cheer each other up with stories of how solid Anderson shelters are and how the bombs will never penetrate to the Tube shelters. Worried men.

Damage

This brings me to how the war quite obviously damaged him quite severely. In the preface he warns:

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind…

He describes how in 1941 they made friends with a jazz drummer named Dixie Dean whose Dad owned a radio shop in Hailsham. On Sunday evening he invited the band over to listen to jazz records all evening. It was his greatest joy. When he was posted overseas he left his jazz record collection in Dixie’s dad’s care and, of course, his shop suffered a direct hit, destroying all his records bar one.

Among the losses was my record collection, all save one, which I still have, Jimmy Lunceford’s Bugs Parade. I daren’t play it much; it creates such vivid memories. I have to go out for a walk; even then it’s about three hours before I can settle down again. (p.102)

When he worked as a signaller, a wartime telephone exchange was set up:

It was installed in a concrete air-raid shelter at the back of Worthingholm. In 1962 I took a sentimental journey back to Bexhill. The shelter was overgrown with brambles; I pushed down the stairs and by the light of a match I saw the original telephone cables still in place on the wall where the exchange used to be. There was still a label on one. In faded lettering it said, ‘Galley Hill O.P.’ in my handwriting. The place was full of ghosts – I had to get out. (p.73)

‘I had to get out’ – just those five words, if you give them their proper weight, reveal the truth behind the entire book; almost buried in the welter of gags, one-liners, excruciating puns and absurdist flights of fantasy, lurks the deep, abiding mental anguish.

Credit

Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1971. References are to the 1973 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

• Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall online

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• Second World War reviews