Read Online Where Have All the Bullets Gone? by Spike Milligan - Free Book Online

plunge into crystal clear waters that in forty years time will be floating with tourist crap and overpopulation. Lording over the island is Mount Epomeo, hung with a mantle of vineyards and bougainvillaea. Legend has it that the giant Typhoeus lies transfixed beneath it. A punishment for screwing one of the Naiads. I suppose one way of keeping it down is to put a mountain on it.
    On this very island Michelangelo used to visit the lady Vittoria Collona — mysterious, as he was gay.
    VITTORIA:
    ‘ows the cealin goin, Mike?
    MICHEL A:
    I bin using the long brush but it’s doin’ me back in.
    VITTORIA:
    Why don’t you arst the Pope fer scaffoldin’?
    MICHEL A:
    Oh ta, I knew these visits ‘ere wouldn’t be wasted.
     
    Hours. We lie on the beach sunning and smoking, and like true smokers throw our dog ends and matches in the sea.
    “Hello, down there.” The Colonel’s red face is at the grilled Moorish window, his face looking equally grilled. We must come up, tea is being served. A long refectory table laden with salads and a magnificent bronze samovar. Our every whim is waited on slavishly by the little Italian. “They’re a dying breed,” says Startling Grope. (He was right. The Iti died the day after we left.) The officers are slopping down one Alexander after another and we all repair to the beach again; Captain Clarke in a one-piece suit that was out of date when Captain Webb swam the channel, and the Colonel in a pair of bathing drawers of ‘the briefest gist’. He plunges in, comes out, and goes up to bed. Captain Clarke strikes out to sea so far that the current gradually carries him out of sight round the headland. He is not shouting ‘help’ but just in case we shout “Goodbye, sir.” He disappears. Should we inform the life-guards? No, there’s plenty more like him. Hours later he returned overland via the Villa Fondalillo some three miles away. When the Italian flunkey opened the door, a shagged-out Captain Clarke fell into the house, but at least he had two wet legs and a body to match.
    Eventide and we are returning; the RAF boat waits at the mole. The Colonel has organized it perfectly, except for falling in the sea again. “Homeward bound, eh?” says the Captain, and leads our officers away for drinkypoos. We of the lower order stay on deck with buggerallpoos. Ischia fades into the crepuscular evening and Naples looms. We dock.
    “You drive, Terence,” says Colonel S. Singing all the while, we are back at Maddaloni in just over the hour and under the weather. It was a memorable day. Even as I type this, I can see that splendid sunlight on that warm azure sea in a time capsule that will never come again.
    Len and I are bedding down for the night. “He must have drunk ten bottles of wine, two of Strega and two of brandy,”
    Len said. “You’ll see, when he goes it will be his liver or his bladder.” He was wrong: in 1970 Stanley died of heart failure during an operation for piles. But for piles, Stanley would be alive today, doing ten years for interfering with little boys.
    One of them could have been me. I speak with experience.
    . You see that evening on our return from Ischia, I drove Stanley back to his billet and he put his hand up my shorts. I thought, this could mean promotion for me, but no, I said “Look here, sir, fuck off…sir.” He is sorry. It will never happen again.
    Len falls about laughing. “Cor, fancy, there’s men up the line dying and down here the Colonels are trying to grab yer goolies.” I reminded him it was better than dying. “Let’s face it, would you rather be fucked or killed?”

Ars Gratia Artist
    I have entered an Art Contest, and I win!
Nude winner of art contest
    The prize is given me by a new man, Major Rodes of the Highland Light Infantry. He too is gay, and has just returned from some daring deed behind the enemy lines, like squeezing partisans’ balls under fire. Now he is out of the line as he has developed a hernia (did he use a dark