Peace Work (2 page)

And I say, “It’s time you bought a watch that I can laugh at.”

From our floor we take the lift.

“
Che piano?
” says the ageing lift attendant.

“
La terra piano
,” says Mulgrew which translated means ‘the earth floor’.

The dining-room is full. Another ENSA party has booked in, among them Tony Fayne who in post-war years would become well known for his partnership with David Evans. As Fayne and Evans, they did funny sporting commentaries and were used by the BBC till it had sucked them dry and discarded them. I noticed that this new intake all wore their shirts outside their trousers. This struck me as amusing because, dear reader, during my boyhood days in India we, the Raj, laughed at the ‘wogs’ for that selfsame reason. What I didn’t know is that this was the ‘latest fashion’ from America! Suddenly, tucking shirts in was old-fashioned. I remember whenever Tony Fayne passed me there was the faint aroma of marijuana, for which he was later ‘busted’! I remember one dinner-time, when the smell of pot emanated from their table as I passed it on my way to bed, a pale ENS A female of some forty summers grabbed the seat of my trousers and whooped ‘Wot ho, Monty’ and fell face-down into the soup.

Our lesbian javelin-thrower manageress remembers me.

“
Come sta, Terri?
” she says.

We chatted over coffee. Had I any spare tickets for the show? Of course. How many? She’d like to bring the family, thirty-two. She ‘buys’ us a bottle of wine and we discuss post-war Italy – the political scene was very woolly with the Christian Democrats holding the wolf of Communism at bay. She doesn’t want Communism, she loves democracy and have we anything for sale on the black market? We repair to her private suite where we continue drinking and she shows me a photo album. There she is in all her athletic glory, throwing the javelin at the All Italia Games. Gad! In her running shorts and vest, she’s a fine figure of a man. She shows me photos of Mussolini’s execution – ghastly – then, a turn-up for the book, a picture of Clara Petacci looking very sexy in a net dress (see picture).

A knock at the door. It’s the late Bill Hall and fiddle, can he come in? His eyes fall on the Petacci photo.

“Cor, ‘oo’s the bird? Clara Petacci? Wot, the one that Musso was givin’ it to? Cor, ‘ow could they shoot her, all that lovely stuff!”

He was right, she would have made a lovely stuff.

Bill has been out visiting ‘a friend’. This is usually some old boiler with a turkey trot neck, one foot in the grave and very grateful for any that’s going. He wants to know if it’s too late for dinner. The manageress says no, what’s he want? Spaghetti. We watch Bill eating it. He cuts it all up with a knife, then shovels it in on a spoon.

I retire to bed, first taking a luxurious bath. Mulgrew is already abed, smoking and sipping red wine from a glass by his bedside. “How did you get on with the Italian bird?”

Italian
bird?
If he meant Miss Toni Fontana, I was indeed much favoured by her and would see her on the morrow and be immediately hypnotized by her ‘petite beauty’. Mulgrew is given to silent evil laughter with heavy shoulders. “Wait till she gets a look at your petite beauty.” He was a dirty little devil and would never go to heaven.

Clara Petacci turning on the Fascist party.

BARBARY COAST

B
arbary Coast
opened at the Argentina Theatre on Monday, 24 June. It was an immediate success and the Bill Hall Trio again the hit of the show. Wait till England heard about us, rich, rich, rich!!!

The Bill Hall Trio on stage in Rome, where the Pope lives.

It’s a busy show for me: I have to appear in sketches, in the Bowery Quartette singing ‘Close the Shutters, Willy’s Dead’, play trumpet in the orchestra and the guitar in the Bill Hall Trio – all at no extra charge. Bornheim has a dastardly trick. During my solo in ‘Close the Shutters’, he drops a lone ping-pong ball that bounces slowly and repeatedly and faster into the orchestra pit, where he has arranged for a man to drop a brick into a bucket of water. It was a simple but funny idea.

Of others in the show, the lead comic was Jimmy Molloy, about forty, overweight, a cockney, very left wing, his comedy all aggressive. After the war not a word was heard of him in the profession, so…There’s one born every minute and we had one who was, Sergeant Chalky White, ex-Marine Para Commando. What he was doing in the entertainment world was as baffling as finding Adolf Eichmann in the Israeli government. His only claim to fame was he once leapt off Bari Bridge into the harbour with an umbrella – all very clever, but there’s a limit to how many times. He was a bouncing all-noise cockney boy: if you were in a pub with him, you all
had
to sing and do ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. He had a brain that would have fitted into a thimble with room to spare. He was i⁄c transport and scenery, both of which strained his mental capacities to the limit. Yes, he was a nice bouncing thirty-year-old cockney lad who should have stayed on his barrow. However, he was turned on by the bright lights and birds of show biz, so he wheedled his way into the show. He couldn’t act, he couldn’t sing, he couldn’t dance, but he could fight…So, for no reason at all, in the middle of the show a mock fight breaks out and we all have to pretend to be floored by Sergeant White.

“Don’t worry, I won’t ‘urt yer, I’ll miss you by a whisker.”

This didn’t work out. Every night he would mistime and render one of the cast unconscious. As I had boxed in the past, I rode his punches. Even then, to this day I have a chipped front tooth and a scarred inner lip. Finally, after we’d all been hit, Lieutenant Priest had to put a stop to the ‘Fight’. White sulked off.

“It’s professional jealousy,” he said.

White truly believed that after the war he would ‘become someone’. He did, a dustman.

Maxie – just Maxie – was a short, squat mid-European. A huge head dwarfed his body and his neck didn’t exist, so much so that he couldn’t turn his head but had to revolve his whole body. He spoke very little English. His ‘act’ consisted of bending iron bars on his head and shoulders, concluding with his bending an iron bar on his forearm.

“Maxie has developed this special muscle that ‘no living human has developed’. In this attempt, if he misses the muscle he could break his arm,” announced Molloy.

There followed great grunts and thwacks as the sweating strong man beat the shit out of himself, finally holding up the now bent bar and collapsing into the wings.

The programme of the Barbary Coast opening night, Rome, where the Pope lives.

The Barbary Coast Quartet – left to right, Milligan, Bornheim, Trowler, Escott.

ROMANCE AND TEA

27 June 1946

O
n the day she visited her mother, Toni arranged to meet me in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. There, we would have tea. I was walking on air! Our budding romance was the talk of the company.

“We will meeta under theee statue of Goethe,” she had said smilingly.

Of course, Frederick von Goethe the well-known German singer dancer! I wore my dark blue trousers, white silk shirt, satin blue tie, navy blue velvet jacket and my sensible strong brown outsized convulsed English shoes. I took one of Rome’s dying Fiat taxis. He had never heard of the statue of Frederick von Goethe, singer and dancer, but we kept driving till we found it.

I arrived early as I wished to choose a suitable pose to strike for when Toni arrived. I chose a Spanish oak against which I leaned like Gary Cooper and smoked a cigarette like Humphrey Bogart. By the time she arrived, I’d run out. Toni drew up in a taxi, I posed heavily as Robert Taylor. As she approached, all the juices in my metabolism started to revolve. I think I was actually vibrating: as she drew near I would appear to her as a blue blur. She was dressed in a blue polka-dot dress, her clean brown limbs glowed in the Roman sun and I was speechless in the face of her smile. “Buon giorno, Toni,” I said going light-headed, only the weight of my sensible English shoes keeping me earthbound. “Hello Terr-ee,”* she said and held out her hand.

≡ She had discovered I was also Terence and Terry. She liked the latter.

My first photograph of Maria Antoinetta Fontana – the Villa Borghese gardens, Rome, where the Pope lives.

I took it and she led me away. “Come,” she said.

Through leafy glades she led me to a teahouse. We sat at a table, all the others were deserted, how perfect! A crisp white-coated waiter still smelling of shaving soap attended us. Would I like tea, asks Toni. Yes, I say. What kind, she says. What’s she mean what kind? Tea, there’s only one kind. Toni orders in Italian and the waiter speeds to her bidding.

“Isn’t it a lovely day?”

Yes, Toni, and I love you.

“The trees are at their best this time of the year.”

Yes, Toni, and I love you.

The tea arrives – ah! and Italian pastries. Good old Char. Toni watches as I mix mine with half milk, five spoons of sugar and stir it into a treacly goo. What’s that she’s drinking in a tall glass enclosed in a silver holder? There’s a lemon floating in it. Careless waiter! Shall I get it out for her? What? It’s meant to be there? Russian tea? Oh, I’m sorry I can’t speak Russian, so how should I know?