Up For Grabs

by Max Hennessy

  Up For Grabs

  Cover

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Epilogue

  The WWII Italian Collection

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Author’s Note

  For a short time during the war of 1939–45 I found myself a member of a service concert party in Africa. I’d originally been recruited to write material for the comedian who’d been sweating blood trying to write it himself but, unfortunately, when one of his group disappeared into hospital, I found myself raked in to play a more active part and, in a nightshirt and fez, ended up onstage auctioning ‘slave girls’ in a mini-play which served as an introduction for the tunes of The Desert Song. I was dragged in deeper and deeper but, my heart not being in it, could never manage to learn my lines so that I always had to be given parts where I could hold a magazine with them secreted inside for easy reference. By the time I finally escaped, I had learned not only quite a few of the tricks but also more than one of the disasters that can occur in showbiz.

  The tricks, as anyone knows who served during the war, were not confined to showbiz. In North Africa especially, the war was an extraordinary affair in more ways than one. Since the natives were always short of everything, stealing, swindle and fraud were indulged in on an enormous scale. The British were not alone in this. The Italian army also suffered from it and, according to the Rommel Papers, so did the Afrika Korps, and despite the efforts of specialized groups designed to stop it, it was never put down. Confusion was added to by both sides using each other’s captured weapons, vehicles, even clothes. As each ran short, they refitted themselves on their next move forward in the yo-yo war that was being conducted. And men of both sides managed from time to time to live for considerable periods behind each other’s lines – deliberately to gather information or for sabotage, or accidentally as they found themselves cut off by the fighting. One escaped German prisoner was reported to have worked for a time as a waiter in a British senior officers’ mess where plans were discussed over food.

  It couldn’t have been too difficult to merge into the crowd. I myself once saw a group of Italian prisoners passing through a station entrance under guard when several of them were cut off by the hurrying people heading for trains. For several wild minutes they were free men and, had they not obviously considered it safer to remain prisoners than to be free, could easily have escaped and vanished because, despite their Italian uniforms, no one took the slightest notice of them.

  All this is mentioned merely to show that the events described in this story could have happened, even if they didn’t.

  I am indebted for concert party details to Fighting for a Laugh, by Richard Fawkes, and for information concerning the misappropriation of equipment to Tail of an Army, by J. K. Stanford.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Edward Kitchener Clegg had been enjoying Cairo, even if he didn’t enjoy being in the army.

  He’d been in a show at Golders Green when his call-up papers had arrived and, though he’d managed to put off his appearance in khaki until they’d found a replacement for him, in the end he’d had to go. Because of an old injury caused by falling into the orchestra pit during a comic ballet at the Hippodrome in Wallasey in 1938 when he’d had a couple of drinks, he’d been made a Pay Corps babu. But, working at accounts during the day and following his old profession at night as part of a concert party that entertained the troops of Northern Command, he’d just decided that the war was bearable after all when he was posted to Cairo.

  He wasn’t over-excited at the prospect, but when he arrived in Egypt he found that even for a corporal pay clerk Cairo wasn’t bad. There was plenty to eat and drink and everybody worked peacetime hours, staff officers lunching, sleeping and playing games at the Cairo clubs, while men in on urgent business from the desert with scorched skins, burned-out eyes and sand in their hair, had to kick their heels until five o’clock when they strolled back to their desks. Even the fitters in the workshops of the Delta avoided doing too much so they could keep up their strength to go out dancing in the evening.

  Morale, however, was said to be low – not at the front, of course, where nobody seemed very worried about the war, but at the back where there was no danger of being shot at – and every now and again there was a blitz with orders from the High Altar that everybody had to buckle down, work harder, get their hair cut, wear sun helmets, avoid exposing themselves to the sun, and be smart and alert at all times. Such orders never had a chance, of course, because the men out in the desert had worn nothing but side hats for some time and staff officers regularly fried themselves to crisps round the Gezira swimming pools without coming to any harm; while the technicians in the base workshops considered that smartness indicated a lack of professionalism and preferred to be scruffy. Come to that, they also liked to sleep off their lunch and when, because of the lost man-hours that resulted, an attempt was made to give them their main meal at night, they complained they were weak from hunger during the afternoon. It was important enough to occupy the minds of the staff for some time.

  The panics never lasted long, of course, and they all got back to their personal comfort as quickly as possible. Everybody had vehicle seat cushions as pillows for their beds and if you were in need of cash you could, if you were that way inclined, sell socks and shirts by the hundredweight in the Cairo black market. Food was wasted abominably and Egyptians by the dozen lived from the swill bins. And while the men trying to organize camouflage in the desert were desperately in need of paint and timber, no base unit was complete without flagpoles and barriers all glittering with white paint, and a forest of huge notices adjuring you to ‘Save timber’ and that ‘Salvage wins wars’. Since the conflict was being run by professionals, Clegg had to assume it was the only way.

  He couldn’t do much about it, anyway, but, because he was a cheerful, gregarious, uncomplaining type, he determined to make the best of it until it was over.

  Because he’d been performing in front of people since leaving school, he could play the trombone, the trumpet, the piano and the piano accordion and, bored with the routine, he started a small dance band to amuse his friends. In no time at all, he found himself amusing not only his friends but the sergeants’ mess and eventually became part of a small group which played for the officers as they ate their evening meal. There was, he felt, something vaguely immoral about this but, since the band were excused guard and supplied with free beer, he raised no objections.

  Eventually, weary of the repetitious music when his inclination lay in other directions, one evening, without saying anything to anyone, he launched into a comic monologue he’d adapted from one he’d done on the halls before his call-up. It was about an Italian officer talking to an Egyptian ice-cream merchant and it went down very well. Even the Egyptian mess servants laughed at it. To his surprise, the following week he was ordered to report to the general’s office.

>   Wondering what had gone wrong, because no riot or civil commotion had resulted from anything he’d done, Clegg appeared at the appointed hour and was shunted through a variety of senior NCOs and officers to the general’s door. He wasn’t a fighting general, of course, because he was getting on a bit; he was just the general in command of the Cairo depots whose job was to organize everything that went up to the troops in the desert. Nevertheless, he was quite a popular old boy, without any side and a lot of gongs from the previous bunfight. He was tall and beefy with a marked sense of humour and a great feeling for the good things in life. On his desk were two books – King’s Regulations and No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

  ‘Clegg,’ he said. ‘Eddie Clegg.’

  He sounded like one of the boys meeting an old mate and Clegg half expected him to offer him a gin and tonic.

  ‘Comedian chap.’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Saw you at the Theatre Royal, Sheffield, in 1938. That right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Clegg was amazed. ‘I was there.’

  ‘Did a monologue. Saw you do a sketch about a fire and a bucket chain where you did a bit of sleight of hand so that the full buckets went back to the tap and the empty ones back to the fire. Reminded me of Harry Tate at his best.’ It appeared that the general was an enthusiastic visitor to West End shows.

  ‘Not much of a one for culture,’ he admitted. ‘Prefer to laugh. Makes you feel better, laughing. Pity we haven’t got the Crazy Gang out here. They’d fit in nicely.’ He leaned forward. ‘Got an idea that might interest you. Concert parties.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Concert parties to entertain the troops. You’ve heard of ENSA – Entertainment National Service Association.’

  Clegg was beginning to feel almost like an old buddy by this time and he replied almost automatically. ‘We call it “Every Night Something Awful”, sir.’

  The general laughed. ‘That’s about it,’ he agreed. ‘Well, they seem to have made a pills of things at the moment out here and it’s been decided at rather a high level that we’ve got to provide our own. You’d better get on with it.’

  ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘In the mess when you did that monologue. Remembered it from the Theatre Royal and when I enquired around I discovered you were just about the only professional in the area. Think you could organize something?’

  It was a startling order but Clegg had no doubt.

  ‘Know anybody else who was a professional?’

  Clegg didn’t. But he knew a few keen amateurs who were willing to get up in the Naafi and sing or tell jokes.

  ‘Talk to them,’ the general urged. ‘Might be able to make something of ’em. Something to amuse the troops out in the blue. They’re bored, it seems, and we’ve got to produce entertainment for them. Toot sweet, too. The tooter the sweeter. We’ll make you up to sergeant to give you some thump and you can have anybody you want so long as you don’t ask for too many. And you can take them from anywhere. One exception: you can’t have the adjutant of 58 Maintenance Unit.’

  Clegg immediately assumed the adjutant of 58 MU was essential to the war effort, but when he started interviewing among the first to offer himself was the adjutant of 58 MU. He was overweight, toothbrush-moustached and had a voice like a penny whistle. When he announced that he occasionally sang ballads in the mess, Clegg saw at once what lay behind the general’s veto.

  Some of the men he spoke to were genuinely keen, some had done semi-professional turns before the war, some saw a concert party as a soft number. Several of the acts were appalling. There was a conjuror who was one degree better than the magic sets you gave the kids at Christmas, a tenor so shrill he sounded like a castrato, a man who called himself the International Entertainer and would have been dreadful in any language, and a large man with a tremendous belly who did a comic apache dance with another smaller man dressed as a girl and ended up whirling his partner round his head so much he staggered dizzily offstage to throw up his lunch in a corner. There were also dozens who imitated bird calls, dozens more who imitated Churchill and couldn’t imitate anyone else, tap dancers who couldn’t tap dance, jugglers who couldn’t juggle, and a balancing act that fell apart at the crucial moment so that one of the participants had to be carted off to hospital with a strained back. Clegg began to see he was going to have problems.

  Since the troops out in the blue would need to laugh as much as anything else, he decided on comedy and a few tuneful songs and in the end settled on a group of no more than four. That way, he felt, they could travel light with one lorry for themselves and all their props. Nobody in the desert, he decided, was going to welcome a bloody great crowd all needing to be fed and watered.

  The men he chose were a mixed bag. Second-in-command was Lancelot Hugh Morton who, born of wealthy parents who disliked English weather, had had the good fortune to grow up in southern Switzerland and could speak Italian, French and German without an accent. He had a Cambridge degree in European languages and should have had a commission, but a sardonic manner had put the interviewing board off and instead he had ended up as a corporal in Intelligence, examining captured Italian stores NCOs and investigating the inventories of equipment seized in Wavell’s dash to Bardia the year before. Since it was hardly the most exciting job there was, he had decided to seek a change and, though he was an oddity, he had appeared in shows at university and Clegg thought that between them they might produce some good material.

  For the songs he found Private Ivor Elwyn Jones, of the Gordons, who, of course, turned out to be Welsh and, like all Welshmen, knew everything there was to know about singing. Trained on hymns, he loved applause, sang well enough to deserve it and could reach notes so high Morton insisted he must have had a nasty accident at some point in his career. ‘High Cs, man, see,’ he liked to boast. ‘Not always, o’ course, but mostly.’ Unfortunately, his appearance didn’t match his talent; he was a small highly strung man with a worn gnome-like face who was unkempt and vaguely unhygienic in a uniform that fitted where it touched. His badges were unpolished, his buttons hanging off and his boots unshined. Happily, he sang most of the time in prop clothes.

  Finally, there was Arthur Caccia, whose father ran a grocery shop in Soho. As he was in the catering trade in Civvy Street, the army had naturally made him a mechanic and he was more than eager for a change. He had a good voice, a nice line in Cockney humour and a swift mind that could produce ideas. Being on the small side, he could also do female impersonations and, coming from the RASC, could drive and service the lorry they’d been given.

  Careful about what they were to put on, Clegg decided jokes about Egyptians were all right because even the song ‘Up your pipe, King Farouk, Hang your bollocks on a hook’ had never offended the Egyptian labourers who crowded the doorways to watch rehearsals. They could also mock the soldiers’ plight and could be vulgar, but they couldn’t be really obscene because up in the desert the men lived a puritanical life, while jokes about unfaithful wives would only cause worry. They decided to play on nostalgia a lot, however, and dug out the sort of songs that made men think of home, and from Clegg’s monologue worked up a sketch about a German officer and an Italian soldier he was trying to send forward towards the fighting. It was an immediate success because everybody laughed at the Italians, who would persist in surrendering, and there was a lot of comic arguing in mock Italian, German and English, and a lot of talk about ice cream and spaghetti, the leaning Tower of Pisa and Mussolini’s underpants.

  ‘Variety, comedy and somebody who looks like a girl,’ Clegg decided at their first programme conference. ‘And we never perform on Saturday night anywhere near Cairo because Saturday night’s the troops’ traditional booze-up night and nobody’s going to stay in to watch a half-arsed show like ours when he’s got money to spend on beer.’

  They collected planks and curtains and a few props and moved about the Nile Delta brushing up their performance on base details until they were ready to go into the de
sert. Whatever the disasters, they were always welcomed as a change from Shafto’s Shambles, the Arab cinema where you saw old films featuring Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford at three and a half ackers a go – when it did go, because usually it didn’t. It had Egyptian operators and the films usually began upside-down, invariably appeared with the reels in the wrong order and were so overprinted at the sides and bottom with French, Greek and Arabic subtitles the actors were barely visible.

  They weren’t the best concert party in the world and their material probably wouldn’t have raised a laugh back in England but the men they tried it out on loved it. With Jones’s soaring tenor always on hand in case things went wrong, they decided they were in business and Clegg reported to the general, who announced he would see their next performance.

  They put it on in a Naafi marquee and Jones was in splendid voice so that, his success going to his head, he announced that as an encore he would sing the ‘Ave Maria’. ‘In the original Italian,’ he said.

  It was a lot of gibberish because he couldn’t speak Italian but the audience didn’t know and the rest of the show couldn’t have gone better, though Caccia’s female turn when he donned a wig and sang ‘Olga Paulovski, The Beautiful Spy’ looked a little odd because they’d had trouble with the lorry so that his hands, which were never on the small side, still bore traces of oil and his fingernails were heavily in mourning.

  The general was delighted. ‘Just one or two tips,’ he pointed out to Clegg. ‘And I hope as a professional you won’t take them amiss. I always thought the original of the “Ave Maria” was in Latin, and you should tell your female impersonator not to raise his arms at the end of his act when he’s acknowledging the applause. Either that or he should shave under his arms. Otherwise, no complaints. Just what the troops want. Tits and tinsel. Pity we haven’t a few spare ATS girls.’

  Calling themselves the Desert Ratbags, they put on a show wherever anyone would erect a stage from ammunition boxes. Once the curtains fell on them as they were being opened and stopped the show before it had even started; once Caccia fell through a gap in the ammunition-box stage and sprained his ankle; and once, when a German aeroplane came over and dropped bombs nearby, the whole audience and cast bolted, leaving an amateur escapologist they’d recruited from Base Workshops still tied up onstage. But they improved all the time as they thought of new material. Clegg worked up a comic strong-man act, then, because there were two of them who could rattle off Italian at full speed – Morton who had grown up with it and Caccia who had spoken it constantly at home – they worked up the German-officer-and-Italian-soldier sketch into a finale with three ‘Italians’ on stage so they could finish with a song the South Africans had sung about them after Wavell had kicked them out of Libya – ‘Where do we go from here, Now that we’ve lost Bardia?’ To make it look better, they obtained captured Italian uniforms and a German jacket and cap.