Rommel? Gunner Who?

Spike Milligan Rommel? Gunner Who? (1974)
I first read this as a teenager in the seventies, when most of those named therein as Milligan's pals were still alive, as was the working class culture from which they were drawn forth to fight the rise of Nazism. It seems safe to assume that nearly everyone named in this book is now dead, and I probably belong to the last generation to recognise the environment. Rommel? Gunner Who? was written thirty years after the events it describes, and nearly fifty years have passed since it was written. I'm still not sure how to process this information.

As you possibly know, it's the second of Spike Milligan's war journals, detailing his daily life, having been sent to man the guns in north Africa. As part of an artillery regiment, his experience of the second world war was, at least for the first half of 1943, as something occurring over the next hill - a distant point at which shells were fired, and from which shells were returned in retaliation. It probably wasn't the worst part of the fighting to have been caught up in, but there were nevertheless casualties and the humour is very obviously the thing which kept them from losing their marbles.

Its composition is somewhat haphazard compared to that of the first volume, reading as an assemblage of memoirs - some in much greater detail than others - jokes, comic scripts taking the piss out of the enemy, and jottings which might almost be the preliminary shorthand notes for the book - suggesting that he never quite got around to writing the thing in full and simply handed what he had in to the publisher on the grounds that it worked fine as it did and didn't  require transformation into anything more respectable.

A line of black clad Arab ladies carrying pitchers moved liquidly by. 'You'd think their old man would buy 'em a suitcase,' said Chalky White.

'How you gonna carry bloody water in a suitcase?'

'Look, I just think of the ideas, it's up to the wogs to make 'em work.'

There are quite a lot of wogs in this book, and the term would - lest it need stating - leave me somewhat uneasy in almost any other context, but the context here is that of young working class men spending at least some of the time trying hard not to think about whether they'll still be alive in six weeks; and there's nothing particularly mean spirited in their casual dispensation of this racial slur, or any others for that matter, just anger with the circumstances and at having to get on with it regardless. I mention this because Spike's bunch were patently good people for the most part, and they remind me of people I worked with - often from the same part of London, as it happens - and I grow tired of the demonisation of the working class by humourless fuckers who have taken it upon themselves to police our language on our behalf because they went to better schools than we did; and I fear that the people who still get this will one day all be dead, with entire tracts of valuable human experience whitewashed out of existence because of a generation so insecure that it can't stand anything not made in its own fragile image.

Anyway, once you get into the rhythm of this thing, the humour is both relentless and infectious, despite the disjointed rhythm of prose turning to script, punctuated with absurdly captioned but otherwise unrelated photographs or engravings. I have a feeling that this telling of the events of a few months in north Africa by means of what amounts to collage may actually serve as a better record of the mood which Spike was hoping to record than the more traditional narrative of this happened, then this happened, and here's how we felt about it. Strangely, the technique allows for a sense of creeping unease without requiring detail beyond a few incongruously pensive passages describing the writing of the book, Spike's communication with old friends regarding the same, and even a few nightmares from the time. It's a riot, but you can tell that he knew what was coming, and that he knew it would be terrible.

As to why anyone would make jokes about anything so terrible as the second world war which, lest any of us should have forgotten, led to the routine industrialised slaughter of six-million Jews, the answer is because we have to; otherwise the enemy have won.