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be receiving. The male feet getting vague messages, the female feet immediately having to adjust to their bidding. The female is being backed up like a coal lorry. To vary this the male suddenly tries to revolve her round him, ending up with Barley Twist legs and shattered knees. The female legs are now at the rear of the male legs, the male unwinds his Barley Twist legs bringing the poor female’s legs back again, and the coal lorry style continues.
    There can be no enjoyment in it at all, but it has to be done.
    Through the warm night Spoleto and his ‘Gypsies’ batter through ‘Little Brown Jug’. I tell Tom, “He thinks he’s Glenn Miller.” Tom says he’s more like ‘Max Fuckin’ Miller’. It had to be done.
    Wow! Gentry! General Alexander and his retinue breeze in for an after-dinner drink. Immaculate in starched KDs, he was in a, shall-we-say, “flushed’ mood; he had just seen the Anzio breakout, the fall of Rome and the news of D-Day. This was a celebration. I admired him until he too started barley twisting his legs on the floor. His laughing retinue was last to leave. As I handed him his hat, he said ‘What do you do?”
    “I hand hats to departing officers,” I replied.
    He smiled and barley twisted his way out. A great soldier, a terrible dancer.

Music Maestro Please
    S poleto had given me the address of a Professor Fabrizzi. He lived in a seedy villa in Resina, a town built over the city of Herculaneum. He was about seventy and used to play the harp in the San Carlo Orchestra and I could see that it wouldn’t be long before he would be playing it again. He had long white snowy hair, a gaunt shrunken smiling face and two deep-set brown eyes. Harmony and counterpoint? Of course, 500 lire an hour. “Harmony is not easy,” he said. At 500 lire a go I agreed. His ‘study’ was lined with books on music and gardening. Perhaps I could learn harmony and tree growing. “Professor Milligan will now play his tree! The compostion is in A Minor, the tree is in A garden.”
    The lessons start. “You see dis black a notes.” Can I see it? I ask him is he an optician or a music teacher? That is the note of C. I knew that. “The notes on the line-a above is E.” I knew that. He told me how the scales went. I knew that as well. Something else I knew, I was being conned. I went away richer in life’s experience and he richer by two thousand lire. I watched as he counted every single lire. It’s the little things that count and he was one of them.
     
    One night after closing I hie me to the city of Herculaneum. The dead city lies sightless in the bay light of a Neapolitan moon. I walk through the unattended entrance: ‘Vietato ingresso’. The city is like Catford, after dark. Dead. I walk along the sea front from which the seas have departed that day in AD 79. This was Bournemouth to Pompeii’s Blackpool. Here people sat on summer’s nights drinking wine and eating figs from water-filled bowls. Now all gone. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.
Ohhh, Herculaneum City
Ohhh what a terrible pity
All of you had gone
Except a little tiny bitty.
    Back at the billet I awake Tom.
    “Who’s that?” he snuffled.
    “Errol Flynn.”
    “You silly bugger.”
    “A man can dream, can’t he?”
    Where had I been, and did I get it? “Nay, I’m as pure as the driven snow. I’ve been to Herculaneum.”
COURT FOR THE IGNORANT
JUDGE:
What is a Herculaneum?
QC TARLO:
Herculaneum my lord is a place where any free-born slave can go and Hercu-his-laneum.
JUDGE:
Oh, and in Hercuing-his-laneum, what benefits are derived?
QC TARLO:
The swelling on the Blurzon is much reduced.
JUDGE:
What is a Blurzon.
QC TARLO:
It is a small hairy area at the back of the knee where Armenian shepherds crack their nuts.
    Oh, what’s Herculaneum? By day I have quite a lot of time on my hands; I also have it on my legs, elbows and shins. There was a lot of it about.

A Colonel Intervenes
    Y es! One evening as I sat at the reception desk varnishing