Free Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall by Spike Milligan

with his sleek-muscled professionally-clad opponents. By then he had arrived at the jump-off; the warming up had been terminated. The official had taken down the bar and temporarily rested it at the three foot level…Naze eyed it…He walked some hundred yards from the bar, then turned and started to run. It wasn’t until he was half-way there we realised he intended to jump. He gathered a sort of lumbering momentum but never got faster…finally reaching his goal, he launched himself into a schoolboy ‘double-your-legs-under-you’ style jump and just managed to clear it. He seemed well pleased, unconscious of the puzzled look that followed his effort. Came time for the jump off. An official signalled Naze and asked him if he was competing. Naze nodded. Naze walked twenty yards away, turned, and now saw that the officials had set the bar at five foot. For the first time he looked worried. He walked back a further fifty yards. He started his approach. The stadium fell quiet as the great athlete bounded across the grass. We all felt that something unusual was about to happen. On and on he came, making little clenching gestures with his hands…he reached the bar and with a triumphant shout of “Hoi Hup la!” and an almighty effort he hurled himself upwards. The bar broke across his forehead. Cheering broke out from the stands. Gunner Naze kept running, he left the field, he left the stadium, he left athletics. Our next hope of a champion was the as yet untested Lofty Andrews.
20 ELIMINATION BOUTS!!
PROCEEDS TO THE ARMY BENEVOLENT FUND
SEATS 6d, 2/6, 3/-, 5/- .
    The notice was pinned below the ticket office window in the foyer of the De La Warr Pavillion. “Hurry-a-long, first fight starts in minutes five—minutes five,” said Sergeant Balcon in his best voice. He was a strange-looking fellow, his eyes very close together, his nose and ears so large they appeared to be trying to outgrow each other. He spoke with that sound peculiar to the cockney larynx, when it tries to speak posh. To obtain this metallic sound, you press the chin down on to the throat, applying slight pressure to the Adam’s apple, you purse the lips, the lower one slightly protruding, tense the tongue lay it flat in the well between the lower teeth and say ‘Yew’.
    Troops were rolling in; I sat thirteen rows back, between Gunners Devine and White, Devine being no mean brawler himself. “Why aren’t you fightin’ tonight, Devine?” asked Captain Martin. “They won’t let you use your head sir,” said Devine, going through the motion of nutting an opponent. The hall was packed, and a great carillon of voices filled the ear. Cigarette smoke wafted upwards from two thousand throats, and hung like a pall in the still air. Old scores were being settled with balls of paper flicked at the backs of unsuspecting N.C.O.s’ necks. Men were standing shouting to men in other rows. Bombardier Rossi was taking bets in the tense region of two shillings. The last of the officers were sauntering in, flushed with hurried whiskies. They were greeted with cheers or raspberries according to their popularity rating.
    Now came guest of honour, Lieutenant-Colonel Harding. No sooner had we all sat down, when came the National Anthem, and very strangely. It was being played by Gunner Edgington on a piano from the stage behind vast heavy velvet curtains that acted as a baffle. As the first tinklings of the Anthem permeated the babble, it was a rare sight to see 2,000 soldiers in various stages of patriotic uncertainty, those nearest could hear and were at attention, those in the middle were somewhere in between sitting and hovering in the half upright, while those farthest away heard nothing and sat looking puzzled at the confusion around them.
    “Wot’s going on?”
    “Stand up, it’s the Nash-i-nole Anfem!”
    “I can’t ‘ear it.”
    “It’s behind the curtain!”
    “What’s behind the curtains?”
    “The Nash-i-nole fuckin’ Anfem!”
    To try and weld