Free Puckoon by Spike Milligan Page B

pectorals into play.
    More complicated combinations
followed. Lying flat playing middle C fortissimo and arching his back from the
legs gave prominence to the lines of the abdominal ridge. Holding
the saxophone above the head, bending backwards and playing repetitive B
sharps, showed the deltoids in all their flexed glory.
    From this simple beginning, a unique
idea was to formulate.
    For two years he worked on it in
absolute secrecy. It turned out to be a Concerto for Alto-Saxophone and Human
Muscles. Full of zeal he entered the work in an amateur talent contest at the
West End Cinema, Poona. Pouring with sweat and blowing notes in all directions,
he was watched in mystified silence by a baffled Hindu audience. After twenty
minutes of grunting strainings he was booed from the stage. He later sold the
idea to a travelling Armenian herbalist who, with delusions of grandeur, tried
to curry favour by performing it before the Czarina, but he was shot by a
palace guard whilst trying to invade her bedchamber.
    Then there was 'Soap' Holloway. The
favourite trick they played on him was talking him into messing his pants, then
telling his mother. One evening' Soap' fell out of a nim tree. He lay there
very quiet. 'Come on, you'll be all right,' young Dan said.
    ' He's not
breathing,' said a kid.
    They ran and told his mother. The
last they saw of ' Soap' was his father carrying him at the double, his mother
running alongside crying and saying something. It didn't matter what, 'Soap' wasn't one of them any more. On hot nights,
Dan's mother would move his bed into the small garden. He would lie there,
looking at the sky through the mosquito net.
    There was the Plough - that one was
easy. The rest could go to hell. He would fall asleep to the peculiar smell of
the nim tree and the distant chug-chug of the engine that lit the Empire
Cinema.
    Poona had one of the finest race
courses in India. At the height of the season it was the thing to belong to the
Western India Turf Club. At an early age Milligan got the taste for horses and
betting.
    With a rupee pocket money he'd enjoy
the meeting from the middle of the course. The stands were a riot of colour.
Pugrees, saris, white dhotis, there was the Maharajah of Kolapur in orange silk
trousers, syces in white with polished brass shoulder trappings led in the
horses, the Aga Khan, then a young man with many wives
to go. Everywhere the smell of betel-nut and pan biddy.
    Milligan remembered his first bet
with a short Hindu bookie who wrote his betting slips on rice paper so in case
of raids they could be eaten. It was the Governor's Cup, the Derby of India.
Milligan had picked out 'Cherrio', a pure white Arab horse, a Pegasus without
wings. She sailed home.
    Milligan ran for his winnings only to
find the Hindu bookie under arrest. Charged with molesting an Indian woman
between races, he had protested he had never touched the woman. She said he had
but she hadn't minded it. Apparently it was the policeman who was jealous and
broke up the fun.
    Those days were all gone. It might
never have happened.
    'You've gone quiet, Milligan,' said
Rafferty, now three stone heavier.
    'No Irishman can enjoy himself alone
for long, Rafferty. I was thinkin' of me boyhood.'
    Suddenly Rafferty went tense.' I
think we're on the wrong road, Milligan.'
    'Whyd'you say that?'
    'We've just passed a Chinaman.'
    'We couldn't have come that far.'
    'I'm not joking. It was a Chinee, I
tell you, not only that, he was wearing a policeman's hat.'
    'We never had that much to drink, did
we?'
    They argued into the beckoning night.
From the roadside, Constable Lee Ah Pong made a note of two drunken men arguing
on a bike. He looked at his watch and then added the time to his report. He
waxed mysterious and disappeared sideways into the dark.
    Ah Pong of Peking, China, had arrived
in Dublin on a tramp steamer The General Gordon, engaged in smuggling monkeys
from India to Tilbury.
    The Scottish Captain Gordon MacThun
had lost his way many