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
