Norma Farnes - Memories of Milligan

DESMOND:Terry is almost eight years older than me, but the story I heard as a boy, over and over again, was the calamity of his birth. Of course, it had to be in the middle of a storm and the nearest transport to get my mother to the military hospital in Ahmednagar was a bullock wagon taxi called a dhumni. The hospital was several miles away and the roads were rough dirt tracks. She had started in labour, she was in great pain. When they arrived at the hospital the duty nurse had to unlock the door, that’s how small the hospital was. By this time my mother was in the advanced stage of labour and when the battery doctor arrived – Dr Anderson – she screamed at him, ‘Get out of here! I never want to see another man in my life again.’ Dr Anderson replied, ‘Don’t blame me, Florrie. I didn’t do it.’ So, at 3.30 p.m. on 16 April 1918, screaming his lungs out, Terence Alan Milligan was born, all 8½ lbs of him. From now on I’ll give him his nickname, Spike. He had been given this name when he was in the army because he was so thin.

Apart from hearing the story of his birth a thousand times, we had a wonderful happy childhood. My father had been transferred to the Third Field Brigade Port Defence in Rangoon, Burma. I was born there in December 1925. We had a big house within the military grounds, and we had servants, including a gardener. My earliest memory of Spike was in 1930 when Rangoon was struck by a huge earthquake, the epicentre being in the north. It was evening and after the earthquake my mother and father had been expecting a major riot and looting. I remember, as we sat down to dinner, Dad had on his pistols. Mum had her .44 Winchester rifle alongside her, and Spike, being Spike, was upstairs having a cold bath. He too had a pair of pistols on the chair alongside the bath. As the first shocks arrived Father Milligan reached over and grabbed me. ‘Everybody outside,’ he shouted and rushed into the garden.

Everything was shaking. The noise was terrifying, added to by all the birds being shaken out of the trees. Up in the bathroom the double doors shook violently. Spike thought that rioters were breaking in and shouted, ‘ Koowan Hai? Koowan Hai ?’ (Who’s there?) Of course, no reply, so he picked up his pistols and fired through the doors. He soon realised it was an earthquake, threw a towel around himself and ran to join us in the garden.

The shocks subsided but the town to our north, by the epicentre, was totally destroyed. I was looking over my father’s shoulder directly at the Golden Shwe Dagon Pagoda. It was all illuminated and as I looked the umbrella crown at the top broke off and crashed to the ground. It contained a casket of jewels placed there by the last king of Burma in 1930. It’s extraordinary, but it was not put back until 1960, and I wondered if the jewels got put back up. Lucky for us this did not happen during the monsoon season. In the East, when the rainy season moves in, boy, does it rain. It’s like a solid wall of water hitting the ground, and it goes on and on. All social activity comes to a halt. The Burmese priests, called pungees, walk through it with giant umbrellas, in their saffron-coloured costumes. Then when the rain stopped, everything grew like crazy. All the little creatures came out of hiding: snakes, lizards, little furry things and insects by the million. Gorgeous butterflies and more . . . but back to the earthquake. There were many aftershocks over the following days, but it is surprising how quickly life returns to normality. Mum and Spike were soon playing on our tennis court or going on outings with his school, as if nothing had happened.

NORMA:In spite of the age difference, did you still play together as children?

DESMOND:Oh yes, life for us kids was heaven. Spike went to St Paul’s High School, run by the Brothers de La Salle, and I went to a tiny school run by Catholic nuns in the convent grounds. Father, as a military man, taught us to play soldiers and drill with our toy guns. We would have battles in the bits of jungle and three lakes that surrounded us. We made a flag and we called ourselves ‘The Lamanian Army’. Spike wrote an anthem, ‘Fun in the Sun’. We recruited three soldiers, Sergeant Taylor’s son, Haveldar’s son and our servant’s son – wait for it – Hari Krishna. It was here that the fun started, the lampooning of people and places where Spike’s stretching of reality began. He decided we needed a proper trench. We dug a big one right in the middle of Mum and Dad’s garden. My God, were we reprimanded.

Even the word Goon goes back to when we were reading Popeye cartoon strips in the English papers that we received. There were some blob-like characters in the strip that were called Goons, and that is where the word came from. When we were fooling around, we would impersonate these characters as we saw them. We would literally become them. I suppose one could say it was the beginning of The Goon Show . The world of the Raj gave us so much material for fun. For example, there was an Indian businessman who had dealings with Dad’s battery. His name was Percy Lalkakaa. He bought himself a bright red motorcar. There were very few privately owned motor cars in this little town at the time. But a bright red one! Wow! So Spike (we stilled called him Terry) wrote a song about him and his car. It went something like this:

Oh Percy Lalkakaa in his red motorcar,

Oh Percy Lalkakaa we see him from afar.

Oh Percy Lalkakaa he comes to see Papa,

He comes to see Papa in his red motorcar . . .

We loved the lakes that surrounded us. In the heat of summer they dried up and grass grew across them. The villagers grazed their cattle on them, but when the thundering monsoons arrived the lakes filled to the top. Then Spike came into his own. He would persuade his school friends to play truant and swim in the Chorcien lakes which weren’t exactly healthy, and Spike would develop severe tropical fevers. But he still kept on doing it.

Nothing daunted Spike. He decided to build a machan – a tree platform for shooting big game – but this one was to be in our garden. A homemade ladder gave access to the platform. I would dress up as a tiger and Hari Krishna as a deer. Spike would always have the toy gun and he would fire at us. We spent many happy hours playing this game and with all the kites we made. Spike always drew funny faces on his, and then we would vie with each other who could draw the funniest face.

Spike was about twelve when he joined the 14th Machine Gun Company as a cadet and drove Mum mad. He would dismantle a Vickers .303 machine gun and reassemble it about a hundred times. Possibly to stop this continuous practice Dad bought him a banjo and undoubtedly this started him off on his musical career, and from then on music was the order of the day.

Entertainment came right to our front door – snake charmers, dancers, the shoe repair man (the Mooche Wallah), the barber (the Nappie Wallah). There was no television or radio so as a family we entertained ourselves. Dad formed a concert party that toured the army camps performing everything from comedy sketches to Shakespeare. The Milligan boys were drawn into productions so this was a very good grounding for Spike.

But time was running out. The Great Depression had struck, the size of the army was cut down and the Milligan family came to London, in winter 1933, when Spike was 15 years old. I remember we were returning to England from Bombay on the SS Kaiser-I-Hind . A makeshift canvas swimming pool had been erected on the deck. I was about six or seven years old and was just learning to swim, or drown as Spike put it. I jumped into the pool and panicked, I was saved only by the squeaky high-pitched voice of a stick-thin four-year-old girl, saying to my father, ‘He’s fallen in the water!’ That memory never left Spike and it would later become one of the most famous catch phrases in The Goon Show .