Goodbye Soldier
Goodbye Soldier is Spike Milligan's sixth volume of autobiography. While he began writing it immediately after finishing Where Have All the Bullets Gone? in 1985, he finished it in a manic two week period in early 1986. World War II has ended, Milligan continues NAAFI performances. During this time in Italy and Austria he tours with a large group as one of The Bill Hall Trio. While music and war were backdrops for the first books, music and his relationship with Toni Fontana are here. (A relationship described in longings using tourist-guide Italian, and a repetitive  fascination with being called “Terr-ee”.) The book covers June to September 1946, at which point Milligan is released from service and sails home for England. The text is a fifth shorter than the longest volume "Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall". The jokes are sometimes sparse. Unlike the people he occasionally performed with during the war, with whom Milligan later worked or who otherwise became notable, Milligan spends a page suggesting the NAAFI tour group were “bloody awful”, and that “...none of them were ever heard of again”. (p. 111) But he says of Bill Hall: Italian ballerina Toni  Fontana, a member of the group, is Milligan’s almost exclusive love interest. Milligan’s Italian is weak, her English is better, but not always up to Milligan’s verbal horseplay. Jokes need to be explained. Beyond reflections on how wonderful Milligan is, that it’s too hot, or too crowded, her opinions are little described — she says that Mussolini “was not a bad man, just stupid”. When not with Toni, Milligan plays or listens to music, or reads. “…we retire to my room for two hours and play those jazz standards I still love, ‘Georgia Brown’, ‘Poor Butterfly’, ‘What ’s New’, ‘Sophisticated Lady’” (p. 30). There is music on the long bus trips between gigs. Milligan amplifies on a theme from ""Rommel?" "Gunner Who?"" — the effect of popular culture on his life expectations: As with earlier volumes, it is not always clear what is contrived. Illustratively, Milligan quotes two diary sentences, then expands them into a page of description (pp. 268-9). Other inserts are definitely contrived, such as quoting Hitler, “'You see, you Russian fools? Zey are already starting to like back us Germans!'” (p. 100).