Lady Chatterley's Lover

PENGUIN BOOKS

    LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER
    ACCORDING TO SPIKE MILLIGAN

    Spike Milligan was born at Ahmednagar in India in 1918. He received his first education in a tent in the Hyderabad Sindh desert and graduated from there, through a series of Roman Catholic schools in India and England, to the Lewisham Polytechnic. Always something of a playboy, he then plunged into the world of Show Business, seduced by his first stage appearance, at the age of eight, in the nativity play of his Poona convent school. He began his career as a band musician but has since become famous as a humorous script-writer and actor in both films and broadcasting. He was one of the main figures in and behind the infamous Goon Show. Among the films he has appeared in are Suspect, Invasion, Postman’s Knock, Milligan at Large and The Three Musketeers.

    Spike Milligan’s published work includes The Little Potboiler, Silly Verse for Kids, Dustbin of Milligan, A Book of Bits, The Bed-Sitting Room (a play), The Bald Twit Lion, A Book of Mil-liganimals, Puckoon, Small Dreams of a Scorpion, The Mirror Running (a book of poetry), Transports of Delight, The Milligan Book of Records, Games, Cartoons and Commercials, Badjel-ly the Witch, Dip the Puppy, The Spike Milligan Letters and More Spike Milligan Letters, both edited by Norma Fames, Open Heart University, The Q Annual, Unspun Socks from a Chicken’s Laundry, The 101 Best and Only Limericks of Spike Milligan, There’s a Lot of It About, The Melting Pot, Further Transports of Delight, Startling Verse for All the Family, The Looney: An Irish Fantasy, The Lost Goon Shows, It Ends With Magic and The Bible, According to Spike Milligan. With Jack Hobbs, he has also written William McGonagall: The Truth at Last, William McGonagall Meets George Gershwin and William McGonagall — Freefall.
    His unique and incomparable seven volumes of war memoirs are: Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, ‘Rommel?’
    ‘Gunner Who?’, Monty: His Part in My Victory, Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, Where Have All the Bullets Gone?, Goodbye, Soldier and Peace Work. To celebrate his seventieth birthday Penguin published a special edition of his first novel Puckoon. Spike Milligan received an honorary CBE in 1992.

LADY CHATTERLEY’S
    LOVER

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    ACCORDING TO SPIKE MILLIGAN

Thanks are due to
    the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli

    PENGUIN BOOKS
    Published by the Penguin Group
    Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
    Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
    Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
    Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
    Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

    Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

    First published by Michael Joseph 1994
    Published in Penguin Books 1995
    1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

    Copyright O Spike Milligan Productions Ltd, 1994
    All rights reserved

    The moral right of the author has been asserted

    Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

    Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

LADY CHATTERLEY’S
    LOVER

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    ACCORDING TO SPIKE MILLIGAN

ONE
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    O URS IS essentially a tragic age. There’s Barbara Cartland, John Major, etc. But we have got to live no matter how many skies have fallen. Horizontal, this was Lady Chatterley’s position in society: she spent long periods like it, looking up. However, she married Clifford Chatterley in the upright position. They had a month’s honeymoon in a bed in Lewisham. Then came the war. Soon he was shipped to France to the Front. Alas, he suffered a direct hit by a German 155mm shell, his bits were shipped back to England in a paper bag and handed to Lewisham General Hospital. As they were, a groan came from the bag, ‘No! Not Lewisham,’ it said. His hold on life was tenacious. He didn’t die. The doctors lay all his bits out on a table — and, like a jigsaw, put him together. The fact that he had six fingers on one hand, four toes and a finger on the other was by the way, and when he