Wuthering Heights

PENGUIN BOOKS
    WUTHERING HEIGHTS
    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 scriptwriter 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 Milliganimals; 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; Badjelly 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 Laundty; The J 01 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; The Bible According to Spike Milligan:
The Old Testament; and Lady Chatterley’s Lover According to Spike
Milligan. With the late Jack Hobbs he also wrote 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.



 
    PENGUIN
BOOKS
     
    Published
by the Penguin Group
    Penguin
Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
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Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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    Penguin
Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
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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 C
Spike Milligan Productions Ltd 1994
    All rights
reserved
     
    The moral
right of the author has been asserted
     
    The
drawings by Balthasar Klossowski de Rola on pages 27, 30 and 57 are reproduced
by courtesy of Electra, Milan
     
    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



Chapter
I
    -----------
     
     
     
    801
YEAR OF our Lord and a nit called Lockwood — i.e. me, the narrator. I have just I
returned from a visit to my landlord, whereby, killing him has stopped any
increase in the rent. In all England, I do not believe I could have fixed on a
situation so completely removed from the stir of society; indeed there are
societies that do nothing but stir all day. They are porridge brotherhoods, a
perfect misanthrope’s Heaven: I myself was an imperfect misanthrope as I had
piles, and Mr Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide life’s
desolation between us, we had half each. A capital fellow, it came to about
£40,000. Imagine how my heart warmed to him along with my liver, kidneys and
bacon.
    ‘Mr Heathcliff,’ I said.
    A nod was the answer, but
not very loud. ‘You are a very tall man,’ he said.
    ‘There’s a reason,’ I