Wuthering Heights

helpfully.
    ‘I, I,’ stammered Mrs Dean,
overcome by overcomeness. ‘I touched his body, it were ice cold so I knew he’d
keep a bit, I could doubt no more, Mr Lockwood. He was dead, and I sobbed in
grief. The bastard hadn’t paid me for three months. Old Joseph came in the
room, he knelt and crossed himself. Why not? He’d crossed everything else. We
tried to close Heathcliff’s eyes but they wouldn’t, so with the aid of pliers
we glued them. Poor Hareton sat by the corpse all night, it was no use: in the
morning it was still there. The autopsy said he had died from African swamp
fever that had affected his swonnicles.
    ‘To celebrate after the
funeral Hareton married Cathy; they were the perfect mismatch.’
    So ended the story of
Wuthering Heights, except for one occasion, I was riding on the moors when I
saw a shepherd boy and his sheep. He was trembling. He hadn’t been paid for
three months.
    ‘What ails thee, lad?’ I
asked.
    ‘There’s Heathcliff, and a
woman yonder,’ he said, and they’re doing it.’
     
     
    THE END

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
    -----------------------------
     
    A
Selection
     
    Lady
Chatterley’s Lover According to Spike Milligan
    In Spike
Milligan’s intense, steaming, palpitating, lustful, unexpurgated retelling of
Lady Chatterley’s romps with a member of the lower orders (with footnotes),
many hitherto unknown aspects are revealed (as well as — all too frequently —
the gamekeeper’s delicate white loins).
    Perhaps
the reader may not have been aware of Sir Clifford Chatteiley’s penchant for
stretched haddock, or that Mellors had a fetish for collecting toenail
clippings? Certainly, readers will pick «9 a multiplicity of
tips on flower-arranging and where to put their creeping-jenny. Which brings us
back to Mellors’s delicate white loins...
     
    The Bible
According to Spike Milligan
    There have
been many versions of the Old Testament over the centuries but never one quite
like this. Spike Milligan has rewritten, in his own inimitable style, many of
the best-known stories of the Old Testament, featuring characters like King (my
brain hurts) Solomon, the great oar of a giant Goliath and the well-known Telegraph crossword clue Hushai the Archite. Believers and non-believers alike will enjoy
this hilarious reworking, where the jokes, jests and jibes tumble over each
other from Chapter One, Verse One until the end.
     
    Adolf
Hitler: My Part in His Downfall
    Bathos,
pathos, gales of drunken laughter, and insane military goonery explode in
superlative Milliganese.
     
    Mussolini:
My Part in His Downfall
    Britannia
rules the waves, but sometimes she waives the rules, and Spike is set to
liberate — gasp — Italy.
     
    Peace Work
    It’s 1946
and Spike, newly demobbed, goes on tour all over Britain and parts of Europe.
Then he teams up with Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers. They
became ‘The Goons’. The rest is history.