News at Eleven: Laura [Milligan] recalls that her father [Spike Milligan]

didn't talk about his war experiences, rather he wrote about them.

'That was his release for the pain. I think the war had a lot to do with the black dog that plagued him all his life. Poetry and writing was his way of explaining how he felt about things, a release.'

He wrote moving, dark verse while in the grip of manic depression. Milligan wrote a poem called 'Manic Depression' at St Luke's Wing, Woodside Hospital Psychiatric Wing, 1953. The poems starts: The pain is too much, a thousand grim winters grow in my head, in my ears the sound of the coming dead. Laura remembers what it was like to live with her father during the bouts of depression.

from ABC Radio National: Poetica: Spike Milligan the (serious) poet

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