More MWM Live practice. This time I try to fit Hitler, a museum, and a monkey covered in jam onto one side of A5.

It is a little known fact that Hitler maintained a secret museum, three storeys below his bunker in the heart of Berlin. At first, it was home to the ransacked treasures of the nations crushed under the Nazi jackboot but, as the war came towards its end and Hitler’s mania for the esoteric and the occult reached its height, the museum became home to artifacts and relics of a very different nature.

On the final night of the war, it was Private Klaus Gunderson who held the keys to the museum. Loyal to the end, he believed it to be the safest place in all of Berlin. And so, naturally, he brought his wife and child there, sure that the Feurer would approve. She was good, Arian stock, their child a blond haired, blue eyed boy.

He walked with them both through the cramped aisles of the private museum, their small talk designed to drown out the sounds of bombardment and fighting from above, but failing miserably.

“What’s that?” asked Klaus’ wife, pointing a shadowy, hunched figure in the darkness.

“That is a stuffed monkey from the court of Louis the Sixteenth of France. We liberated it from the Bastille.”

“It has been … mutilated?”

“Louis had his private surgeon stitch bladders into the creature so that he could be breast fed his favourite foods by it. When we took it from them, the French had it full of jam.”

“Amazing. And how about this?”

Klaus took the bottle from his wife and studied it carefully. “I believe we took this from the body of a British spy.”

He turned the bottle over in his hands. Although his English was not terribly good, he could read the simple inscription.

“Drink me …”

With a thunderous crash, something hit the bunker from above. Boxes toppled in the museum, throwing up a thick cloud of dust.

Klaus could hear shouting from upstairs, and splashing noises. Someone shouted something about kerosene, and that the Feurer must not be captured, no matter what the cost.

“What should we do?” asked Klaus’ wife.

Klaus took a last look at his wife, uncorked the bottle, and drank.