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Some Sunny Day
Dame Vera Lynn
The remarkable autobiography of the last great wartime icon.Born Vera Welch on 20 March, 1917 in the East End of London, Dame Vera Lynn’s career was set from an early age - along with her father, who also did a ‘turn’, she sang in Working Men’s Clubs from just seven years old. She had a successful radio career with Joe Loss and Charlie Kunz in the 1920s and ‘30s, but it was with World War II that she became the iconic figure that captured the imagination of the national public.Her spirit and verve, along with her ability to connect with the men fighting for their country and those left behind praying for their loved ones, made her the ‘Forces’ sweetheart’. Performing the songs that she will always be associated with, such as ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘Yours’, Vera toured Egypt, India and Burma to entertain the troops and bring them a sense of ‘back home’.Her career after the war flourished, with hits in the US and the UK, but Vera was never able to leave behind her wartime role and was deeply affected by what she had seen. Still heavily involved with veteran and other charities, this is Dame Vera’s vivid story of her life and her war - from bombs and rations to dance halls and the searing heat of her appearances abroad. Epitomising British fortitude and hope, Dame Vera gives a vivid portrait of Britain at war, and a unique story of one woman who came to symbolize a nation.
SOME SUNNY DAY
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Dame Vera Lynn
To my wonderful Harry, with whom I was so fortunate
to share my life for all those years.
And to ‘The Boys’, to whom we all owe so much—
your spirit and humour live with me to this day.
Never forgotten.
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u2c3c0d1a-ac46-526e-8b0d-b64648a7ecbd)
Title Page (#ub3537005-3b90-5e3e-bc4e-8c863fb7fc78)
Dedication (#ub8e28435-78a6-5838-b268-1f6903f4c96c)
Acknowledgements (#uc01cf169-e55b-5e18-9471-aeaa8646cefb)
Introduction (#u703746a0-ba27-56ac-bf81-02a56dd5ac7e)
Chapter One: Overture & Beginnings (#u68d86352-8e6a-5afc-a58e-ba4c00755c71)
Chapter Two: One-&-six for an Encore (#u3a1e80a7-cb43-5855-bb5e-9ad94cdd9e33)
Chapter Three: Vocal Chorus (#ud406bdd8-90a6-5654-83e3-3056482feb45)
Chapter Four: A Taste of Ambrosia (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five: Wild About Harry (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six: A Country at War (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven: Sincerely Yours (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight: Off to see the Burma Boys (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine: A Journey with a Legacy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten: A House is a Home (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven: After the Interval (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve: Not My Style (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen: Round & About (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen: Everybody’s Talking (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen: Never Quite Retired (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_228cf8ef-569a-5e4b-97b8-147b9188cb48)
Imust thank all my family, of course, for their constant support and love.
And there are too many others whom I have met and worked with over the years to thank here, so I will mention just three: my dear friend Wally Ridley, for his help in those Denmark Street days; Joe Loss, for selecting me for my first broadcast; and Norman Newell, who produced all my early records. These three men were instrumental in making my life the extraordinary event that it has been.
Introduction (#ulink_aa34a051-579d-5456-8981-4196ff589c1a)
Iwill always remember the moment war was declared at the beginning of September 1939. I was sitting in the garden of the new house I had bought in Barking with Mum and Dad. Life was going well for me: I was singing with Bert Ambrose’s band, fulfilling what was really the only ambition I had ever had: to be the best singer with the best band in the land. Before the announcement came, anyone would have told you that times were not easy, but my life was certainly not bad.
On that day I remember we were all drinking tea in the garden, my dad sitting in his deckchair as he loved to do. He was always brown from sitting in the sun. Naturally we had the radio on all the time because everyone was interested in what was going on. For weeks everyone had been on tenterhooks, not knowing what was going to come. And that’s when I heard the news. The first thought that came into my head was a selfish one: Oh dear. There goes my singing career. Everything I have dreamed of, I thought to myself, is over. The men—including all the musicians I knew in the band—would all be going away to fight. And I would be headed straight for the munitions factory. I was only twenty-two. It seemed like the end of my world.
At that point no one thought that entertainment would become essential during the war. And I certainly never thought I would have the chance to continue singing. I was already very familiar with the words to ‘We’ll Meet Again’ by then, but I had no idea that that particular song would become the tune people most associated with the war era. Or that my voice would become the one that most reminded people of the hope for the future we needed to have at that time.
Seven decades later I remember that day as clearly as if it were yesterday. So it makes me especially proud and honoured to know that all these years later people still want to mark the anniversary. This year, 2009, marks seventy years since the outbreak of the war as well as the sixty-fifth anniversary of D-Day, the biggest wartime operation ever. It’s difficult for me to believe that it was that many years ago, because in my mind there are times when it feels so recent. It thrills me to know that people still remember and still care. It’s so important.
This year also marks exactly seventy years since I first sang that well-known song, the one that made my name, on tour with Ambrose’s band in the autumn of 1939. Ironically, precisely a year before that, I was on stage while history was being made. On 29 September 1938 I was performing at the Hammersmith Palais in London. Meanwhile the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was in Munich for a meeting with Hitler. This was the meeting where Chamberlain believed he had received the reassurance that there would be ‘peace for our time’. Which, as we know now, unravelled within the space of the next twelve months.
In many ways I feel honoured and privileged to have become a symbol of that era. It’s very humbling. But there have been times in my life when I have felt uncomfortable about it too: it is something to live up to when people call you a national treasure, and that is certainly not an expression I would use myself. I just see myself as someone who found herself in the right place at the right time—or perhaps we should call it the wrong time—and I just happened to have a voice which suited the era and, somehow or other, has stood the test of time.
I’m told that schoolchildren today still learn the words to ‘We’ll Meet Again’. That thrills me. It seems that the songs I am remembered for from the war have passed from generation to generation, so that young people today know about them. I still feel a part of things. I have kept myself busy in my semiretirement: I have a garden I look after (with help) and I still drive—but only locally. I feel fortunate that I’m in a position where for the past thirty years I have been able to spend time on the charities I support, such as Breast Cancer Research and my trust, which helps children with cerebral palsy. And, of course, I still like to help organizations such as the Royal British Legion, which supports ex-servicemen.
Almost forty years ago I published an earlier version of my memoirs. This was at a time when I was still appearing regularly in my own television show and—astonishingly to me—my career was still going strong some thirty years after the war. Towards the end of that decade—the 1970s—I began the slow process towards retirement, although I have never really wanted to step completely out of the spotlight. Now that I am ninety-two, barely a week goes by without someone asking me to cut a ribbon at some event or other, and I am more than happy to oblige.
At my ripe old age, though, I felt it was time to revisit that era properly and get everything down on paper in a final account. I have also found that as the years pass I remember some things with a clarity that I didn’t have before. My trip to Burma, for example, looms large in my memories as one of the pivotal moments of my life. I didn’t really understand that when I was in my fifties. In this book, for the first time I have been able to recall that trip in a lot more detail—and I even found the red leather Collins diary I carried with me throughout. I’m particularly fond of that little diary, because I wasn’t supposed to keep it: we were not allowed to take any notes in case they fell into enemy hands. I wrote in it in tiny spidery handwriting that I thought the enemy would never be able to read.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the events I am involved with today revolve around wartime. I still attend many charity events and veterans’ anniversaries, and often the ones that I find most moving are to do with Burma. Five years ago I attended a grand reunion for Burma veterans at London’s Imperial War Museum. It was the sixtieth anniversary of a number of decisive battles fought by the ‘Forgotten’ Fourteenth Army in the vicious Burma jungle campaign. More than a hundred veterans attended, many in their eighties and nineties. To my astonishment, there was one man there I recognized, although I wouldn’t have known his name—Neville Hogan. It turns out I met him on my tour of Burma in 1944. I sang a concert for the Second Battalion Burma Rifles. He was sick in hospital at the time and I visited him there. When I asked him what I could do for him, he said, ‘A kiss.’ I held his hand and kissed him on the forehead.
At the reunion he was now eighty and I was eighty-seven. I kissed him again on the forehead. He remembered my visit to his camp vividly and told a reporter about it afterwards: ‘Dame Vera came into the room and visited every soldier individually. She stood at the side of the bed and asked each one if she could have anything sent over for them. She was fantastic. She used to come and play off the side of a truck and boost everyone’s morale.’ I’m very proud of that. To think that I entertained audiences from 2,000 to 6,000 in that blazing heat. The boys would just come out of the jungle and sit there for hours waiting until we arrived and then slip back in once we’d left. What I enjoyed most, though—and still do now—was chatting to the troops. What they needed was a contact from home rather than a concert. I knew it was my place to provide that. It was the least I could do. When I talked to the men and women who served at war about their thoughts and how they felt about going into action, many of them would just shrug, saying, ‘It’s what we are trained to do.’ Their humility was matched only by their courage, honour and duty.
That was their vocation; singing was mine. People have always been amazed to learn that I can’t read music. I told a newspaper in 1943, ‘I learn a tune pretty easily although I can’t read music. I get the words into my head and then run them over and over again until I don’t have to bother any more because they just come out naturally. Then I can think about the singing.’ They called me ‘a natural born singer, who sings like a thrush, sweetly and spontaneously’. And they added: ‘There are plenty of people who can read music who could not sing like Vera in a thousand years. And there are not many who would not give their ability to read music for a voice like hers.’
It makes me laugh to read what else I told them for that article: that I wanted to retire before long (seventy years later and I haven’t really retired at all), that I wanted to get the garden going properly (that took another fifty years) and that I wanted ‘a couple of kids, maybe, when I get time’ (I had one daughter, Virginia, born in 1946; work got in the way of having the bigger family I had once dreamed of). My music publisher, Walter Ridley, added his thoughts at the time: ‘The secret of the kid’s success is that she’s genuinely sincere and sounds it.’
I like to think that he was right and that is why my voice and my songs are remembered now. If, in any small way, that can go towards encouraging people to commemorate the sacrifice of those who fought in the Second World War, then I am glad. We should always carry on remembering what happened seventy years ago. Even now I am constantly inspired by the work and bravery of our servicemen and women. Simon Weston, for example, the hero who was badly burned during the sinking of the Sir Galahad during the Falklands conflict, has become a good friend of the family. Earlier this year (June 2009) I was with him at the opening of a new burns research laboratory at the Blond McIndoe Research Foundation. It is based at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, where Sir Archibald McIndoe treated hundreds of burned air crew during the Second World War. There were a lot of burns victims during the Second World War—I remember visiting so many of them myself—and centres like this continue to be invaluable even today. Many of them—like this one—are funded solely on charitable donations. I feel it’s important for me to keep going if I can help in any way at all.
As I look back on my life, I am grateful to have survived that time and to be a symbol of an era which must never be forgotten. If that is my legacy, then I am proud of it. We still have servicemen and women serving abroad now and who knows when they will be called upon to fight for their country in the future? It’s for the ones who are fighting now that we must always make sure that the ones who fought in the past are not forgotten.
As for me, although my last official public performance was in 1995 at the VE Day Golden Jubilee concert outside Buckingham Palace, people still seem to hold me in mind. I feel privileged to have done three Royal Variety shows across three decades—in 1960, 1975 and 1986—and to have performed with some of the favourites of the last century: Bing Crosby, Morecambe and Wise, Cliff Richard. All in all it has been quite a journey for a plumber’s daughter from East Ham who almost didn’t make it to her third birthday.
CHAPTER ONE Overture & Beginnings (#ulink_e44b2b65-1953-5550-a802-bd4439ba6877)
The funny thing is, I don’t remember singing as a tiny child. It’s only from my press cuttings that I know that apparently I could sing five songs right through by the time I was two. And I’m sure that when I was two and a half my uncle George taught me two old favourites—‘K-K-K-Katy’ and ‘I’m Sorry I Made You Cry’—because I’ve been told this many times. But I believe that a person’s life only really begins with what they can remember for themselves. So my story has got to start, strangely enough, with the time I nearly died. I was not quite three years old.
I have a recollection of being all on my own in some kind of a tent, surrounded by steaming kettles. I can’t shake off the impression that the tent was out of doors. Wherever it was, it was certainly in East Ham Hospital, and I was in isolation there with a dangerous illness called diphtheric croup. The steam was part of the treatment, I suppose.
I found out when I was older that at one stage they didn’t think I was going to live, and it’s peculiar to look back now and realize that there very nearly wasn’t anything to tell. I don’t know how long they kept me in the tent, but I was in hospital for three months altogether, and came out in time for my third birthday in 1920.
By that time I’d missed Christmas, so I had my Christmas and birthday all in one, in March. Mum even got me a Christmas tree from somewhere. I was Vera Welch then, and we lived in Thackeray Road, East Ham. All my life most people have thought, Oh, Vera Lynn, she grew up in the East End. But it’s not really the East End at all. East Ham is in fact classified as Essex. That ground-floor flat in Thackeray Road is my other earliest memory. I can see the little kitchen and wash-house now—especially the wash-house, where I went through a right terrible scrubbing from an aunt who’d come in to look after me. My mother had had to go off somewhere for the day—to make a visit to a hospital, I think—and this aunt was taking care of me, and when the time came for her to wash me she scrubbed and rubbed me dry so hard that I can feel the rough towelling even now, all these years later. In the kitchen was a high dresser along one wall, and that sticks in my memory because my brother knocked an egg-cup off it and broke it and got a clip round the ear for it.
These trivial incidents must have made a tremendous impression on me, for they remain vivid in my mind’s eye after ninety years. I know for certain that they took place before I was four, because when I was four we moved to another of those straight, flat East Ham streets, Ladysmith Avenue, to share a house with my grandma. And there we would stay until 1938, when at the age of twenty-one I’d made enough progress as a singer to be able to buy a house for my mum and dad and myself not far away in Barking.
In many ways we were just another typical working-class family. We were a small family: just me, my brother Roger, who was three years older than me, my parents, and my grandma, of course. I have very few recollections of my parents’ parents, although I have some beautiful old-fashioned pictures of them all. I vaguely remember my mother’s father, who died when I was four years old. From the photographs you’d think that we were well off, because everyone was always dressed in their Sunday best if they were having their photograph taken or if they were going out somewhere special. There’s a favourite shot I have of one of my aunts wearing a tweed suit, a fur tippet and a hat on the beach. I even have a photograph of my father on holiday in the countryside wearing what looks like a bowler hat. It was not because people were wealthy that they dressed like that: they just wore their best clothes to go out.
My mother, Annie, was a dressmaker and my father, Bertram, did all sorts of jobs. To this day I haven’t the faintest idea how my parents met—I never asked them. They were just ordinary people to me. My mother was a bit smart, though, because of her dressmaking. She made all her own clothes. Before she was married, she worked for a London dressmaker who took on royal commissions. She was the one who taught me how to sew and make things properly. My father worked as a plumber and he’d been on the docks. In those days, you took any job you could get. That’s how it was when I was a child. Despite this, my father was an easy-going man who liked to laugh—and he was a very good dancer.
That’s what was unusual about my childhood in a way. Thinking back on it all now, I realize that the things which helped to determine that I would go on to have a career as a singer were part of my life very early on, even though they may not have stayed in my mind in the same way as the kettles and the wash-house and the rough towel and the broken eggcup. We had quite a social life. There was Uncle George, my Dad’s brother, who had taught me those songs and would even wake me up to sing them for him. He used to appear in the working men’s clubs doing a George Robey impression, with a little round hat and the arched eyebrows; he had an act with his sister as well, and they wrote some of their own songs. Dad himself was very active in the East Ham Working Men’s Club, and was master of ceremonies at the dances there on a Saturday night: I used to see him in his white gloves and patent pumps, calling out the names of the dances, and feel so proud of him. During the long period of the club-going days—almost the first two decades of my life—he worked not only in the docks, but also as a plumber’s mate, as a glass blower, at the Co-op and, during the Depression, sometimes not at all; but whatever he was doing, I think it was his club activities he really lived for—his darts, his billiards and above all his dancing. In fact the whole family was very socially minded, and I was taken to the club as a matter of course from my very earliest childhood. Now I come to think of it, it was at a concert in the East Ham club that I was first taken ill that time.
Even after we moved to Ladysmith Avenue and lived with my grandma, Margaret Martin, my mother’s mother, there was never any question of leaving me at home. For a start, Grandma always came with us anyway, until she got too old, but that had nothing to do with it—it was simply the accepted thing that we should all go as a family. So, what with my dad being master of ceremonies at the dances, and one of his sisters being on the music-hall stage in a small way, and Uncle George singing his songs and doing his George Robey act, and Mum occasionally seeing to some of the club bar work and the catering (‘There’s money in cups of tea,’ she used to say in her practical way), I got accustomed very early to the idea of helping to provide entertainment.
Besides, we were a great family for singing: there were good voices on both sides, and no reluctance to use them. Grandma had a lovely voice, untrained, but much more of a concert performer’s voice than the voices of the rest of us. She used to sing ballads like the popular ‘Thora’, by Stephen Adams, and ‘Until’, and she still sang at the party we gave for her eighty-fourth birthday. Dad had a good voice and his party piece was ‘Laugh and the world will be smiling, weep and you’re weeping alone’. There always seemed to be sing-song parties going on round at my other grandmother’s in Gillett Avenue—which was the next road—with my aunt at the piano and everybody doing something.
My father was a very easy-going man, very quiet. He never made demands, never asked for anything. My mother was the one with the push and the get-up-and-go. She was the one who got me into singing professionally. She had it in mind from before I was seven. She was considered one of the smart girls when she was young and she had carried on sewing professionally once she was married. In those days when you married you had to leave your job—you couldn’t carry on—so she just did her dressmaking at home for people. She cared about her appearance but wasn’t what you’d call glamorous nowadays. She didn’t use make-up, only powder, because it wasn’t done to wear make-up in those days, but she always used Pond’s Cold Cream, and I used to sit on the bed and watch her put it on at the mirror at her dressing table. People called her ‘nice-looking’: she was pale with dark, bobbed hair, which she set herself in waves. One of my favourite photographs of her shows her wearing a black dress cinched at the waist with a silver belt buckle and she’s wearing a beautiful lace collar. That’s just how I like to remember her.
As a child I wasn’t interested in dressing up and showing off myself. I suppose at those early house parties I was like most little girls—torn between a desire to show what I could do and shyness at the idea of standing up and singing in front of a roomful of people. Oddly enough, in time I really came to resent being asked to sing at parties and hated it when Mum would encourage her friends to call out those dreaded words ‘Come on, give us a song.’ And I have to confess I still hate that sort of thing; even today, if I’m at a party, I get very uncomfortable at the thought of having to get up and sing. That’s why, at the sing-songs round the piano which we occasionally have at home, no matter who’s there I’d never ask them to do a turn.
Besides the entertainment that the immediate family and the club could offer, there was that of the professional variety theatre. The old lady opposite my grandmother’s in Ladysmith Avenue had a girl living with her as some kind of companion and this girl would sometimes take me to the East Ham Palace, where it was threepence to go up in the gods. This was our local variety theatre, right next to East Ham Station. I’d gaze down from our seats practically in the roof and dream of being on a stage like that myself one day. They had all sorts of different acts on there: comics, singers, dancers, acrobats, magicians—they weren’t necessarily famous but they were professionals, all working the circuit. A comic called Wood sticks in my mind and I saw Florrie Forde there when I was about ten years old—I remember her on stage all dressed up and singing songs. She would probably have had top billing as she was a very popular Australian entertainer best known for singing, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. She had entertained the troops during the First World War and she would perform until the day she died in 1940, straight after an engagement singing for the troops. She made a lasting impression on me.
After I started singing in public at the age of seven, my childhood changed. I tended to be working when most little girls were simply enjoying themselves. So I was not much like other little girls. Even earlier than that I was a solitary child. I don’t remember having any friends before my school days, and for a long time even after I went to school I was never allowed to visit any other child’s house. There was a girl in the street with whom I was friendly when I was little. That was Maudie Monshall. If I played outside, it was just outside the front door. I wasn’t allowed to wander. I wasn’t allowed in the street to play and it was a big privilege to be given permission to go and play in the park for an hour. I wasn’t consciously aware that my mother was being strict and protective, but looking back now I think she must have been. She was nothing like so strict with my brother, Roger. Three years older than me, he seemed to go pretty much where he liked and to make whatever friends he chose; he was always off out somewhere. Not that I really minded being on my own such a lot, for just as I didn’t feel at the time that my mother was being unusually firm, so I never thought about all those friends I didn’t have. Certainly in those days, children never questioned their parents.
There was certainly no shortage in the immediate neighbourhood of children about my age—this was a time, remember, when large families were still not uncommon, and there were several near by, though for some reason there were far more boys than girls. One of the girls who lived opposite was a little horror called Mary, who tipped up my doll’s pram and smashed the face of the doll. In those days dolls’ heads were all made of china, and an accident to your favourite doll often proved fatal. I obviously took great care of the one that replaced it, for I’ve still got it and I’d hate anything to happen to it, because once when I young I actually used it on stage as a prop. It was dressed exactly as I was; I sang ‘Glad Rag Doll’, and won a prize.
Little girls seem to divide into two kinds—those who love dolls and those who don’t. My own daughter, Virginia, never had any time for them—only teddy bears—but I was very much a doll person, so obviously a good deal of my solitary playing revolved round them. Luckily there was a garden at the house in Ladysmith Avenue, and as well as being a place to play, it was a plaything in itself. Strictly speaking, it was my grandmother’s garden, but I had a tiny piece of it for myself, where I built a rockery. One of my ambitions was to grow up and have an enormous rockery; like the horse I was going to have one day. I still haven’t got it, but I look back on that little heap of stones with great affection. I made a tiny lawn in front of it from tufts of grass weeded out of other parts of the garden, and which I used to cut with a pair of scissors. I would keep myself busy for hours in that garden.
My very close friend, Maudie, used to come and play sometimes, and we found a special use for the arched trellis that ran across the garden. With Maudie as my audience, I used to pretend I was entering a stage—through the arch, a quick bow or curtsey graciously to right and left, and into my performance. Sometimes we’d do a double act, playing to just a strip of lawn and my grandmother’s gladioli. Or so we thought. I didn’t discover till years later that the neighbours had been watching these antics all the time. I must have presented a strange picture—this tiny girl, gravely acknowledging imaginary applause, unconsciously preparing for the future.
At the bottom of the garden there was a shed, which seems to have been my dad’s province, and I remember he would sit in it singing that music hall favourite ‘I Wouldn’t Leave My Little Wooden Hut For You’. In everything he did out there I would be his mate, talking to him in a special kind of dialogue we had, where he called me Jim and I called him Bill. One of the jobs he would do out there was to mend all the family’s shoes on one of those three-footed iron shoe lasts you used to be able to get. He’d cut the leather and hammer away. I don’t know if he held the nails in his mouth the way professional cobblers do, but I can remember him working the raw, pale buff edges of the cut leather with black heel-ball (the stiff wax used by cobblers) to get a good professional-looking finish. He had a passion for bright-green paint, so in time the dustbin, the coalbox, the doors and the window frames all ended up a vivid green. And I loved to paint pictures—and still do—so I used to pinch this paint for doing grass.
There was always a lot of grass in my paintings, but not just because I had plenty of green paint handy, nor because I was a town-bred child longing for the country. I did long for the country, but I was lucky enough to know what it was really like. This is another reason why I believe that my childhood was a little different from that of the average East Londoner in the early 1920s. For that I have to thank Auntie Maggie and the fact that she lived at a place called Weybourne. The nearest towns are Farnham and Aldershot, one on either side of the Surrey-Hampshire boundary, and they have grown now until they almost meet each other. But when I was a little girl, Weybourne, more or less halfway between the two, was not much more than a straggle of houses by a crossroads, with plenty of open country round about.
And there, every year, my mother, my brother Roger and I would spend the whole of August, with my father joining us for part of the time, staying with Auntie Maggie, Uncle George and Cousin Georgie. Those visits to Weybourne were the high point in my young life. If the steaming kettles and the illness and the tiny incidents in the flat in Thackeray Road make up my very first impressions, that’s all they are—a succession of fleeting images. But my memories of those holidays in Weybourne are among the most precious things I possess, and they have coloured the whole of my life. There is no doubt that they shaped my future: at every moment of stress or discomfort in my life, I have been able to draw on them. Years later in 1944, when I found myself in the unbelievable, sticky heat of Burma, I suddenly remembered the cool taste of water taken from a well near Weybourne when I was a girl. When I returned from Burma one of the first things I longed for was the English countryside, and that is exactly where I returned. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the quiet rural life.
Children love ritual, and I loved every detail of the ritual of those holidays. I have a special memory which captures everything wonderful about that time: my mother, father and my Auntie Maggie are lying in a field next to a hayrick, laughing their heads off. It was a time for all of us to relax and have fun. It began with the excitement on the station platform at Waterloo, and I can even recall the sense of disappointment I felt the first year that the trains were electric and not steam. The very smell and sounds of the steam train were part of knowing that the holiday had begun. The next part of the ritual was the arrival at Aldershot station and seeing my cousin’s face poking through the slatted gate at the side of the platform. Then we’d set off to walk to Weybourne; sometimes it was very early in the morning, and if my uncle had been on night duty—he was some sort of lorry driver—he’d meet us at a little coffee shop near the station and help us carry our cases. It seemed a very long walk, though it couldn’t have been more than about a mile, and at the end of it there was another ritual: my auntie, who was living then in part of a very old house (which has now gone), would always be watching for us over the hedge. Unpacking was another ceremony: the new plimsolls, the gingham dress made for the occasion by my mother—these were the very symbols of freedom, to be taken from the case with full understanding of their significance. It was as if the holiday couldn’t start until all these little rites had been observed.
There were certain things that had to be done each year as well; otherwise the holiday wasn’t complete. There was an old barn at the back of the house, with a rope we used to swing on; we would go there at the first opportunity and enjoy the creepy darkness and mustiness. (It reminded us of Maria Marten and the Red Barn—one of the plays I knew from the club at home about the famous murder in the 1800s of a country girl by her squire lover in a barn). When we had grown up a little and Auntie Maggie had moved into a new council house across the road, there were four walks that must be taken each holiday: up the hill to the common, along the road to Farnham one way, to Aldershot in the other direction, and down the hill for the really long trudge to Crooksbury Hill and Frensham Ponds. Frensham was all of six or seven miles away, but we thought nothing of it. At least, Mum and I and Roger didn’t, but my cousin hated walking, and grumbled all the way. Frensham meant a swim and a bus most of the way back. Crooksbury Hill you can actually see from Weybourne, and when we got back from there we used to say to each other, ‘Look, that’s where we’ve been—all that way.’ There were shorter walks too: of an evening across the fields, for lemonade outside the Six Bells Inn; or along the rough farm track and across a humpback bridge over the railway to where a lovely old couple called Bill and Annie Walker had a cottage with a well in the garden where we’d stop for a drink of their water.
On the whole, Weybourne didn’t mean incidents so much as atmosphere; it was walks and flowers and green grass and fresh air and picnics. It was people: a real aunt and uncle, plus a crowd of friendly adults we always knew—in the fashion of the day—as aunties and uncles. It was like having a huge family in the country, and a whole circuit of houses to visit. There were the usual cuts and bruises, the quarrels and the getting into trouble, which are part of childhood, but I remember Weybourne mostly as a place of calm pleasures and small but intense excitements.
The one major excitement befell my brother Roger, not me, and happened a little later. He would have been about twelve, which would have made me nine. There was a pub called The Elm Tree, and near by a real elm, an enormous one on a crossroads. Roger was standing under this tree one day when he saw, careering towards him down the lane, a big metal army wagon with two huge bolting horses at the head of it. They appeared to be coming straight at him, so naturally he dodged round the tree, only to find when he emerged from the other side of the trunk that the runaway horses and the wagon still seemed to be heading for him. Wherever he put himself, the horses were apparently bent on getting Roger. The driver had completely lost control—in fact by this time he might well have jumped or been thrown off—so obviously the thing was lurching from side to side so much that it gave the impression of being all over the place. Roger can never remember how long he kept up this scuttling backwards and forwards around the tree, though at the time it felt like ages. But within what must in reality have been only a few seconds, the horses had rushed past him and they ended up by going through the window of the frail little shop, Mason’s, where we bought our sweets. Roger was probably a bit shaken for a while, but nothing upsets you for long at twelve and afterwards it made him feel rather proud and manly. (Not long after this Roger and I became much closer—which we hadn’t really been as small children—when we started ballroom dancing together in our teens. We used to practise in the clubs.)
Otherwise Roger’s memories of Weybourne are not as vivid as mine. The annual visits went on until I was almost out of my teens, but I was the one who kept going back long after that—until Auntie Maggie moved right away, in fact. Throughout my childhood I always told myself that nobody could have been more miserable than I was at the end of every August. My gloom would get deeper and deeper as we came closer to Waterloo, and would reach its lowest—almost despair—on the final bus ride back to East Ham. ‘Why have we got to come back to all the streets and houses? Why can’t we always live in the country?’ I’d ask my mother. And my mother, who always said she wouldn’t want to ‘shut herself away’, as she called it, in some village, probably dismissed it as end-of-holiday grizzling. But I was in deadly earnest, which is why I live in the country now, in Sussex. The dream that I had as a little girl, to never have to leave the country, eventually came true for me. I realize, of course, that I’m able to live in the country because of the career I chose—or perhaps I should say because of the career that chose me—and I was deep into that even before Roger thought the horses were after him.
CHAPTER TWO One-&-six for an Encore (#ulink_f3397a42-cfa0-5afb-a395-310321c3abd2)
People find it hard to believe that I started singing regularly in the clubs when I was seven, but there’s nothing strange about it at all, really. With the club life practically in my blood, with a tradition of party singing deeply ingrained in the whole family, and with my own voice already—so I’ve been told—distinctive in some uncanny way, finding myself singing songs to a real audience, with just a piano for accompaniment, felt almost as natural and inevitable as growing up. I look very serious and grown-up in the photographs from the time, dressed in silk and satin dresses with ruffles which my mother designed and made herself. In one—I must be about seven—I am dressed as a fairy wearing a dress with a sequinned bodice and have a huge net skirt!
The costumes, along with everything else in my early career, were largely down to my mother’s influence: she wanted me to perform. I have to say now that I didn’t particularly enjoy singing. The idea came from the family—it certainly didn’t come from me. For me it was a case of ‘Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington’. But I had no choice. It was my mother who saw that I started doing formal concerts. And, to my amazement, I got paid for it, although obviously I didn’t see the money myself.
It didn’t happen entirely automatically, of course; somebody had to provide the first push. That came from a man named Pat Barry, who was a male ‘soubrette’ on the working men’s club circuit. ‘Soubrette’ is an odd kind of word, but it used to be bandied about in the business. Originally it meant a girl who sang and danced. By the time the concert parties and then the revues had come along, the word had taken on the meaning of a young female member of the cast who could sing and dance and act, and was therefore useful in several ways. Pat Barry’s talents were singing and tap dancing and clog dancing. A sort of jack-of-all-trades for the stage, then.
Pat knew the family, he’d heard me sing at parties and he thought that I was good enough to appear as an act; and he not only persuaded my mother and father that I ought to go on, but—being an all-rounder himself and keen on the idea of having at least a second accomplishment to call on—he told me I ought to learn to step dance as well. So once a week round at his house he’d teach me to dance on a proper little slatted step-dancing mat on the kitchen floor—a roll-up mat of wooden slats on straps that your shoes would ‘clack’ against. I was tall and leggy as a child and, although that first big illness seemed to have left me unable to run far without getting out of breath, I was acrobatic and nimble enough, and did pretty well. But for me, singing—with all the appropriate actions—was to be the main thing, and the club would bill me as a ‘descriptive child vocalist’.
The clubs themselves were part of a network of entertainment of which, unless you grew up in it, you could be completely unaware. There have been working men’s clubs in practically every industrial and thickly populated working-class area since the end of the nineteenth century, and the East London clubs I started in were just a few out of literally hundreds of such places. The old Mildmay Club at Newington Green was one of the best known.
I appeared many times at the Mildmay, with its large hall where the rows of chairs had ledges on the backs of them to hold glasses of beer, and where the chairman and committee of the club sat in front of the stage at a long table. That was the standard practice and, very much as in an old-fashioned music hall, the chairman could quickly gauge the mood of an audience. This was very important, because it was the committee who decided, according to the strength of the applause, whether you were worth an encore or not. That made all the difference to the money you earned: an extra encore earned you a shilling and sixpence. An encore also meant you were well in, and if it happened in a club you were new to, you could be sure that the entertainments secretary would have taken note of how you went down and would book you again.
In the working men’s clubs the entertainments secretaries were roughly the equivalent of agents, and like agents they were always visiting other clubs, on the look-out for new acts. They were unpaid, but every so often the club would run a benefit night for its entertainments secretary. These were known as ‘nanty’ jobs (the word comes from niente, Italian for ‘nothing’), because the performers offered their services free. Artists would try hard to appear on these shows, for apart from anything else, they were the accepted way of getting into a new club. If you could do a nanty job for an entertainments secretary who didn’t know your act, then it worked like an audition. If he liked you, you’d go down in his book of contacts and you could expect him to remember you later for a paid performance.
Some artists remained more or less permanent fixtures on the club circuit; others used the clubs as a way into ‘the business’ and a step towards bigger things. The comedy team of Bennett and Williams began in the clubs as a double act known, if I remember rightly, as Prop and Cop; the comedian and actor Max Wall started in the clubs too. The Beverley Sisters’ parents were a club act called The Corams. These were names and faces from the bills I used to appear on as a child.
For my first appearance, when Pat Barry got an entertainments secretary to put me on, I learned three songs and had a new dress made: white lace with little mauve bows—I can see it now. You didn’t have ‘dresses’ in those days; you had one dress and that was it. (When that one got shabby, if you were lucky you got another one.) I had a pair of silver pumps, a tiny briefcase from Woolworth’s for sixpence and my rolled-up music, and off I went. Later I would suffer from nerves, like everybody else, but at seven I was simply too young to feel anxious. The thing that excited me was the medal I’d been promised for going on. Our next-door neighbour in Ladysmith Avenue was Charlie Paynter, the trainer/manager of West Ham United football team, and he had said he’d give me a West Ham United medallion if I sang in public. He kept his promise, and I was thrilled, because he was a very important man in our locality. My parents would have been with me that first time too, but I don’t remember them telling me that I’d done well or anything like that. I just remember not wanting to do it but knowing that I had to. The applause made me feel good, though, and I got an encore—and got paid for that.
I don’t remember what I sang on that first occasion, but I know that from my earliest days I seemed to be attracted naturally to the straightforward sentimental ballad. In spite of—or maybe, come to think of it, because of—the happy times I had with my dad, I practically cornered the market in ‘daddy’ numbers: ‘Dream Daddy’; ‘I’ve Got a Real Daddy Now’; and a genuine 22-carat tear-jerker called ‘What is a Mammy, Daddy?’ I sang that at a competition once:
What is a mammy, daddy?
Everyone’s got one but me,
Is she the lady what lives next door
Who cooks our dinner and sweeps up the floor?
I’ve got no mammy to put me to bed
And tell me to go out to play.
Daddy I’ll be such a very good girl,
If you’ll bring me a mammy some day.
Everybody was in tears, and there was tremendous applause, but I didn’t win. When the results were announced, the audience kept shouting out, ‘What about the little girl in the red dress?’ and, in the end, I got a consolation prize. This particular competition took place not far from home in Poplar, East London, and it was one of a whole series run at various cinemas in London by Nat Travers, a local cockney comedian. Afterwards he came round to me and my mum and said, ‘Sorry about that, ducks, but come to Tottenham Court Road next week. I’ve got another competition on there and you’ll be all right.’ But my mother was furious and wouldn’t let me go in for any more of his contests.
