Kitabı oku: «Some Sunny Day»

CHAPTER ONE Overture & Beginnings

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.