Some Sunny Day. Dame Vera Lynn

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