Some Sunny Day. Dame Lynn Vera

troupe was a very busy performing unit, working the clubs as I had always done, but going rather farther afield, usually travelling in a small coach. On a trip to Dagenham once the driver got it into his head that he had to get us there in a great hurry, and drove like a madman all the way. We were terrified, and I seem to remember that we spent most of the journey screaming. He must have been driving very badly, because on the whole children are only aware of that kind of danger when it gets physically alarming, and I have a very clear recollection of being pitched all over the place. When you consider how much higher off the ground all the cars and buses were in those days, you can understand our certain belief that we were going to turn over. How we managed to dance and sing properly at the end of it I can’t think.

      The other trip that sticks in my mind was part of what turned out in the end to be a rather longer stay away from home. It must have been during the Christmas holidays one year, because we’d been booked to do three nights in pantomime at—wait for it—the Corn Exchange, Leighton Buzzard. I don’t know whether the extra distance was a strain on the Kracker Kids’ finances, or whether the coach contractor was out of favour after the Dagenham Grand Prix run, or what, but this time we’d hired a vegetable van, with a flap at the back, to take us to and from the engagement. The arrangement lasted one night only. You know that old tag line ‘We had one but the wheel came off’? Well, it did, somewhere out on the edge of London where the tramlines ended. We were on the way home in the small hours of the morning when one of the wheels of this van came off, and there we were, a bunch of kids and a few mums stranded in a freezing street in some unfamiliar suburb. Keeping ourselves warm was the main problem, and we ran up and down for what seemed like hours, trying to keep our circulations going while we waited for the first tram to come along.

      Eventually we got home at about six in the morning, though God knows what sort of state we were in, and we somehow went back to Leighton Buzzard the next night. But Mrs Harris decided we weren’t going to take any more risks and she found somewhere for us to stay for those two nights. All I can remember of our dubious accommodation is that we had to go up a winding staircase and all the girls were put in one room, the boys in another and the mums somewhere else, and in the middle of everything my mother was wandering about with a spoon in one hand and a bottle of syrup of figs in the other, dosing us one by one. This was in the heyday of parental belief in laxatives, of course, and what with that and the candles we had to carry to find our way to the loo it was like something out of Oliver Twist. Now I stop to think about it, the Leighton Buzzard Corn Exchange itself must have been pretty Dickensian, because all the backstage passages were unlit, and we had to use candles to find our way around the rambling passages. That must have been the first occasion when entertaining other people caused me to spend a night away from home. I couldn’t possibly have guessed then that eventually I should lose count of the times that happened, and that for part of my life that would be the rule rather than the exception.

      I’m sure I was too busy concentrating on the job in hand to think of things like that, and in any case I always took my career a step at a time. It was very much a matter of steps then, too, for with one or two exceptions we were a strong dancing team. Which doesn’t mean we were short of soloists. Apart from myself there was Leslie, a boy soprano, who eventually made some records as Leslie Day, ‘the 14-year-old Wonder Voice Boy Soprano—Sings with the Perfect Art of a Coloratura Soprano’. My cousin Joan was in the troupe, too. Where I was tall and thin, she was short and tubby. She didn’t go on with it after the troupe days ended—she was my mother’s sister’s daughter, and had been rather pushed into it—but she had a terrific voice, and used to sing meaty songs like ‘The Trumpeter’. Unfortunately, she couldn’t dance to save her life. We used to try to teach her, but she’d just clop from foot to foot, saying, ‘I hate this, I hate it.’ Another boy, Bobby, who was a future Battle of Britain pilot, was a kind of juvenile lead, and we had little Dot, Bobby’s sister, who was tiny and sang Florrie Forde numbers and one or two Marie Lloyd songs, like ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’. Eileen Fields was another soubrette type. She and I would do duets occasionally—we dressed up as an old couple for one of them and sang ‘My Old Dutch’. Mrs Harris’s daughter, Doreen, was a good singer too, and in fact she practically ran the troupe; later on she became the wife of Leon Cortez, an actor who went on to appear in Dixon of Dock Green, The Saint and Dad’s Army in the 1960s. Doreen and I were the ones who went on into the profession itself, and when Doreen left to start broadcasting Mrs Harris asked me to take over instead. Soon after that, Mrs Harris packed it in altogether, and I took over the school for a year until I, too, got involved in other things.

      I was with the troupe for about four years, and had a lot of fun. Some of the children clearly had no liking for it and no talent, and had merely been conscripted into it by ambitious mothers, but on the whole I don’t think we can have been too bad. We certainly did plenty of work, especially during the school holidays, when we often did shows on the stages of the big local cinemas. As juveniles we were subject to fairly strict controls and licensing regulations; you had to be over fourteen to appear on public stages after a certain hour at night without a licence, which ruined our chances when cousin Joan and I went in for a competition once. We were both under age and neither of us had a licence, but we got through to the semifinal without anyone bothering to check up. Then they said, ‘When you come tomorrow you’ll have to bring your birth certificate with you,’ but they said it to Joan and not to me. They never said it to me because I looked fourteen, even though I wasn’t. But they wanted Joan’s birth certificate, and that would have given the show away. We tried for hours to work out some way round it, but in the end we had to admit defeat, so that was us out of the competition, even though we felt we had a good chance of winning.

      I don’t suppose ‘That’s show business’ had become a common phrase by that time, but presumably I accepted that setback (if that’s what it was) as simply one obstacle which time would remove. For in due course I would be fourteen and such problems wouldn’t arise.

      I would also be free to leave school. Fourteen was the official leaving age, though you could stay on another year if you wanted to. The drama teacher begged me not to leave, because she wanted to put me into all sorts of productions, but all I wanted was to get away from school. Once I’d left, of course, I began wanting to go back. I realized I’d wasted a lot of precious time by not concentrating; I felt ignorant, and I wanted to return and make up for it.

      Not that I ever doubted for a moment that I was going to be a professional singer. Judging by the way she stood over me while I learned my songs, by the way she helped with my costumes and by the way she came with me to whatever show I was doing, whichever club I was working at, I don’t think my mother could have doubted it either. But when I left school she wavered, offering the classic and very reasonable objection that there wasn’t enough security in the life of a professional popular singer. Actually her plan seemed not to have been for me to work at all in the ordinary sense, but to stay at home and help her while carrying on as usual—only more actively—in the clubs. In other words I was to continue to do as much singing as I could get, but that I wasn’t to regard it as my profession.

      I didn’t fancy that, because the girl next door had stayed at home after she left school, and in no time at all she seemed to have turned into an old maid. I didn’t want to be like that, so I decided I ought to have a job and I went and signed on at the Labour Exchange. It took them six weeks to come up with something, by which time I’d already lost any enthusiasm for the idea before I even went to a little factory at East Ham to start sewing on buttons for a living. I sat down with a number of other young girls, but we weren’t even allowed to talk. When lunchtime came I went into a little back room with my sandwiches and felt thoroughly miserable. The day seemed never ending.

      When I finally did get home, my dad asked me how I’d got on.

      ‘Horrible,’ I said. ‘You must do this and you mustn’t do that. I don’t want to go back there any more.’

      ‘How much do you get?’ he asked.

      ‘Six-and-six.’

      ‘A day?’

      ‘No, for the week.’

      ‘Be damned to that,’ he said. ‘Why, you can earn more than that for