Some Sunny Day

I did club work for something like eight years, mostly in east and north London and on the Essex fringe, but also over the river in places like Woolwich and Plumstead, which were comparatively easy to get to because of the Blackwall tunnel. Coming back from Woolwich one night we missed a bus and had to walk all the way through the tunnel, which had only a tiny pavement and wasn’t really designed for pedestrians, to pick up the tram at Poplar. And there were many other nights when I would wait at Poplar in the cold and wet, and being so tired that I’d fall asleep on the bus long before we got home. While I was still small enough, my dad would sometimes give me a piggyback home late at night, and it was wonderful to stop on the way for fish and chips and what we used to call wally-wallies, which were big dill pickles. Occasionally on the way to a club, when the shops were still open, we’d call in at the little grocer’s near the end of the road for a penn’orth of broken biscuits. These were a great bargain because biscuits came in big square tins in those days and were bought loose— any that got broken were sold off cheap, even the most expensive ones.

Nowadays if child performers earn any money the parents are able to build up the child’s bank account and put money aside for their future. But in my day they were only too glad of the money to keep the house going. Although my father had a job, when I started earning money that helped pay the food bills. In fact the money I earned more than fed me. If I had concerts on the weekend and a cabaret somewhere I could earn seven shillings and sixpence. Unless I did two places in one night, which I did regularly: then I could earn more. And if the public wanted an encore, then the men sitting around the committee table in the club would put money in a kitty—up to one shilling and six. That was useful because it paid for our fares, either on a sixpenny tram or on a shilling-all-night tram. In those days my dad was probably earning about three pounds fifty a week. So there were some weekends when I could almost make in two nights what my father made in a week.

I was not allowed to spend any of the money I earned myself. I didn’t feel good or bad about it; I didn’t think about it. I just did the concerts, knowing that whatever money I earned, it would go into the household. In my younger days going to school I would be given a penny to buy a chocolate cupcake from the bakery opposite the school, and I would have that in my break. It was a little spongey cake with chocolate melted on top, which used to go all hard and crispy—it was so nice. As long as I had my penny for the school break, I never thought to ask for anything more than that. I knew that the money made a big difference to the family as it was a lot of money in those days. You don’t analyse these things when you’re young, but we were always well fed, although not by today’s standards, maybe. The children of today just help themselves to whatever they want. You weren’t allowed to help yourself back then—we would have eaten at mealtimes but rarely between. The only time we had a bowl of oranges on the side was at Christmas. The rest of the year fruit was kept in the larder. I didn’t consider our family poor, though: we were just middle of the road. We never really went short of anything.

I was certainly never hungry. My mother was a plain cook but a good cook. Most women were in those days. There wasn’t all the fancy cooking that we do today. It was basic. We had a roast every Sunday—Mother used to make very good Yorkshire pudding—and then the cold meat on the Monday. And we always had two different sorts of potatoes: roast and boiled. I was thinking about that the other day when I was peeling potatoes: that at home on Sundays there was always a choice. They don’t do that nowadays, do they? You get either boiled or roast, but not both. Funny how things change.

All this time, of course, I was at school, and although the work I did in the clubs was mostly at weekends, the two things still managed to clash—sometimes in unexpected ways. At my junior school in Central Park Road I once asked if I could borrow a copy of the sheet music of ‘Your Land and My Land’, and when I told the teacher what I wanted it for she said, ‘Oh, you sing, do you?’ Obviously she remembered, because one morning at assembly not long after that I was suddenly called on to sing this song. I was petrified, and I had every reason to be, for as I’ve mentioned, my voice was of a rather unorthodox pitch for a little girl, so when the school played it from the original song copy, it was in completely the wrong key for me. It was a terrible mess, and although it wasn’t my fault I was crimson with shame. They must have thought, Good God! How can this child go on stage and sing!

As a matter of fact everything we sang at school was pitched too high for me. Most of the time I couldn’t get up there, and the only alternative was to go into a kind of falsetto voice, which was disastrous. The school disliked my singing voice so much that ironically I was only allowed in the front row of the choir because I opened my mouth nice and wide and it looked good.

If I was ever tired at school it was automatically put down to my going out singing late at night ‘in those terrible places’. My voice and the sort of singing I was doing were much looked down on. One teacher in particular was most unsympathetic. One day she wouldn’t let me go home early in time to get to a competition at East Ham Granada, so when we did come out of school I had to run all the way home, where my mother was waiting with my things—this was the time I sang with my doll—and then we both ran all the way there. I wasn’t much of a runner, and I arrived out of breath, just as the last competitor was coming off. I flew on, somehow struggled through my number—‘A Glad Rag Doll’—and won first prize. Ten bob, it was, and it bought me and my mum enough of that red ripply material that everybody used for dressing gowns in those days to make us a dressing gown each.

I was never keen on school—probably because I wasn’t good at any of the academic subjects. I could never spell; I couldn’t add up; I couldn’t assimilate the facts in history and geography. I never tried very hard at French; I didn’t need French, I was going to be a singer—I can actually remember thinking that. How foolish can you be? I’ve bitterly regretted my poor record at that kind of subject ever since, and it’s left me with a permanent sense of inferiority in certain kinds of company. As if in compensation, I was always good at anything with my hands—drawing, painting and sewing. Gardening too, even then; when we made a crazy paving path at my secondary school, Brampton Road School, I took charge of laying out the pieces. Maybe it’s still there. Cookery was something else I was good at, and botany, though my marks in that came mostly from my little sketches. I wasn’t a great reader, but I read quite well out loud in class—I suppose there was some kinship there with projecting a song. I tended to be good at what came easily to me, and made heavy weather of everything else, like learning songs. But I just wasn’t academic. In fact I never learned to read music, not even to this day.

The whole act of going to school was rather like learning new words, as a matter of fact, because no matter how much I may have disliked it, I never tried to get out of it; I knew it had to be done. I suffered a great deal from bilious attacks as a child, but even if I’d been up nearly all night and felt like death the next morning, when my mother would ask me if I wanted to stay at home, I’d have to explain that I had to go—I musn’t miss school. It turned out in later life that one of the things that was causing the biliousness, and the being ill after eating, say, strawberries, was a troublesome appendix, which would eventually catch up with me right on the stage of the Palladium during the Blitz. But at the time I was just another of those bilious children, with maybe that difference—that instead of using the weakness as an excuse for taking it easy, I felt I had actively to fight it. If I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I feel I’m slacking. I’ve got to deserve a rest; I feel each day that I’ve got to earn my day. My mother was the same, never still. She didn’t slow down until the mid-1970s, when infirmity forced her to (she died not many years after that), and my recollection of her during my childhood is that she was always rushing about. She wanted to get a lot done, and I suppose I do, too.

We shared that practical streak. As mentioned already, my mother had been a dressmaker before I was born, and not only made all my dresses and costumes during those early years but, when the Depression came and my dad was out of work for a spell, went back to dressmaking rather more seriously in order to help out, and I suppose my seven-and-sixes must have been quite a help.

When I was eleven the pattern of my young career changed a little. I still carried on with the solo club singing, but I also joined a juvenile troupe with the ringing title of Madame Harris’s Kracker Kabaret Kids, and that was when, for professional purposes, I changed my name.

I never doubted that I was going to be a singer, and the instinct that had prompted me, when I was very tiny, to sing ‘Dream Daddy’ and follow it up with ‘I’ve Got a Real Daddy Now’ suggested that I ought to adopt a more comfortable— and more glamorous—stage name than Vera Welch. The main concern was to find something that was short and easily remembered, and that would stand out on a bill—something that would allow for plenty of space round each letter. We held a kind of family conference about it, and we found the answer within the family too. My grandmother’s maiden name had been Lynn; it seemed to be everything a stage name ought to be, but at the same time it was a real one. From then on, I was to be Vera Lynn.

In spite of its exotic name, Madame Harris’s Kracker Kabaret Kids was run from a house in Central Park Road, East Ham. As a juvenile troupe it prospered, and it quickly outgrew Madame Harris’s front parlour and transferred its activities, every Saturday morning, to the local Salvation Army hut; we used to pay sixpence each towards the cost of hiring it. I don’t know exactly how Madame Harris advertised the tuition she offered, but it’s my guess that she must have been an early exponent of ‘Ballet, Tap and Acro.’, that faintly ridiculous-sounding description you used to see on local advertising boards and among the small ads in local papers. Acrobatic I certainly was, with my long legs and my ability to kick high; while Pat Barry’s wisdom in insisting on my doing some tap dancing meant that I was halfway there as far as dancing was concerned. After a while I used to teach the kids while Madame Harris banged away at the piano. In fact it became something of a family concern, for my mother and Mrs Harris, between them, made all the costumes for our shows.

The 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 one concert. You’re not going back there. What do you have to put up with it all for?’

So I never did go back, and I got a postal order for one-and-a-penny for my day’s work. I can’t say that at this stage I really had any idea myself what I wanted to do with my life. Children thought differently in those days to how they think today. Now they have ideas of what they want to do, but in those days you just went along with what your mother or father said.

But it was fairly typical of my father to side with me over the button factory. He was very much the one for going along with the wishes of his children. In fact he was an enormously easy-going man altogether. While my mother was the sort who, for some years to come, would wait up for me after a show so that I dare not linger or go to any of the many parties that were held, Dad would have said, ‘Go on, mate, do as you like, mate; enjoy yourself, I’m going off to bed.’ Only two things ever really seemed to upset him, and they were quite trivial. If you gave him a cup of tea that hadn’t been sugared he’d carry on as if you’d tried to poison him; and he hated being expected to go to tea at anybody else’s home.

It was the strong principles of my mother that laid down the rules that gave our household and my childhood their peculiar flavour. For example, most families at that time, no matter what their religious views, tended to encourage the children to go to Sunday school, if only to get them out of the way for an hour or so on a Sunday. We were positively not allowed to go to Sunday school. My mother didn’t think it was right to go to church or Sunday school during the day on Sunday, and then go singing in the clubs on Sunday night. I think she was wrong, but that’s what she believed, and there seemed nothing strange about it at the time.

At the latter end of my period with Mrs Harris’s juvenile troupe I was starting to work quite hard as a young entertainer. By the time I left school at fourteen I had, to all intents and purposes, already been earning my living as a performer for seven years, and after that one day’s orthodox employment I never thought of doing anything else. I more or less ran the troupe, and I sang and danced with it, but I still went out solo as well. The engagements were mainly club dates, as they had always been, but I was beginning to add slightly more sophisticated cabaret bookings to my diary—private social functions and dinners. On a ticket to one of them I suddenly found I was being described as ‘the girl with the different voice’. That was a label I should hold on to, I realized. It was nothing spectacular, but it was progress, a kind of hint that I wasn’t to remain working round the clubs for ever, and that I could expect in time to move on to something else.

That something else was to start when I was fifteen, and doing a cabaret spot at Poplar Baths. It was a nerve-racking evening when everything happened at once: I had a foul cold, I encountered my first microphone and I was heard by Howard Baker, the king of the local bandleaders. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the moment my life really took off.

CHAPTER THREE Vocal Chorus

You can get a real flavour of the period from the advertisements and Howard Baker’s ads were hardly humble:

HOWARD BAKER BANDS

- The Gig King -

Definitely the largest band organization in the country. Howard Baker Bands supplied. Also leading agents for outside combinations. We also supply first-class cabaret and concert artistes for all functions.

Nowadays wording like that has a faintly preposterous ring about it. But in the early 1930s, celebrity was infinitely graded, and while Howard Baker was not a household name, like Roy Fox or Lew Stone or Jack Payne (all bandleaders in their heyday in the 1930s), and he isn’t familiar to later generations, he was every bit as successful as he implied in those pompous ads. Nobody disputed his claim to be the Gig King.

The word ‘gig’ in those days nearly always meant just a one-night engagement. Musicians today seem to talk of almost any kind of job as a gig, even a long residency somewhere or a complete tour. But then ‘gigging around’ in essence meant doing musical odd jobs. It wasn’t anything like as lowly as it sounds, because back then in the 1930s, long before disco had been heard of and jukeboxes were still a rarity, the demand for live musical entertainment was tremendous and musicians would be booked to appear at anything from twenty-first birthday parties through weddings and firms’ dinners to large private and public dances—‘all functions’, just as the advert said.