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.
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