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.