Vera Lynn — Voice of the whole nation

Over 80, locked down and living alone, I turned on the Queen’s magnificant Coronavirus speech, out of little more than idle curiosity. I admire the Queen. Who doesn’t? But I’m no great fan of Royalty and have no love for the demonstrative sentimentality which gripped this country after the death of Princess Diana and which has re-emerged periodically ever since. I was born in the late 1930s and grew up in an east London family, during and after the War. I knew that a stiff upper lip was the thing to aim for.

But when Her Majesty unexpectedly signed off with “We’ll meet again” I suddenly found myself in tears. It was perfect. It took me back to my childhood. The monarch was of course deliberately referencing Vera Lynn, “the Forces’ sweetheart”. Working class, East End Vera — her dad, Bert, a plumber and mum, Annie. a seamstress — was also called, during the War, the People’s Queen for her astonishing ability to to capture the mood and the hearts of the whole of what was still a class ridden country. Mine was a rather austere Marxist family. We didn’t do popular entertainment. Except for Vera Lynn. We were allowed to sit around the wireless when she was on. I loved her songs. “Voice of the whole nation,” dad would say.

Amazingly, almost eight decades later, the old “We’ll meet again” magic still worked, for me and somehow for millions of people more that half a century younger than I am. Perhaps the key to the Queen’s instinctive feel for the mood came from the fact that, as Princess Elizabeth, just over a decade older that me, she too grew up during the War. As I did, along with millions of others, she must have heard the radio programme “Sincerely Yours” in which Vera sang or played requests from both serving officers and men, reading their messages and replying to them. And the Queen’s father, George VI, had deliberately and successfully branded the Royal Family as ordinary and classless. Ration books and a strict limit on the amount of hot water in the royal bath tub. Carrying on and doing their duty. Just what the country needed.

If Churchill was glamorous defiance, inspiring the nation, then the Royal family WAS the nation. And Vera, the beautiful girl from East Ham with a glorious voice and a modest manner, was the sweetheart of the nation. Between them, they made a great act. It worked because you knew it wasn’t acting.

Instead, capturing the mood of the nation came naturally to Vera. There is a lovely story that the out-of-touch desk jockeys and bureaucrats in Whitehall were shocked by the whole idea that we would meet again — don’t know where, don’t know when. Miserable stuff. Undermine the morale of the troops and their families back home. They didn’t much like the idea of bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover. They tried to ban the songs from the airwaves. She knew instinctively, and from her friends and neighbours back in East Ham, from the messages sent by thousands of ordinary blokes serving overseas — and their commanding officers — that her songs were morale boosting. So she just carried on singing them. The ban was never enforced.

She joined the Entertainments National Service Association in the final years of the War and travelled to battle zones to entertain the troops. The Army wanted her to go to France. She replied that our troops there were well served by entertainers. Typically, she said she wanted to go where she was needed, to sing for forgotten soldiers. Well you can’t get much more forgotten than our boys in Burma, came the reply. So that was where she insisted on going. She sang for British guerilla forces in Japanese-occupied Burma and earned the Burma Star, though it was only awarded more than 40 years later, in 1985.

For an amazing three quarters of a century after VE Day, she lived quietly with her husband until his death. No night clubs. No scandals. She continued to work hard of course. But she spent much of her time doing charitable work for former soldiers and appearing in times of national stress — the Falklands War for example — to inspire us all.