We kept passing open-fronted fruit shops with piles of glossy melons, more purple egg plants, baskets of tomatoes, strings of red peppers, fresh dates on their yellow stalks, lemons and oranges and candelabra bunches of bananas, both green and yellow.
After the drab greyness of home, the Middle East was bursting with colour: the intense green of heaps of tiny cucumbers, the yellow robes of Bedouins – ‘no two alike’ – the pink and white striped djellabas of little boys, the myriad hues of the Damascus bazaar.
Vera Lynn’s travel experiences with ENSA lacked such picturesque qualities. The ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ contacted the organisation in spring 1944:
I phoned up their offices in Drury Lane and said I thought I ought to go out to sing for the boys themselves, rather than just stay at home. And at that time the Jap war was at its peak. So, when I phoned up they said, ‘Where would you like to go?’ And I said ‘Well, I’d like to go where there isn’t any entertainment.’ So they said ‘There’s only one place that nobody’s going to, and that’s Burma.’ And I said ‘Okay, I’ll go there.’
Vera had never been abroad before. She set out in a vast Sunderland cargo plane, with her accompanist, on the long journey east via Gibraltar, Cairo and Basra, arriving at the Bengali seaport of Chittagong, to find the decisive Battle of Kohima at its height. Three hundred miles up country, the Japanese army were attacking this small garrison of 1,500 men with 12,000 troops. Ferocious artillery fire deterred the initial assault, and a combination of British reinforcements, Japanese lack of supplies and sheer luck helped stave off the capture of this vital route to India. By June the Japanese were in retreat.
For Vera, the memories of those four months on the road are still fresh. The colonel at Chittagong saw her off with the present of a bottle of whisky: ‘Medicinal purposes only, my dear – a chotapeg every night.’ She didn’t drink. But in every other way Vera took jungle life in her stride. Unfazed by the foreignness of everything, she preferred not to be singled out for star treatment, proudly adapting to the same accommodation, washing facilities and food as the army:
In the Far East I lived like the boys did – in a grass hut with buckets of water – one for toilet and one for washing. And you took whatever meals was offered you.
It’s true you never quite knew what you were eating … I remember having plain boiled rice with a dollop of jam in the middle. And all the boys were looking as they went by to see if I was eating anything different to them, but I wasn’t! There wasn’t much else to give us, really, out there!
She resigned herself, too, when it came to appearances:
I couldn’t use make-up at all – as soon as you put it on you would sweat it off. As long as I had lipstick: that was the important piece of make-up. As for my hair – well I had a perm, and of course there was no such thing as hairdressers abroad – so my hair went all fuzzy and curly. But I had no option – I just had to put it in a bucket of water and wash it and let it dry in the heat. They didn’t have hairdryers out in the jungle!
But Vera was a celebrity, and as such she was accompanied by the gentlemen of the press. It was not her way to shrink from journalists. One tropical night, she sat with two of them outside the grass huts by a swirling river, protected from panthers, boa constrictors and the Japanese army by a barbed-wire palisade. The war correspondents, Dickie and Gerald, had failed to extract any form of sundowner from the mess that evening. That was when Vera remembered her bottle of Scotch:
I thought ‘Right, I’ll surprise them’, and I went back to my grass hut and came out with this bottle of Canadian Club – and they couldn’t believe their eyes. Well, there was nothing to dilute it with, so the three of us sat outside with this river going by and the hut behind and all these barbed wire railings, drinking neat Canadian Club. And then I staggered into my hut afterwards and got into my little bed, tucked all my netting around me, and sat and watched the bush rats running around the ceiling inside, like little squirrels with bushy tails.
Dickie set up a stunt that nearly landed her in trouble:
I didn’t see action – I was billeted behind the lines. But Dickie Sharp wanted to go up the road to Kohima so he could record me singing with the sound of gunfire in the background. He said ‘Are you game?’ And I said – ‘Yes, OK – all right.’ But one of the commanders in charge of the station heard about it and said, ‘No way, because if anything happens to Vera Lynn while she is under my protection, I’ll be shot at dawn.’
Vera was indispensable. Her voice and her songs had – and have – a uniquely affecting and patriotic quality which touched her listeners’ souls:
These are the chains
Nothing can break –
There’ll always be an England
And England shall be free
If England means as much to you
As England means to me …
But she herself recognises that it was her very ordinariness that stole their hearts. In her nineties, this woman is still luminously beautiful, but the comfortable cardigan and clipped Cockney are the clues to Vera Lynn’s sweetness and approachability. The lads of the West Kents and the Durham Light Infantry, killing and dying in a rat-infested wilderness strewn with human remains, recognised her as a symbol of the world they were fighting for:
I wasn’t a soprano or an opera singer, and I wasn’t a glamour girl. They knew I came from East Ham. I sounded just like one of them, just like the kind of girls they knew at home – an ordinary working-class girl. So they could connect with me, and I with them. I was singing to my own kind.
All of which made Vera the more personally affected by the terrible losses suffered in that punishing campaign. By the time the Japanese army was retreating, over 4,000 British and Indian troops were dead, missing or wounded. It was hard for her to bear.
It’s one of the things you can’t help thinking of: How many of these boys are going to get back home? Here they are, sitting, alive at the moment … clapping me for what I’m doing. At lunchtime there’d be that patch of grass – and it would be full of men who’d walked for miles, and they’d have been sitting there for hours, waiting, not just to hear me sing, but to see me singing.
And afterwards, when they get up off that grass, and pick up their rifles, and go back into the jungle – what then? There’d be an empty piece of grass at daybreak.
But the best thing was knowing that I was taking a little bit of home to them. One of the boys said to me once – ‘England can’t be that far away, because you’re here.’
I could give them the feeling that they were just around the corner.
Dancing the Night Away
The vital contribution of wartime artistes like Joyce Grenfell and Vera Lynn has been much acknowledged. At home and abroad, they and many others, from conjurers to comedians, did their best to cheer, amuse and delight at a time of austerity, war-weariness and low spirits. Female performers had an incomparable glamour and allure that appealed to love-starved – and sex-starved – servicemen. At the famous Windmill Theatre (‘We Never Closed’) soubrette Doris Barry and the other Windmill girls played to packed houses; the manager, Vivian Van Damm, persuaded his troupe to pose naked in ‘tableaux vivants’, as mermaids, or Britannia. The experience quickly disabused Doris of any romantic views she might have had of men – ‘It wasn’t very good to be up there on the stage with an audience full of men with raincoats across their knees, half of them playing with themselves.’
Vera Lynn, the voice of the war.
People in Britain were spending more money than ever before on pleasure; by 1944, 120 per cent more than in 1938. And where ENSA concerts were lacking, people flocked to the cinema, went dancing or made their own entertainment. Community singing flourished; pubs and air-raid shelters rang to the chorus of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ or the endlessly popular ditty: ‘Hitler has only got one ball. / The other is in the Albert Hall’. Theatre director Nancy Hewins took her all-women acting company on the road throughout the Second World War, putting on
no fewer than 1,534 performances of thirty-three plays, of which half were by Shakespeare. The petrol shortage reduced the company to travel by horse and cart. They slept in barns or on floors.
When twenty-two-year-old Isa Barker was a land girl in rural East Lothian she discovered that her hostel was a mine of talent:
We found out that we had a couple of beautiful singers; and there was one girl who was very adept with poetry recitations, and could make people laugh. And I had been in a tap-dancing troupe for five or six years when I was younger.
Isa and her friends were persuaded by the Land Army rep to devise a show; for the next six months they staged the ‘Revue by the Landgirls’ weekly on Friday nights, in village halls round the district, with audiences from the local community. Their signature tune was:
We’re in the Land Army
We think we’ll all go barmy
If this goes on for years and years and years …
With a ticket price of sixpence a head, plus raffle prizes donated by the local farmers – fresh eggs, butter and even a sucking pig – the event soon raised £300 for the Land Army Benevolent Fund. Today, the concerts remain the high spot of Isa’s war:
We didn’t get to bed till about two in the morning because of people enjoying themselves. And on Saturday mornings you’d get up and think ‘Och, we’ve got to lift manure.’ Well, we could hardly lift the fork, never mind the fork with the manure on it!
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles from the Scottish glens, London buzzed with life. Throughout the war the 400 Club and the Gargoyle did good business. The Ritz and the Berkeley were a whirl of fun, packed with couples in uniform and evening dress. ATS recruit Vera Roberts would catch a train from her Home Counties base to go dancing to Joe Loss and his orchestra at the Hammersmith Palais; it cost only sixpence if you were in uniform. ‘We got up to quite a few tricks. I used to roll my hair up – then when I got to the dance I’d let it down. Once we were going to this dance in Croydon; I had this gold dress – so what I did was I put an elastic round my waist, and pulled it all up under my greatcoat. And when we got to the dance you let your dress down, took your coat off, and you were a civilian!’ As another young woman remembered, ‘If this is war, why am I enjoying it so much?’
For Helen Forrester in Liverpool, dancing helped to anaesthetise the pain of loss. Her fiancé, Harry O’Dwyer, had been killed in the Atlantic in August 1940. The ensuing emptiness in her heart continued to gnaw: ‘As I lay in bed, I would still occasionally burst into tears.’ But there was nobody she could tell.
All through the war, late at night, I danced. I danced with men from every nation in Europe, and they had one attitude in common; they never talked about what they would do after the war. Perhaps they accepted, what I feared, that they would be killed.
Defended though she was, new relationships slowly entered Helen’s life. Through her job at the Liverpool Petroleum Board she met a onetime oil company employee, Eddie Parry, who was visiting his colleagues while on leave from Commando training. Eddie – tall, tough, fair and lean – had a reputation as a tearaway, a womaniser who went on pub crawls, swore and got drunk. But with Helen he was different: respectful and gallant. He walked her home one rainy night, and Helen realised she was struggling to conquer feelings that had lain dormant since Harry’s death. After Eddie returned to his unit they corresponded. Helen was deeply attracted to him, and she also discovered that they had much in common: secret vulnerabilities, a capacity for endurance and a defiance of what life could throw at them. But she pulled back from making any gesture of commitment. Their letters kept her going, and, though they met whenever he had leave, she was clear-eyed about his shortcomings. Eddie was not husband material; moreover, as one of Churchill’s crack raiders, he would inevitably be in the greatest danger once the Second Front got under way. He himself recognised that he was training to kill, or be killed.
So Helen did not feel she was betraying him when she made friends with Derek Hampson, a wounded bomber pilot whom she found weeping one evening on the rocky beach near Moreton. Tear-sodden though he was, Helen couldn’t help noticing this young man’s film-star good looks. He was blond, ‘easily the most handsome man I had ever met … like … some beautiful gift of nature, a perfect Arab pony, for example.’ They got talking; his voice, as it steadied, betraying his public-school education. It turned out that Derek had crash-landed his Lancaster, broken his thigh and was being nursed in a convalescent home for airmen in nearby Hoylake. The ordeal had shot his nerves to pieces, the last straw being the news that his best friend in the squadron had been posted abroad. Helen agreed to go to the cinema with him.
Once Derek’s thigh healed, she discovered that he was also a wonderful dancing partner. Helen told him how she supplemented her meagre clerical income with dress-making, and he in turn revealed that before the war he had been in the rag trade. ‘I sell clothes – ladies’ dresses, mostly … [But] you absolutely must not tell anybody, particularly the RAF types. I would be ribbed to death, if they knew.’ Even Helen’s spiteful mother found Derek’s good looks and educated manner irresistible.
By contrast with the electricity between her and Eddie, Helen felt no ‘jump of desire’ for this handsome, fashion-conscious young man. And gradually it dawned on her why. ‘He was truly and faithfully in love with a man he had known since boyhood.’ Homosexuality was illegal and punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, and Derek was terrified of exposure and blackmail; but Helen’s sufferings had made her tolerant, and she felt pity for his vulnerability in the macho world of the squadron. Over time she persuaded him that he could trust her with the knowledge of this secret relationship, and in return she confided in him about her own sorrows and disappointments. And so, as they sat one sunny day on the sea wall at Moreton, looking out over the barbed wire at the blue ocean beyond, he turned to her and, with unconcealed embarrassment, suggested that they marry. Helen reacted more with surprise than shock – ‘Derek!’
‘Helen, it would offer some protection to my friend and me – having a woman in the house … Listen to what I have in mind. I would take you into the business with me, as an equal partner … you’re good with clothes, and it’s an interesting thing for a woman to be in …
Think about it … You’ll have a good house, I promise you. And we’d never question your comings and goings – I mean, if you found, well – a lover.’
It was not out of anger or pique that Helen checked his flow:
‘I couldn’t, Derek. I just could not do it. I am a normal woman with a normal set of desires and hopes. I am just very, very tired at present; yet, sometime, I hope to marry.’
His face had fallen … I felt very sorry for him …
‘Believe me, I understand your predicament. But I could not live such a lie. I just couldn’t.’
In time, Derek returned to his squadron. Once a month he wrote to Helen, and she replied. As a bomber pilot it was his job to deliver heavy explosives to military targets. But they often missed, killing German civilians, and his sensitive nature rebelled against being the cause of so much suffering. Then the letters stopped. Eventually, an envelope addressed to her in unknown handwriting arrived from Yorkshire. It was Derek’s mother, who had discovered Helen’s letters in her son’s belongings, returned to her after his death. He had been killed in action. For the bereaved lady it must have been some consolation to find that he had a girlfriend; but who would write to Derek’s real lover? Meanwhile, to Helen, it seemed that whoever she allowed to get close to her was singled out for untimely death. ‘I grieved … for the slaughter of my generation.’
The Secret Army
Helen Forrester was learning to live her life provisionally. There would be time enough – when the war ended, as it surely soon would – to determine what to be, who to marry. ‘Like many other women I was waiting it out.’
Monica Littleboy was one of these. In the brief period in 1939 that she had known her boyfriend, George Symington, their romance had seemed to offer
everything her young and passionate heart had ever dreamt of. But by 1944 she had not seen George for four and a half years. ‘[He] had gone to the Far East, for how long I did not know.’ Monica had a spell in the WAAFs before opting to become an ambulance driver with the FANYs, attached to the Red Cross, where she was trained to drive and maintain a heavy vehicle, and to lift and carry stretchers. Posted to Dorset under Southern Command, she threw herself into her work and found temporary happiness with a gentle older officer who talked to her of marriage. ‘He was posted elsewhere … We both knew that things were not to be.’ When news finally reached her that George had been taken prisoner by the Japanese it intensified her memories of their love. ‘I have realised that George Symington is the only person I could really marry and be happy with,’ she confided to her diary.
But he was so far away. At this time Monica’s job gave meaning to her life. Her ambulance, her friendships in the FANY, above all the patients – from dysentery cases to plane crash survivors – were the here and now of her existence. ‘I learnt more about human nature there than anywhere else.’
And now the time was approaching when the commitment of women like Monica would be put to the test. It is tempting to compare the slow accomplishment of the Allied invasion to a gestation; for women, a time of gathering readiness and anticipation in the hatching of a long-awaited outcome. Nature has fashioned our sex for patience; we know, too, that a long-prayed-for event may bring death, blood and a mother’s tears. Mystery and fear, love and faith in the future: with victory at stake these preparations were, for many women in Britain, burdened with more hopes than any military campaign before or since.
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