Historic day Dame Vera won my heart

THE one and only occasion on which I met Dame Vera Lynn will live on in my memory until my dying day.

It was 1995 on the 50th anniversary of VE Day, and I had been asked to join the great lady at a champagne reception on a terrace overlooking the River Thames, where we stood side by side watching a fly-past by Spitfires and Hurricanes.

Never have I felt closer to history than on that particular day, watching those particular aeroplanes in the company of that particular woman, who represented so much about the spirit that kept Britain going through World War II.

The invitation had been my reward for having ghostwritten an article under Dame Vera’s name, which recorded her memories of 50 years earlier.

This was a job for which I’d been selected for no better reason than that I was known to have cleared Fleet Street pubs towards closing time with my passionate renditions of We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs Of Dover — songs that I’d learned at my mother’s knee and have loved ever since.

I confess that I was nervous about being introduced to Dame Vera. This was because she’d been extremely busy in the run-up to the anniversary and I’d had to base an article of more than 1,000 words on a single telephone conversation with her, which had lasted barely two minutes before she’d had to dash off to her next engagement.

Though her husband had cleared what I’d written, I wondered if she’d actually read it.

In fact, I rather hoped not, fearing that I might have got something wrong, or failed to reproduce her authentic language and tone. Megastars, after all, can be highly sensitive.

I needn’t have worried. As soon as we were introduced, she flashed me a devastating smile and delivered the highest praise a ghost-writer could hope for.

‘I just loved our article,’ she said (and how I loved that ‘our’). ‘It was as if I wrote every word of it myself!’

I won’t be the first to have said this since Dame Vera’s death yesterday, at the venerable age of 103. But she was a lovely lady, totally unspoiled by decades of adulation. I hope and pray that we’ll meet again.