Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Burma was heartbreaking, I had to go and do my bit
VERA LYNN AT 100: WE MUST NEVER FORGET SACRIFICE
The bright, brave lipstick smile that had won millions of British soldiers’ hearts.
When 27-year-old Forces’ Sweetheart Vera
Lynn arrived on the Burma front line in 1944 at Kohima, complete with khaki shorts, it was just the tonic troops thousands of miles from home needed.
And when this angel sang for them, her mic powered by searchlight batteries and her pianist toting a pistol, it was a show of defiance more powerful than any weapon.
Even now, 73 years on, that boldness still lingers along with the unwavering smile as Dame Vera – 100 years old tomorrow – tells the Sunday Mirror: “I just wanted to do my bit.
“I cancelled engagements to go to Burma. I was determined to go where nobody else in the entertainment world had gone.
MAIMED
“Some were travelling to the cities rather than the jungle. I felt someone needed to go and support these young men and deliver messages of hope from home. I’d been warned not to travel to certain places, but I just knew I had to do it.”
The newly married Cockney girl, the first to visit the jungle front line, soon found out her advisers weren’t kidding – and that there was no room for naivety, or fear, during her four months in Burma.
“The battle was going on up the hill,” she says. “We were at the bottom.” It was the plight of the wounded that hit her hardest as she visited bedsides.
“The patients were all maimed, bad cases. The worst thing was the smell. Gangrene set in easily in those conditions,” she once said of what she saw.
“The wounded lay in the heat with no sanitation in those tents. It was hard for everybody. The doctors looking after them were just boys themselves.” She recalls seeing an Indian soldier have a bullet removed from his arm. It was offered to her as a memento “complete with slivers of flesh on it”. She still has it. LEGEND Vera’s career kept going after the war years IN the sweltering jungle heat amid the echo of distant fighting, into their midst it floated like a breath of cool, fresh air. As chirpy as Dame Vera has always been, she recalls the heartbreaking scenes got to her. She has said: “At one point, suddenly sickened by the smell of gangrene, disinfectants and the sense of desolation at the thought of life ebbing away all round me, I was overcome by it all, and sat down on somebody’s bed, feeling weary and ill and futile. I asked for a glass of water. ‘We’ve no drinking water,’ someone said gently, ‘but there’s some lemonade if you’d like it’.”
And for our longest serving showbiz icon, about to enter the record books as the oldest star to release a new album, there was no five-star treatment in her makeshift Burma B&B.
In her 2009 autobiography, Some Sunny Day, she remembers: “It was hot, always so hot. There was nowhere to stay but in these grass huts, with two buckets inside – one for water, one for your toilet… It was weeks before I had a bath. One night I slept on a stretcher balanced between two kitchen chairs in a shed.
“In the morning I’d wash by
pouring a bucket of water over myself and letting the water drain away into the hard mud floor.”
But the determination that had propelled Vera to stardom helped her cope. She first took to the stage in workingmen’s clubs as a gaptoothed seven-year-old, egged on by her dressmaker mum and docker dad, often earning more than her his own wages. It all went to keep the household going.
By 19 she had found fame as a big band crooner, but it was those Second World War ballads The White Cliffs Of Dover and We’ll Meet Again that rocketed her to national adoration – and saw her flying to perform for our Our Boys in Burma.
Throughout it all, she secretly kept a diary of her posting with the Entertainments National Service Association. Entries are sparse, knowing she was forbidden to record events. Now, that Burma Book, a collection of notes and photos, is one of her most treasured possessions at her home in East Sussex, reminding her of what she considers as the most important work of her life. Among the memories, is one so painfully poignant.
Her smallest, and hardest, performance in the camps where up to 6,000 would gather to watch her. Once, she sang to just two men at their hospital bedsides, too seriously wounded to make it to her concert. She recalled later: “They asked me to sing We’ll Meet Again. I could see what they were thinking.”
Only one of them made it home.
It’s little wonder that, all these decades on, she still says: “So many brave young boys made sacrifices for our freedom. It is important we never forget the price they paid to
keep us safe.”
I was warned not to travel but I felt someone needed to support these men
DAME VERA ON DECISION TO GO TO BURMA