Authors: Virginia Nicholson
I’m just living for the day
when I can hold you in my arms forever … It’s a heart aching experience, loving you like I do and being away from you.
Basil Dean, who set up ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association, otherwise known as Every Night Something Awful) in 1939, persuaded the government to support his efforts in lightening the load of war workers and soldiers. Over the course of the war
ENSA mounted two and a half million performances, involving four out of five members of the entertainments profession in Britain. Women performers were hugely popular, adding a welcome touch of lipstick and femininity to the laddish environment of army camps and barracks. For some of these women, the experience of travelling to far-flung theatres of war and offering up their talents to the Allied cause was to prove profoundly life-changing.
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For the soldiers who couldn’t go home, home might travel to them. Women were its representatives.
Early in the new year of 1944, two women set sail from Liverpool.
Joyce Grenfell had packed
her trunk, said goodbye to her husband, Reggie, and now – as far as her loved ones were concerned, for her destination had to be kept secret – headed into the unknown. Joyce, a singer and comedienne, was possessed of a deep faith, an infectious zest for life and an infallible instinct for the ridiculous. Viola Tunnard, funny, quiet and clever, was her accompanist. By early February the pair had arrived in Algiers for the first stop of a thirteen-month tour that would take them to hospitals, army bases and far-flung military units in fourteen countries. Joyce both wrote home and kept a diary throughout, recording her observations with humour and compassion. That year of entertaining the troops was ‘the time of my life’.
From the outset they were often giving three concerts a day. In Algiers she and Viola performed at Hospital No. 95, occupied by 2,500 men wounded in the desert war. They started out in orthopaedics; a piano was pushed into the centre of the ward. Before the concert Joyce chatted to the patients. ‘There were two of the illest men I have ever seen I think. Just skulls but with living wide, very clear eyes.’ Joyce apologised to them for the awkward positioning of the ‘stage’. ‘I said to the illest of the two very ill ones that I hoped he’d excuse my back when I had to turn it on him and he said he would if I’d excuse him for not being shaved. Oh, gosh.’ Next day she discovered that he had not survived the night. ‘I wish I could tell his family how he smiled and even sang with us the day before he died.’ Over the next few days they worked their way round the huge hospital, adapting as well as possible to their improvised concert venues. Making music in tarpaulin marquees was challenging – ‘their
acoustic properties are exactly nil’. Despite this, they got the men joining in, fortissimo. Later they performed to sixteen eye patients. There was a shy boy who had lost his sight; Joyce noticed how his pals were endlessly gentle and caring towards this young soldier, looking after him ‘with all the tenderness of mothers … They were happy when he was and exchanged looks … He sang with us; and he cried a little.’ Next door Joyce met another man who had lost both eyes. ‘He has reached the accepting stage and had a look of strange radiance.’
In March, Joyce and Viola moved on to Naples. The city was covered in pink volcano dust. Just to the north the battle for Cassino was raging, German forces holding on to their defences after the bombing of its famous monastery.
Monday, March 20th, 1944
Oh God, the sights I’ve seen today. We haven’t
touched
the war till today. Bed after bed filled with mutilated men, heads, faces, bodies. It’s the most inhuman, ghastly, bloody, hellish thing in the world … It was quite numbing.
Crowded out, the days whistled by: ‘Tuesday Malta, Wednesday Cairo …’ In early April they were in Baghdad, from where they were driven out to Kut, a sandy outpost, ‘115 miles from anywhere’, to give a show in the local NAAFI to eighty English troops.
Friday, April 14th, 1944
Oh the desert! Oh the desert in heat! Oh the desert in heat and wind and dust!
… I do not like dust storms. Very depressing and poor for the morale. Felt far away from home and sanity and safety.
On the way back to Baghdad the dust blew up again, as hour after hour their jeep jolted across the mirage-strewn desert. Once, a camel train came into distant focus through the swirling sand. Soaking off the grime in two inches of cold water that evening, Joyce contemplated the (unfounded) rumour that Allied troops were already invading northern France. ‘My heart sank like lead. Will we get home?’
Touring sprang surprises on them at every turn: in Maqil the piano had no A sharp, and its lid harboured an angry scorpion. Joyce
recorded tussles with cockroaches, beetles, ants and fleas (‘Flea won’), as well as seatless lavatories: ‘my lav-life is of
great
importance to me. I’m affected here by having to do all from a stand or crouch position.’ Their work continued to be emotionally harrowing; Joyce couldn’t bear to sing songs like ‘Someday’ or ‘All My Tomorrows’ to dying men. But she was never in any doubt of its value. Time and again she and Viola were compensated by the men’s laughter and the way music and comedy could make them forget. They talked to the men too – about ‘home and ordinary things’. It was clear that they were needed. Men in hospital craved distraction – though perhaps not of the kind accidentally implied by the ‘bounder’ who introduced her and Viola as having arrived ‘especially to entertain men in bed’, at which a wag from the back of the ward piped up: ‘Cor, they’ve laid that on now!’
Travel, too, had its own rewards. The pair had left for sunnier climes just before the Luftwaffe renewed their attacks on England in what became known as the Little Blitz, and Joyce appreciated her fortune in being far from home at that time. ‘I’m so b---y lucky to be here doing this job and seeing this beautiful country, and being full of fruit and sun.’ Over an exotic meal of chicken followed by pancakes filled with pineapple jam, Joyce admired a sunset sky full of flying storks.
Back home, everyone was obsessed with food. The scarcity of fruit in particular had become distressing. Joyce and Viola, meanwhile, were being driven up to a leave camp in the mountains above Beirut:
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.’