Recalling Bluebirds

I was saddened when Vera Lynn finally shuffled off her mortal coil at the great age of 103! To be totally honest I hadn’t thought about her for years and if I had given her a passing thought I would more than likely have imagined that she died twenty years ago or more. That’s what happens when you live in the antipodes because like it or not you become quite divorced from the trivia of those procedures and practices that ensure you never forget the enormous contribution wartime entertainers made to raise the hopes of the nation. And it’s not simply ensuring that the memory is kept alive is it because if you’re anything like me you feel affronted to find that you simply don’t know what is being referred to when some clever dick visiting from London decides they’ll have a Vera at the local bar. On the other hand a Vera & Tonic doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue does it? - neither does a Vera & Lemon. A Vera & Lime is less troublesome if you use care when tossing it into the banter.

Whether or not I had given her much thought during the intervening years there was no doubt at all that Dame Vera had featured very large indeed in my early childhood. For one thing her wartime repertoire was not only regularly played on the wireless but the refrains were echoed in-between the programming schedules by my mother. This wasn’t as unfortunate as it sounds because back then not only did mothers sing on a daily basis as a matter of course but mine had a very good singing voice that she enjoyed showing off to the neighbours. Singing accompanied hanging out the washing, beating the rugs, doing the ironing and chopping vegetables for a healthy Ministry of Food suggested wartime stew. Consequently the popular catalogue of Vera Lynn melodies had by 1944 become part of me and I was lyric perfect in We’ll Meet Again, The White Cliffs of Dover, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow, and many more besides.

To some extent the hits of the 1940s supplanted and displaced my earlier favourites learned from my Grandmother – Two Lovely Black Eyes, Down at the Old Bull & Bush, Boiled Beef & Carrots and The Boy I Love is up in the Gallery. Old Nan herself maintained she never thought that much of Vera Lynn and when all was said and done she wasn’t a patch on Florrie Forde or Marie Lloyd. The Aunts firmly maintained, when she was safely out of earshot that was because Edgar Constant, their late father had harboured a very sweet spot for Vera, never missing her regular 15 minute broadcasts and saying she brought a tear to his eye. His penchant for the young songstress had been something of a bone of contention between them because my grandmother was never good at sharing attention.

My own overall favourite was The White Cliffs of Dover because when it came to the line about Jimmy going to sleep in his own little room again my mother always unseated poor Jimmy, replacing him with Jeannie. By the time of the Normandy Landings I had become convinced that the song had been written especially with me in mind. The only area of confusion lay with the Bluebirds and this was because I had never actually seen one in real life. When asked my mother just said it was a dear little bird, all blue in colour and shaped a bit like a Robin Redbreast and what’s more when you saw one it made you feel warm and happy. I began to form the opinion that the bluebird was generally perceived as a symbol of joy and an expectation of everlasting happiness. To see the flocks of them that were anticipated over Dover’s white cliffs would surely mean that nothing too awful was ever likely to happen again. It was to be years before I realized that although I was generally spot-on in my bluebird analysis I was unlikely to light upon one easily as they lived mostly in North America as did the song’s composer and lyricist – Walter Kent and Nat Burton. Perhaps the pair simply believed that their ubiquitous local bird was global or perhaps, more obscurely, it was an allusion to the American pilots as apparently the allied planes had their undersides painted sky-blue for some reason to do with camouflage.

So although the bluebird remained a bit of a mystery, the other bird that back then pre-occupied Dame Vera – the nightingale, certainly did not. Old Nan said that although she didn’t think she’d ever laid eyes on one, what with them saving their songs for after dark, you certainly heard them often enough and not just in Berkeley Square either which was a place she did not normally frequent. She’d heard them at Cliffe Woods, and again in Cobham Woods and once as large as life one night in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford she’d swear it. And then my mother would tell of the time she and my father heard one on Blackheath while waiting for a bus. Aunt Mag might then ask if she’d heard from her Bern recently and how was he but not much would be said further because the fact that Mag’s Harold had not been Called Up on account of what was said to be vital war work was a sensitive issue

News of my father was of little interest to me back then because I had only the very vaguest memory of him although I had to blow a kiss to his photograph every evening on my way to bed and I knew that he had bought me my teddy bear prior to leaving to join the Eighth Army. Now he was apparently fighting the enemy in some foreign place where the food was said to be shocking and I was doubtful that he would ever bother to return so I gave him little thought. There were other complications to emerge eventually to do with his time serving in places like Italy and North Africa that were to cause my mother considerable distress but I was always somehow too young for them to directly disturb my overall equilibrium. Nevertheless I was always aware that there often existed between my parents something akin to an armed truce.

When letters arrived from what were clearly faraway places my mother’s attention would stray from me and my narrow pre-school world and I knew that the man whose photograph hung next to the wireless had now taken her entire attention. His writing on the flimsy airmail forms was instantly recognizable and she would hold each one in both hands and a little gingerly when it arrived under the front door, staring down at it for a long time before carefully and slowly slicing the sides with the small ivory handled kitchen knife. Then it would be read and read again throughout the day and she would more than likely cry which made me tense and anxious. The airmail letter days were those when she would be likely to sing Yours a great deal and Mrs Bassant next door would ask to hear it again because she sang like an angel. Yours til the stars lose their glory, yours til the birds cease to sing, yours to the end of life’s story…… But then again when you are three or four years old you don’t pay too much attention to the words that accompany popular melodies.

It was to be many years before I understood that my father had been very much a second best choice as a husband and accepted because it was preferable to being left On The Shelf. Every time she sang Vera Lynn’s 1941 hit song in all likelihood she was dedicating each rendition to Poor Fred her fiancé who had died of TB in 1934. She kept the birthday cards he gave her in a shoe box at the bottom of her wardrobe, along with Very Important Papers such as my birth certificate, her marriage certificate and important letters. From time to time she took the cards out, removed them from their tissue paper and held them gently, tenderly as if afraid they might disintegrate. One day, much later after I had learned to read I took them out myself hardly daring to breathe as I read the message and studied his grown-up writing, so different from Bernard Joseph Hendy’s, less positive and defined…. To my sweetheart on her birthday. And when I was old enough to contemplate such matters I wondered what he had been like, this man who should by rights have been my father and for whom she had so often sung sad songs. And what would I be like if the dreaded TB had not claimed him? Would I be a lot better at maths perhaps? Would I still feel like me?

Once I asked my older cousin Margaret who was known to have a great fondness for my father, if she had known Poor Fred. But she said she didn’t remember him and thought she must have been still a baby when he died. All she knew was that the aunts feared my mother would never get over losing him. They had their doubts at one time about Uncle Bern though and our grandmother didn’t like many of his ideas and said they made him sound as Thick As Pig Shit. Though for all that at the great age of fourteen she thought it was better to marry somebody with daft ideas than not marry at all because nobody wanted to be an old maid. And as for Poor Fred, well there wasn’t much that could be done about getting TB.

Of course these were things destined to be discussed only rarely between my mother and her sisters because working class women had an enormous capacity for absorbing the good with the bad and life was simply the way it was whether you liked it or not. Better not to dwell on it unduly, simpler by far to just get on with it and Count Your Blessings, maybe even Wish Upon A Star if you became too disheartened with your lot – and naturally enough those melodies too definitely featured among family favourites.

Just getting on with it was sound advice for all who grew to adulthood in the first half of the twentieth century and followed assiduously by the man who eventually became my father undoubtedly borne out of his formative years growing up in a Chatham orphanage. His own mother being comfortably familiar with the local workhouse may well have simply deposited him there along with his baby sister, Mary when he was four years old. She was apparently about to receive a prison sentence and not for the first time. The older children had been distributed between various relatives but there was a general reluctance to care for Bernard and Mary as they were illegitimate and thus the Hendy family members felt no responsibility towards them. This situation which eventuated in late 1913 was to cause my brother, the family genealogist considerable distress when he came across the information a century later in 2013. Almost reduced to tears he said he now felt that he was not who he had always thought he was because the person he had always imagined was his paternal grandfather was not in fact - and subsequently try as he might, he could find no information whatsoever regarding the man who might well have taken his place.

Our mother had invariably sniffed disapprovingly when the matter of our father’s peremptory depositing into the care of the Medway Cottage Homes was raised. Such a thing would never have happened in the Constant family and as far as she was concerned his older sister, Connie should have taken care of the poor little mite. The fact that Connie was a mere teenager herself cut no ice with Nellie Hendy as she and her sisters had a long history of caring for numerous younger siblings for extended periods. She was strangely impervious to the fact that having a parent serving a prison sentence was possibly a very different situation to that of her own upbringing no matter how chaotic it was at times. She also, again perplexingly, chose to ignore the presence in the mix of the baby, Mary.

Surprisingly there was an upside to orphanage living even back then with local philanthropists and generous do-gooders more than anxious to fund treats such as trips to the theatre, riding lessons, sports equipment and books of an edifying nature. And to get the best out of life it was advisable to keep your head down, your boots shiny and speak as politely as humanly possible to your elders and betters. My father applied these same dictates to the British Army and thus got along very well indeed with a series of rapid promotions.

And while my mother sang her heart out in York Road, Northfleet, he got the most he could from a musical point of view out of Italy learning a number of arias from the works of Verdi. He sang them to her when he came home on leave, explaining the tragic stories behind each one. He said he would take her to a real performance after the war, perhaps at Covent Garden where they might even see the great Beniamino Gigli himself who he explained was a bit like Richard Tauber. When she discussed this idea with her sisters they turned out to be luke warm on the plan and Maud said you never knew where that kind of activity was going to end did you? In the end it didn’t happen.

What did happen was that at the conclusion of his last period of leave and in a gesture of goodwill towards his emotionally confused wife my father surprised her with a rendering of We’ll Meet Again whilst carrying me on his shoulders to the top of the garden. Later that evening he sang it again at The Prince Albert in Shepherd Street preceded by E Lucevan le Stella from Puccini’s opera Tosca at which my mother said you could have knocked her down with a feather. Old Mr and Mrs Bassant sitting in the Snug over their Saturday night halves of mild and bitter said you could have heard a pin drop and it went down very well indeed because there was no doubt at all that all manner of folks were drawn to all kinds of music and that was a fact.

Many long years later during a discussion about 1940s privations with her grandson gathering information for a school project my mother commented that back in those dark wartime days there was no underestimating the mettle of the likes of Vera Lynn. Black outs and ration books were all very well of course but you could never overlook those who could stand up in front of any number of people day in and day out to sing. A gift like that she said, brought a lot of joy into people’s lives and there was no doubt that’s exactly what you needed to keep you going in wartime bluebirds or no bluebirds.