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There was certainly no shortage in the immediate neighbourhood of children about my age—this was a time, remember, when large families were still not uncommon, and there were several near by, though for some reason there were far more boys than girls. One of the girls who lived opposite was a little horror called Mary, who tipped up my doll’s pram and smashed the face of the doll. In those days dolls’ heads were all made of china, and an accident to your favourite doll often proved fatal. I obviously took great care of the one that replaced it, for I’ve still got it and I’d hate anything to happen to it, because once when I young I actually used it on stage as a prop. It was dressed exactly as I was; I sang ‘Glad Rag Doll’, and won a prize.
Little girls seem to divide into two kinds—those who love dolls and those who don’t. My own daughter, Virginia, never had any time for them—only teddy bears—but I was very much a doll person, so obviously a good deal of my solitary playing revolved round them. Luckily there was a garden at the house in Ladysmith Avenue, and as well as being a place to play, it was a plaything in itself. Strictly speaking, it was my grandmother’s garden, but I had a tiny piece of it for myself, where I built a rockery. One of my ambitions was to grow up and have an enormous rockery; like the horse I was going to have one day. I still haven’t got it, but I look back on that little heap of stones with great affection. I made a tiny lawn in front of it from tufts of grass weeded out of other parts of the garden, and which I used to cut with a pair of scissors. I would keep myself busy for hours in that garden.
My very close friend, Maudie, used to come and play sometimes, and we found a special use for the arched trellis that ran across the garden. With Maudie as my audience, I used to pretend I was entering a stage—through the arch, a quick bow or curtsey graciously to right and left, and into my performance. Sometimes we’d do a double act, playing to just a strip of lawn and my grandmother’s gladioli. Or so we thought. I didn’t discover till years later that the neighbours had been watching these antics all the time. I must have presented a strange picture—this tiny girl, gravely acknowledging imaginary applause, unconsciously preparing for the future.
At the bottom of the garden there was a shed, which seems to have been my dad’s province, and I remember he would sit in it singing that music hall favourite ‘I Wouldn’t Leave My Little Wooden Hut For You’. In everything he did out there I would be his mate, talking to him in a special kind of dialogue we had, where he called me Jim and I called him Bill. One of the jobs he would do out there was to mend all the family’s shoes on one of those three-footed iron shoe lasts you used to be able to get. He’d cut the leather and hammer away. I don’t know if he held the nails in his mouth the way professional cobblers do, but I can remember him working the raw, pale buff edges of the cut leather with black heel-ball (the stiff wax used by cobblers) to get a good professional-looking finish. He had a passion for bright-green paint, so in time the dustbin, the coalbox, the doors and the window frames all ended up a vivid green. And I loved to paint pictures—and still do—so I used to pinch this paint for doing grass.
There was always a lot of grass in my paintings, but not just because I had plenty of green paint handy, nor because I was a town-bred child longing for the country. I did long for the country, but I was lucky enough to know what it was really like. This is another reason why I believe that my childhood was a little different from that of the average East Londoner in the early 1920s. For that I have to thank Auntie Maggie and the fact that she lived at a place called Weybourne. The nearest towns are Farnham and Aldershot, one on either side of the Surrey-Hampshire boundary, and they have grown now until they almost meet each other. But when I was a little girl, Weybourne, more or less halfway between the two, was not much more than a straggle of houses by a crossroads, with plenty of open country round about.
And there, every year, my mother, my brother Roger and I would spend the whole of August, with my father joining us for part of the time, staying with Auntie Maggie, Uncle George and Cousin Georgie. Those visits to Weybourne were the high point in my young life. If the steaming kettles and the illness and the tiny incidents in the flat in Thackeray Road make up my very first impressions, that’s all they are—a succession of fleeting images. But my memories of those holidays in Weybourne are among the most precious things I possess, and they have coloured the whole of my life. There is no doubt that they shaped my future: at every moment of stress or discomfort in my life, I have been able to draw on them. Years later in 1944, when I found myself in the unbelievable, sticky heat of Burma, I suddenly remembered the cool taste of water taken from a well near Weybourne when I was a girl. When I returned from Burma one of the first things I longed for was the English countryside, and that is exactly where I returned. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the quiet rural life.
Children love ritual, and I loved every detail of the ritual of those holidays. I have a special memory which captures everything wonderful about that time: my mother, father and my Auntie Maggie are lying in a field next to a hayrick, laughing their heads off. It was a time for all of us to relax and have fun. It began with the excitement on the station platform at Waterloo, and I can even recall the sense of disappointment I felt the first year that the trains were electric and not steam. The very smell and sounds of the steam train were part of knowing that the holiday had begun. The next part of the ritual was the arrival at Aldershot station and seeing my cousin’s face poking through the slatted gate at the side of the platform. Then we’d set off to walk to Weybourne; sometimes it was very early in the morning, and if my uncle had been on night duty—he was some sort of lorry driver—he’d meet us at a little coffee shop near the station and help us carry our cases. It seemed a very long walk, though it couldn’t have been more than about a mile, and at the end of it there was another ritual: my auntie, who was living then in part of a very old house (which has now gone), would always be watching for us over the hedge. Unpacking was another ceremony: the new plimsolls, the gingham dress made for the occasion by my mother—these were the very symbols of freedom, to be taken from the case with full understanding of their significance. It was as if the holiday couldn’t start until all these little rites had been observed.
There were certain things that had to be done each year as well; otherwise the holiday wasn’t complete. There was an old barn at the back of the house, with a rope we used to swing on; we would go there at the first opportunity and enjoy the creepy darkness and mustiness. (It reminded us of Maria Marten and the Red Barn—one of the plays I knew from the club at home about the famous murder in the 1800s of a country girl by her squire lover in a barn). When we had grown up a little and Auntie Maggie had moved into a new council house across the road, there were four walks that must be taken each holiday: up the hill to the common, along the road to Farnham one way, to Aldershot in the other direction, and down the hill for the really long trudge to Crooksbury Hill and Frensham Ponds. Frensham was all of six or seven miles away, but we thought nothing of it. At least, Mum and I and Roger didn’t, but my cousin hated walking, and grumbled all the way. Frensham meant a swim and a bus most of the way back. Crooksbury Hill you can actually see from Weybourne, and when we got back from there we used to say to each other, ‘Look, that’s where we’ve been—all that way.’ There were shorter walks too: of an evening across the fields, for lemonade outside the Six Bells Inn; or along the rough farm track and across a humpback bridge over the railway to where a lovely old couple called Bill and Annie Walker had a cottage with a well in the garden where we’d stop for a drink of their water.
On the whole, Weybourne didn’t mean incidents so much as atmosphere; it was walks and flowers and green grass and fresh air and picnics. It was people: a real aunt and uncle, plus a crowd of friendly adults we always knew—in the fashion of the day—as aunties and uncles. It was like having a huge family in the country, and a whole circuit of houses to visit. There were the usual cuts and bruises, the quarrels and the getting into trouble, which are part of childhood, but I remember Weybourne mostly as a place of calm pleasures and small but intense excitements.
The one major excitement befell my brother Roger, not me, and happened a little later. He would have been about twelve, which would have made me nine. There was a pub called The Elm Tree, and near by a real elm, an enormous one on a crossroads. Roger was standing under this tree one day when he saw, careering towards him down the lane, a big metal army wagon with two huge bolting horses at the head of it. They appeared to be coming straight at him, so naturally he dodged round the tree, only to find when he emerged from the other side of the trunk that the runaway horses and the wagon still seemed to be heading for him. Wherever he put himself, the horses were apparently bent on getting Roger. The driver had completely lost control—in fact by this time he might well have jumped or been thrown off—so obviously the thing was lurching from side to side so much that it gave the impression of being all over the place. Roger can never remember how long he kept up this scuttling backwards and forwards around the tree, though at the time it felt like ages. But within what must in reality have been only a few seconds, the horses had rushed past him and they ended up by going through the window of the frail little shop, Mason’s, where we bought our sweets. Roger was probably a bit shaken for a while, but nothing upsets you for long at twelve and afterwards it made him feel rather proud and manly. (Not long after this Roger and I became much closer—which we hadn’t really been as small children—when we started ballroom dancing together in our teens. We used to practise in the clubs.)
Otherwise Roger’s memories of Weybourne are not as vivid as mine. The annual visits went on until I was almost out of my teens, but I was the one who kept going back long after that—until Auntie Maggie moved right away, in fact. Throughout my childhood I always told myself that nobody could have been more miserable than I was at the end of every August. My gloom would get deeper and deeper as we came closer to Waterloo, and would reach its lowest—almost despair—on the final bus ride back to East Ham. ‘Why have we got to come back to all the streets and houses? Why can’t we always live in the country?’ I’d ask my mother. And my mother, who always said she wouldn’t want to ‘shut herself away’, as she called it, in some village, probably dismissed it as end-of-holiday grizzling. But I was in deadly earnest, which is why I live in the country now, in Sussex. The dream that I had as a little girl, to never have to leave the country, eventually came true for me. I realize, of course, that I’m able to live in the country because of the career I chose—or perhaps I should say because of the career that chose me—and I was deep into that even before Roger thought the horses were after him.
CHAPTER TWO One-&-six for an Encore
People find it hard to believe that I started singing regularly in the clubs when I was seven, but there’s nothing strange about it at all, really. With the club life practically in my blood, with a tradition of party singing deeply ingrained in the whole family, and with my own voice already—so I’ve been told—distinctive in some uncanny way, finding myself singing songs to a real audience, with just a piano for accompaniment, felt almost as natural and inevitable as growing up. I look very serious and grown-up in the photographs from the time, dressed in silk and satin dresses with ruffles which my mother designed and made herself. In one—I must be about seven—I am dressed as a fairy wearing a dress with a sequinned bodice and have a huge net skirt!
The costumes, along with everything else in my early career, were largely down to my mother’s influence: she wanted me to perform. I have to say now that I didn’t particularly enjoy singing. The idea came from the family—it certainly didn’t come from me. For me it was a case of ‘Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington’. But I had no choice. It was my mother who saw that I started doing formal concerts. And, to my amazement, I got paid for it, although obviously I didn’t see the money myself.
It didn’t happen entirely automatically, of course; somebody had to provide the first push. That came from a man named Pat Barry, who was a male ‘soubrette’ on the working men’s club circuit. ‘Soubrette’ is an odd kind of word, but it used to be bandied about in the business. Originally it meant a girl who sang and danced. By the time the concert parties and then the revues had come along, the word had taken on the meaning of a young female member of the cast who could sing and dance and act, and was therefore useful in several ways. Pat Barry’s talents were singing and tap dancing and clog dancing. A sort of jack-of-all-trades for the stage, then.
Pat knew the family, he’d heard me sing at parties and he thought that I was good enough to appear as an act; and he not only persuaded my mother and father that I ought to go on, but—being an all-rounder himself and keen on the idea of having at least a second accomplishment to call on—he told me I ought to learn to step dance as well. So once a week round at his house he’d teach me to dance on a proper little slatted step-dancing mat on the kitchen floor—a roll-up mat of wooden slats on straps that your shoes would ‘clack’ against. I was tall and leggy as a child and, although that first big illness seemed to have left me unable to run far without getting out of breath, I was acrobatic and nimble enough, and did pretty well. But for me, singing—with all the appropriate actions—was to be the main thing, and the club would bill me as a ‘descriptive child vocalist’.
The clubs themselves were part of a network of entertainment of which, unless you grew up in it, you could be completely unaware. There have been working men’s clubs in practically every industrial and thickly populated working-class area since the end of the nineteenth century, and the East London clubs I started in were just a few out of literally hundreds of such places. The old Mildmay Club at Newington Green was one of the best known.
I appeared many times at the Mildmay, with its large hall where the rows of chairs had ledges on the backs of them to hold glasses of beer, and where the chairman and committee of the club sat in front of the stage at a long table. That was the standard practice and, very much as in an old-fashioned music hall, the chairman could quickly gauge the mood of an audience. This was very important, because it was the committee who decided, according to the strength of the applause, whether you were worth an encore or not. That made all the difference to the money you earned: an extra encore earned you a shilling and sixpence. An encore also meant you were well in, and if it happened in a club you were new to, you could be sure that the entertainments secretary would have taken note of how you went down and would book you again.
In the working men’s clubs the entertainments secretaries were roughly the equivalent of agents, and like agents they were always visiting other clubs, on the look-out for new acts. They were unpaid, but every so often the club would run a benefit night for its entertainments secretary. These were known as ‘nanty’ jobs (the word comes from niente, Italian for ‘nothing’), because the performers offered their services free. Artists would try hard to appear on these shows, for apart from anything else, they were the accepted way of getting into a new club. If you could do a nanty job for an entertainments secretary who didn’t know your act, then it worked like an audition. If he liked you, you’d go down in his book of contacts and you could expect him to remember you later for a paid performance.
Some artists remained more or less permanent fixtures on the club circuit; others used the clubs as a way into ‘the business’ and a step towards bigger things. The comedy team of Bennett and Williams began in the clubs as a double act known, if I remember rightly, as Prop and Cop; the comedian and actor Max Wall started in the clubs too. The Beverley Sisters’ parents were a club act called The Corams. These were names and faces from the bills I used to appear on as a child.
For my first appearance, when Pat Barry got an entertainments secretary to put me on, I learned three songs and had a new dress made: white lace with little mauve bows—I can see it now. You didn’t have ‘dresses’ in those days; you had one dress and that was it. (When that one got shabby, if you were lucky you got another one.) I had a pair of silver pumps, a tiny briefcase from Woolworth’s for sixpence and my rolled-up music, and off I went. Later I would suffer from nerves, like everybody else, but at seven I was simply too young to feel anxious. The thing that excited me was the medal I’d been promised for going on. Our next-door neighbour in Ladysmith Avenue was Charlie Paynter, the trainer/manager of West Ham United football team, and he had said he’d give me a West Ham United medallion if I sang in public. He kept his promise, and I was thrilled, because he was a very important man in our locality. My parents would have been with me that first time too, but I don’t remember them telling me that I’d done well or anything like that. I just remember not wanting to do it but knowing that I had to. The applause made me feel good, though, and I got an encore—and got paid for that.
I don’t remember what I sang on that first occasion, but I know that from my earliest days I seemed to be attracted naturally to the straightforward sentimental ballad. In spite of—or maybe, come to think of it, because of—the happy times I had with my dad, I practically cornered the market in ‘daddy’ numbers: ‘Dream Daddy’; ‘I’ve Got a Real Daddy Now’; and a genuine 22-carat tear-jerker called ‘What is a Mammy, Daddy?’ I sang that at a competition once:
What is a mammy, daddy?
Everyone’s got one but me,
Is she the lady what lives next door
Who cooks our dinner and sweeps up the floor?
I’ve got no mammy to put me to bed
And tell me to go out to play.
Daddy I’ll be such a very good girl,
If you’ll bring me a mammy some day.
Everybody was in tears, and there was tremendous applause, but I didn’t win. When the results were announced, the audience kept shouting out, ‘What about the little girl in the red dress?’ and, in the end, I got a consolation prize. This particular competition took place not far from home in Poplar, East London, and it was one of a whole series run at various cinemas in London by Nat Travers, a local cockney comedian. Afterwards he came round to me and my mum and said, ‘Sorry about that, ducks, but come to Tottenham Court Road next week. I’ve got another competition on there and you’ll be all right.’ But my mother was furious and wouldn’t let me go in for any more of his contests.
Remembering a song, once I’ve learned it, has never been a problem for me, and I could still probably sing you an hour and a half’s worth straight off without repeating myself. I’ve always been able to decide quickly how to sing a song—how to phrase it, what to emphasize. But I had enormous difficulty in learning the words in the first place. I would sit on the floor at home for hours on end, going over them again and again, while my mother doggedly picked out the tune on the piano. Often there’d be tears, and even when I’d finally managed to get a song into my head and came to sing it in public for the first time I’d be petrified in case I forgot the words. Ever so many times I wished I could give the whole thing up, just for this one reason.
Finding material was comparatively easy. The writing and publishing and selling of popular songs was a business then just as it is now, but it was a different kind of business. Live public performances were what counted, not the plugging of records, and anybody who was known to appear regularly in front of an audience could count on being welcome at the various music publishers’ offices, which were then nearly all in Denmark Street, just off Charing Cross Road, the British ‘Tin Pan Alley’. This was where all the music publishers were based, and if they knew you could put a song over, they were often willing to give you copies. So, from quite an early age, I was a familiar little figure up there—something which was to stand me in good stead later when I started broadcasting.
That ‘descriptive child vocalist’ billing was no mere gimmick. Even when I was very small I had an unusual voice, loud, penetrating, and rather low in pitch for my age; most songs had to be transposed from their original key into something more suitable. When I became better known, the publishers would usually do that themselves, but at first I always had to go to someone outside. We found a Mr Winterbottom, who would do you a ‘right-hand part’ for sixpence a copy; if you wanted a left-hand as well it came to one-and-six, but we just used to have the top line done because most of the club pianists were so experienced at this kind of work—which was more than a cut above the ‘you-whistle-it-and-I’ll-follow-you’ school—that was all they needed.
You’d merely hand your music over and they would improvise a bass part on the spot. One or two were actually publishers’ pianists by day—the men whose job was to demonstrate songs to prospective professional customers. (All that has gone now, but forty and fifty years ago that was the accepted way of selling a performer a new number, and those pianists could transpose anything into any key, at sight.) Every now and again you would come across a club pianist who wasn’t much good, but they must have been in a minority, because I can’t recall any great musical disasters.
One minor catastrophe was not the pianist’s fault but mine. Without being a typical ‘stage mother’, my mum always took a very close interest in every aspect of my singing, and my programme for any given appearance was usually the result of a kind of joint decision. We didn’t disagree often, but there was one night when I very much wanted to do one song, and she thought I ought to do another. I must have been a stubborn child, for in the end I won, and it was decided I would sing the one I wanted. I gave the pianist the music for it, but the moment he’d rattled through an introduction (and I must say club pianists’ introductions could sound pretty much alike), I immediately began singing the other one. For a few disorganized bars the two numbers tangled with each other; we both stopped and started, like two people trying to pass one another but always ending up in each other’s way. We did the only thing we could do, and began again from the top. Audiences don’t dislike this sort of thing as much as some artists believe; as long as it doesn’t happen too often, there’s something strangely reassuring about seeing somebody else make a mistake.
That much I accept, and could accept even then. What I couldn’t take were the efforts of some well-meaning entertainments secretaries who would see my deadpan little face and urge me to ‘Smile, dear—smile’. I’d come back at them with, ‘I’m not going to smile; I’m singing a sad song’—and I usually was—‘so why should I have to grin all over my face?’
I was aware that I did not have much choice but to go on stage. Money was short in those days, so any money I could earn helped to swell the household coffers. I hardly ever wanted to be at these concerts, though, and later I was always nervous before I went on. Nobody asked me if I wanted to sing or not. You didn’t argue in those days; you did as you were told. That makes me laugh now, when I think of how youngsters are today. It never entered my mind to be angry with my mother, but there were times when I wasn’t happy. I don’t ever remember saying the words, ‘I don’t want to do it and I’m not going to,’ which is what kids of today might do. This went on until I was about fifteen or sixteen—it wasn’t until I started singing with bands that I started to enjoy it more.