Some Sunny Day: My Autobiography

Some Sunny Day: My Autobiography by Dame Vera Lynn was written by the author when she was 92 years old in 2009. I am a fan of Vera Lynn and own two of her albums. Her voice and songs gave hope and courage to the soldiers and their families during World War II. The text reads like an interview and oral turns of phrase were left in, such as instances when Lynn brings something up and informs the reader that she will elaborate on it later. I cannot really expect that a nonagenarian would sit at a computer or a writing desk and go over the events of her past nine decades and it is more likely that she sat with an interviewer and that this book was ghostwritten. I don’t have a problem with that yet the interviewer might have probed a bit as in far too many instances Lynn cannot remember certain details. She would say that something happened but then immediately follow up with a remark like “I don’t know why” or something similar.

I was eager to learn about her life and her elevation to the role of “The Forces’ Sweetheart”. Before that, though, Lynn took us back to her early childhood and her reminiscences growing up in East Ham, England. She loved to perform as a young child and was onstage at the age of seven. Her memory seemed most acute when recalling her childhood, as she acknowledged that her own mother was at times more of a stage mother, but not as bad as other women she encountered during her earliest years in showbiz. Lynn had a deep and mature voice for her age and was sought after as a performer because of it. From childhood to her adult life Lynn has had difficulty remembering lyrics and wrote of numerous occasions onstage when she nearly (and sometimes did) forget what words to sing next. I have to give Lynn a break in that having so many songs in her repertoire, and introducing new ones all the time into her act, could confuse a young performer. It was interesting to learn how singers acquired new songs all those years ago; they had to go shopping around for them themselves, visiting publishers and hearing the songs played by on-site pianists. It was during visits like this that Lynn was exposed to the shady dealings involving “plug money”, which is being paid underhand by a publisher’s plugger to record certain songs. Lynn never took extra money to record songs she didn’t like or felt weren’t suited to her. Her reputation was on the line and it wasn’t worth any extra money to make recordings that she felt were substandard.

Lynn was a popular singer who toured with a variety of bandleaders. She was popular throughout England and her first international tour took her to the Netherlands, where she had a huge audience. At the start of World War II she worried that her singing days would be over as blackouts and curfews would be in place but such fears were unwarranted. The British people in spite of the war wanted to carry on as much as normal, so Lynn continued to perform. She had a fair number of stories to tell about concert halls being bombed and being holed up in shelters after a show. Once she even insisted on driving herself home during an air raid. Her songs at this time, such as “We’ll Meet Again” (the title of this autobiography comes from a line in that song) and “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover” resonated most with listeners.

In the middle of the war she joined other entertainers and visited the troops throughout Asia. She volunteered to visit regions that she felt were being neglected. While dropping in on a war zone is a risky endeavour for anyone, Lynn felt that the troops in Europe were being cared for by a whole slew of entertainers. Her ordeal to get to Japanese-occupied Burma was an adventure not many would have the fortitude to pursue. While en route, taking short flights from one spot to the next (as there was certainly no nonstop from London to Rangoon then) she gave concerts and met the soldiers in the makeshift hospitals. Ultimately she got to Burma and had to put up with a bucket for a toilet, infestations of insects, and no water to drink or even to bathe in. She sweltered in her outfits as she entertained the men but through it all she stood by the tenet that sustained her all her life: Just get on with it. She would call upon that phrase during various trials in her life.

After the war ended Lynn was fearful that her career was effectively over. With no more need to sing patriotic and sentimental songs, who would hire her?

“As the war moved into its final stages I felt that an era was coming to an end. I couldn’t go on singing the wartime songs, and it would be a long time yet before nostalgia for them would set in and bring them back, if it ever did. In fact I don’t think any of us recognized then that nostalgia was part of entertainment and that everything, but everything, comes round again in time. So I justifiably felt that there might not be much farther for me to go.”

She needn’t have worried. Lynn was never not in demand. She continued to sing around the world, and hosted a variety of TV shows including having her own series until the early seventies. On her first visit to Australia in 1963, eighteen years after the war’s end, Lynn was overwhelmed by the public reaction:

“And the public reception I got was more than I could ever have imagined. At one point on the tour there was a whole motorcade to escort me into town from the airport, and, as we got nearer the centre, throngs of parents and children lining the route. It was unbelievable. You wonder what on earth you can possibly do to live up to it.”

Lynn even in her nineties was elegant in her humility. She was grateful that audiences still flocked to see her. She wrote:

“In many ways I feel honoured and privileged to have become a symbol of that era. It’s very humbling. But there have been times in my life when I have felt uncomfortable about it too: it is something to live up to when people call you a national treasure, and that is certainly not an expression I would use myself. I just see myself as someone who found herself in the right place at the right time–or perhaps we should call it the wrong time–and I just happened to have a voice which suited the era, and somehow or other, has stood the test of time.”

She was always willing to give her time to charity appearances. Lynn was awarded the Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1975. She last sang in public on the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day at the age of 78:

“I have no regrets about that being my last performance. I felt that I had sung for long enough. That was a good time to finish. I wanted to leave with good memories and not wait till I couldn’t sing any more.”

Dame Vera Lynn died three months after turning 103 in 2020.