How cheering to see the white cliffs of Dover lit up with the image of Dame Vera Lynn, to mark her 100th birthday. In her honour, I went and bought her “new” CD, Vera Lynn 100, just issued by Decca at £9.99.
She is the first artiste ever to have a CD issued on her 100th birthday, but wisely Dame Vera has not chosen to sing for her centenary – even the greatest voices must deteriorate with age. The “new” CD is really a remastering of Dame Vera in her prime, but supplemented by some fine orchestration, and sometimes accompanied by other singers. Alfie Boe duets with the wartime recording of Dame Vera in We’ll Meet Again. Aled Jones is her singing partner in As Time Goes By and Cynthia Erivo joins her in When You Wish Upon a Star. Alexander Armstrong accompanies her in the celebrated (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover.
The CD is faultlessly produced, a listening pleasure and a comforting evocation of more innocent times. Vera Lynn had a voice of crystalline lucidity and her wartime specials are hugely nostalgic. The brave hopes of We’ll Meet Again are all the more moving because people knew they might never meet again in this world.
At the beginning of World War II, the BBC was reluctant to play the Vera Lynn songs because they were worried it might make soldiers overseas so nostalgic for home that they’d become “too sentimental” to fight.
And Dame Vera herself never forgot those who were doing their duty in uniform. When complimented on her birthday honours, she said: “As we look to the white cliffs , I will be thinking of our brave boys – the cliffs were the last thing they saw before heading off to war, and for those fortunate enough to return, the first thing they saw upon returning home.”
The white cliffs of Dover have been a symbol of freedom and refuge for many generations fleeing bad times. Let’s hope they remain a symbol of a decent England with compassion for persecuted refugees.
Very Lynn 100 is already my favourite CD of the year, and there’s a personal health benefit too: I’ve been advised by pulmonary specialists that the best thing you can do for your bronchials tubes and lungs is to sing out at the top of your voice. So on my next car journey I’ll be accompanying Dame Vera at full throttle with Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye and Auf Wiederseh’n, Sweetheart.
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Dr Wendy Savage, aged 81, is a veteran campaigner for abortion. I’ve crossed swords with her in debate more than once. On a personal level, our encounters have been amicable, since we’ve had friends in common.
Wendy has now suggested that if women find they are pregnant with the “wrong” sex – expecting a girl, say, rather than a boy – these are valid grounds for abortion at 18 to 21 weeks, when gender can be ascertained. She suggests that a mother might have a negative view of a child of the “wrong” sex.
Many a mother has longed for a daughter, but the son she got became the apple of her eye. And vice versa. Babies are not consumer objects to be returned to sender if the product isn’t as ordered.
And how many doctors would do these sex-selected later abortions? I once asked a pro-choice colleague of Wendy’s, Dr Peter Huntingford, if he would carry out an abortion at any stage in a pregnancy if requested. “No,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’ve done that operation, and I never want to do so again.”
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The Russian Revolution exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, showing until Easter Monday, is pictorially stunning, sad, informative and fair. The hope that inspired early socialism is captured in the paintings, as is the disillusion and cruel oppression that followed.
There’s a heartbreaking short movie of the destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 1931 – so much faith and beauty systematically destroyed. And yet we know that many exquisite Orthodox churches have now been restored, since the fall of the Soviet Union. History surely moves in cycles.
