Straight-Faced Kid

For the past ten years, a slim, long-faced cockney girl with big blue eyes and a big blue voice has been the queen of England's popular singers. By last week, Vera Lynn's voice was being heard across the U.S. -- and if she wasn't yet the queen of U.S. singers, she was at least high on the list of ladies in waiting.

When her recording (London Records) of You Can't Be True, Dear first hit the U.S. last May, thousands of fans bought the platter and listened. Here, for a change, was a girl who really sang, straight out and straight on the beat, instead of cooing mushily and straying away from the band. Last month, her warmly sung Again crept into Variety as a comer on the coin machines. By last week, Vera and Again seemed headed straight for the hit parade.

Born in London's poor East Ham district, the daughter of a plumber, Vera knew five songs, Peggy O'Neil and K-K-K-Katy among them, before she was three. At seven, she was singing, in frills and bows, for Masonic dinners and charity benefits. "A straight-faced kid, couldn't get her to smile," says her dressmaker-mother, who always went along. At school, "they thought I had a terrible voice," says Vera, "but they always put me up in front because I opened my mouth so nice and wide."

At eleven, she joined the "Kracker Kids Kabaret" and won a small reputation as a juvenile torch singer. Then, at 14, her voice broke during an attack of laryngitis; it came out, says Vera, "slightly lower and not so noisy."

Britain at large first got an earful of

Vera's singing when she began broadcasting with Ambrose and His Orchestra in 1937. But she really won her queen's crown during the war with a program for the troops called Sincerely Yours. So many of them heard her telling Private Bill Jones his wife was well, then following up with Bill's favorite song, that standard questions of returning British troops were 1) "What's left of London?" and 2) "Is Vera still alive?"

At 32, Vera is not much interested, she says, in coming to New York ("too much of a headache"). She would rather be with her husband Harry and three-year-old daughter Virginia at home in Regent's Park, where she still does most of the housework--"anything with my hands, and not much with my brain." Vera's explanation of her success: "I suppose I'm the girl in the street, singing to the man in the street."

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