End of April 2021
During the summer of 2013, I was in the process of recording some songs for this website, specifically ones that had been mentioned in THE DAWN. One piece that I attempted to sing well enough for professional purposes was “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover”, as sung in 1942 by Vera Lynn, the Forces’ Sweetheart.
The voice of the late Vera Lynn, with its lilting and steadily flowing vibrato, seems to have been tailor-made for this enormously successful tune of World War II, or perhaps it was vice versa, or, even more likely, both forces of fate were working magically in harmony. Vera Margaret Welch was born in East Ham, Essex, England, in 1917; she died only recently, on 18 June 2020. Her unabashed patriotism is so much a part of this song that I felt as if I were not worthy of singing it that summer.
It is always difficult for me to try to sing a song that so completely and profoundly belongs to another singer. I must come up with my own personal, even intimate, meaning of it. With this melodic composition, my persistent struggles to grant it a beautiful voice indicated to me that I was very much still endeavouring to find my own sensibility of the lyrics. And it wasn’t happening, not one little bit.
The French songs I performed without a hitch. In one take or two, each one was done, over and through. I sailed through la musique française, from the heart, soaring on each note.
With There’ll be bluebirds over . . . I was self-presented with an entirely different experience.
My perhaps larger problem with expressing this song was due to more than just my sense of esteem for Vera Lynn, or to my quest to attain a personal take within the take. My voice consistently went flat at the same places of the composition — which was a logical consequence of my suppressing my non-logical response to only certain precise bits of lyric and sound.
Words cannot describe the abominable feeling of hearing one’s own singing voice going 1/2 note flat. It’s a problem I’d dealt with as an adolescent, and I knew exactly why it used to happen, as well as why I was, back then, unable to quickly fix this dilemma: I’d not adequately processed the powerful sensations and sentiments driving the voice. To my enormous consternation during that summer of 2013, the off-key-ness happened again.
Cringing at one’s flawed singing comes to one and all who must train her own voice through identifying errors and correcting them, and not necessarily through the expedient of technique. I had, however, become convinced that my learning moments of that horrifying horror were over and gone, long gone. That summer of 2013, I learned an inescapable truth about my creative muse, and how to better respect her.
Any time that I try to restrain any pure feeling, rather than allow it to flow freely through the mind and then the voice box, my voice goes flat by half a note. Not an entire note, just a half-tone. With some vocalists, the tendency is to go sharp; for me, it’s to glide a teeny bit flat. That minuscule degree of auditory off-ness can sound even worse than being off an entire note!
I probably even know during the performance that the error is occurring, but the training in me commands the singer in me:
Keep singing. No matter what: the song goes on.
The emotions that I was holding back during those recording sessions of the summer of 2013 had very little to do with the England of World War II, or with the stoic but dignified and determined beauty of the voice of Vera Lynn. My sad and solemn feelings were of a piece with the England of the present day, the England of 2013. The world that post-World War II England had known was tellingly beginning to unravel. Who at the time could read any headline stating that obvious truth? When was the last time any News stated any truth, obvious or otherwise?
The Islamic terrorism of those years was abhorrent and agonizing for the Brits to assimilate into their understanding of their own nation. The national bending and bowing to foreign despots has been quite another matter altogether. The reality of that treasonous reality has been revealed during those awful years since 2013 — to every free and democratic nation on earth, and particularly to America. Consequently, our hearts, the true blue beating hearts of Americans, are presently very much in sympathy with the true bluebirds of Dover, although, in terms of ornithology, there are no true bluebirds in Dover, in England, or even in Europe.
During the past decade, I have written and spoken out about the England of today. I’ve steadfastly maintained that the peoples of the UK are not sheeple, are not namby-pamby wimps who don’t know and don’t care about what is going on in their beloved nation. I’ve consistently taken a position that flies in the face of the naysayers and cynics about the Anglo-Saxons.
My feelings and opinions are not pie-in-the-sky hopes and wishes. They have been informed by some valiant and wonderful women of England, citizens of Manchester, Northamptonshire, Yorkshire, and Leeds. Those patriots have felt a keen sense of shame over the betrayal of their own homeland by the members in Parliament. They feel a rare sense of rage and steely will that approaches the defiance that comes so much more swiftly to Americans. That slowly provoked ire and audacity of the Anglo Saxon just might endure beyond the fiery flames of those of us in the New World who have not had to rebuild from rubble the homeland that Hitler laid to waste.
The one enormous and eternal link between the silent majority in the United States and the muted masses in the Mother Country is this quietly solemn vow:
No one is going to tell us what to do, and when to do it, what to buy and from whom to buy it, what to say and how to say it, what to think or not to think.
The lewdly lying American media, just like the flipping fibbing English media, are not about to inform any freedom-loving individual the facts about any bluebirds flying over the white cliffs of Dover, or over any of the fields of the Midlands, or over any of the bitter weeds in England. The media blobs of the globalist pigs are going broke, while the socialist-with-guns government, Red China, pays through its own fetid nose for those parroted words to hide the truth to the rest of the world it craves to dominate and financially control.
Are free people that easily conned? Are the inheritors of the Magna Carta that stupidly suckered into the destruction of their own island?
I think not.
If, during that summer of 2013, I’d possessed less faith and less confidence in the peoples of that Sceptered Isle, then I would not have felt so despairingly melancholy during those attempts, every afternoon at 2, for almost a week, to sing “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover.” I would have been able to devote my vocal cords to the definitive and final sounds of a wake, a cultural burial for a nation that gave birth to my nation. Instead, I felt a harrowing sense, a premonition, a Scottish second-sight, of what was to come, within the domain of those white cliffs of Dover — after 2013.
During the past five years, the bloody battle has finally been joined, once Brexit took its first aim at inciting the 21st century Restoration. The payola in the Parliament of Great Britain has been conclusively ratted out. Those fat rats shall continue to either flee or scurry within the magnificent ship that is England. Their running will be somewhat encumbered by their adipose arses, but I’m sure a Chinese-made rickshaw will give ‘em a lift to lands’ end. That is, if the shoddily made cart does not fall apart on its way to Heathrow.
The other nations of the United Kingdom, they’ll survive well enough the onslaught of the Chinese dragon upon their cultural shores. If the Irish and the Welsh and the Scots have been able to ride out the assaults of the English upon their nationalities during previous centuries, those countries will outlive the British buggers selling them out. The bluebirds of England have been waiting for decades to fly freely, without fear of being pulverized by those Chi-Comm windmills.
Keep singing, England. No matter what: the song goes on.
Dame Vera Margaret Lynn also sang “There’ll Always Be an England”, another song mentioned in THE DAWN. My character, Arthur Carmichael, cannot comprehend how the patriotic housemaid and cook, Belinda Wells, can not only listen to that weepie, but sing it as well!
This novelist was able to imbue that character with a voice and an ability that the writer lacks. There’s no blooming way that I am approaching the performance of that song without being sufficiently English. I’ve not a drop of pure English blood in me!