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'We will meet again': when a monarch brings comfort with a song

<span>Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

It is 1939 and I am in bed listening to the king. He seems to be reading a poem. “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year / Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” I can feel my nails dig into the palm of my hand as his voice vanishes, perhaps for ever, into some dark pit from which it emerges suddenly with a gasp. Very like my father’s car which stops and starts for no obvious reason.

“Give me a light.” The words are simplicity itself. A child can understand them and remember them. As I do.

The royal family are not partial to posh poetry. The Queen Mother was once reported describing a poetry recital at Buckingham Palace during the war. “A rather lugubrious man in a suit read a poem. I think it was called The Desert. At first the girls got the giggles and then I did and then even the king. We didn’t understand a word. Such a gloomy man, he looked as if he worked in a bank.”

It was Old Possum in person who, when not dashing off The Waste Land, did indeed earn a crust in Lloyds. In view of the hostile audience reaction, someone should have warned TS Eliot to switch to his Book of Practical Cats. When you really are in the waste land, slap in the middle of a world war, you need a teaspoonful of sugar to take the taste away.

“We will meet again” the Queen’s parting words were – give or take an apostrophe – a pop song. And as Noël Coward said, how potent cheap music is. It goes nonstop to the heart. “We’ll meet again” comes trailing golden associations of an impossible war we managed to win and Vera Lynn, who is apparently indestructible, and blue skies and blue birds. Well, perhaps not blue birds. Simple, memorable, cheerful and chin-up.

It is also, conveniently, very popular at funerals.