A 98-year-old wartime entertainer has recalled how her Army driver, the future James Bond actor Roger Moore, used to hitchhike across Germany to visit her during the Second World War.
Hazel Kaye, who turns 99 in September, met Moore while entertaining troops working for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA).
Ms Kaye said the then 18-year-old was “a bit of my boyfriend” and that she has “good memories” of him.
Speaking of the moment she was introduced to Moore, she said: “The manager came up to me and he said ‘We’ve got a new driver for you, Hazel’ and I said ‘Oh, have you?’
“He said, ‘Yes, he’s stage-struck, he’s in the Army, but he’s stage-struck.’
“He said, ‘He’s going to travel with you’, I said, ‘That’s lovely’. And I said ‘What’s his name?’ and he said ‘Roger Moore.’
“I had him with me as my driver for about six months. He used to come with me and get ideas from me. Anyway, he stayed with me for quite some time.
“He was a bit of my boyfriend, really, but not for too long.
“Then he went with a friend of mine, Dorothy Squires, and he married her.”
“He hitchhiked across Germany to see me several times,” Ms Kaye added.
“I’ve got good memories of him, very much so.”
Born in 1926, Ms Kaye grew up in Watford.
Her parents were both singers, something which inspired her to take up performing too.
She said: “My mother and father were singers, and they used to do the clubs, so I used to go with them.
“I loved it, so I decided it was for me too.”
Ms Kaye joined the ENSA when she was 16, and quickly transferred to the Canadian equivalent, The Maple Leafs.
“They were very nice,” she said.
“They loved me because I was the only English girl in the company. So it was lovely. I enjoyed it.”
Describing life as a wartime entertainer, Ms Kaye said: “I did songs from the shows, like My Fair Lady, all the shows that were popular at the time.
“There was just myself, a comic and three dancers. That was all there was in the show.
“We travelled about in a bus, and we had the piano in the back of the bus.
“And when the fighting finished, we thought the Army should have a rest so we were waiting to get in to give them a show on the bus.
“We used to let the top down and do a show while they were waiting for a cup of tea or something.”
Ms Kaye would follow the Canadian troops around in a bus, something which she said was “quite frightening at times” witnessing moments such as the Battle of Arnhem.
It meant she was following behind Canadian troops based in Germany as they helped the British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Ms Kaye recalled the moment she arrived near the gates of the concentration camp.
“We knew we were getting near Belsen because of the awful smell,” she said.
“We’d just done a show, and the driver came up to us and he said, ‘Oh, we’re getting near a concentration camp called Belsen. Do you want to get out?’
“I didn’t go in, because when the men came out, they didn’t look very nice. They were absolutely yellow.
“So they didn’t let the ladies in, only to the entrance to see the ladies on the floor who wanted clothes, something to wear, because they had just nothing on, really, just rags.
“It wasn’t very nice. It was very sad, very sad. I’ll never forget it, and I’ll never forget the smell. I’ll always remember that. Always remember that.”
Sharing her story publicly for the first time ahead of the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Ms Kaye said she was in Reykjavik, Iceland, on VE Day in 1945.
“I didn’t see London at the end of the war, because I was waiting for the boat to come back to England. So I had to wait. So I didn’t see all the English excitement,” she said.
“I didn’t know it (the war) had finished because we were in Iceland, which was a strange country to us. We really didn’t know how excited everybody was.
“I don’t remember any celebrations. I was just dying to get back and waiting for a boat to take me back.
“I eventually got back to England on a boat and a train, and my family were waiting for me at Watford Junction to meet me.
“They hadn’t seen me for a long, long time because I’d been touring around. So that was the only celebration I really had.”
Ms Kaye continued performing after the war, joining George Formby on a tour in Blackpool.
It was during an audition in Harrow, north-west London, that she met her then-husband, fellow performer Davy Kaye.
The pair had two children together.
Continuing to perform up until very recently, she recalled an evening spent with The Beatles at the Royal Variety Show in 1963.
She said: “They put me on their table and they were lovely to me because they must have thought I was a star. Well, I was only selling programmes.
“Well, they were just becoming stars. And they were very nice to me, they bucked in with me and we had a lovely meal together.
“Had I known how famous they were going to be! I mean they were just coming up.”
