Serving with a sense of purpose
Colin Bradley reads one Wren's account of a wartime experience.
SPLENDIDLY over-endowed with a well established tophamper and rough bluff cheeks, the senior officer looked every inch like a ship's figurehead as she leaned forward from her desk and greeted Christian Lamb with the words: "How nice to have to welcome a breath of fresh air."
By PHILLIPA SPACKMAN
I Only Joined for the Hat is the jaunty title of a new book by octogenarian writer Christian Lamb, who lives in Tywardreath.
Christian is no stranger to publishing. In 2004, also while in her eighties, she published her first book about famous plant collectors and the species and specimens they introduced to the UK.
Her new book is a memoir of life during the Second World War. It begins in 1939, before compulsory call-up, when the 20-year-old felt she had to 'do her bit' for the country.
More than just a hat...
HE title isn't a joke. Christian Lamb, who put together this very jolly book of Wrens' stories from the WW2 - I Only Joined for the Hat (Bene Factum, £9.99 ISBN 978-1-903071-15-1) really did choose the service for its splendid tricorne hat.
But the rather self-deprecating title sums up these women and the modest way they approached their war work. No matter what skills they acquired (some ended up training submariners on the Perisher course, for instance) or how crucial their jobs to the country's ultimate victory, there is very little sense of self-importance.
by Robin Hanbury-Tenison
The indomitable Christian Lamb has done it again. After reviewing her hugely enter¬taining and successful first book, From The Ends Of The Earth: Passionate Plant Collectors Remembered in a Cornish Garden, in these pages three years ago, I said that I did hope that we would be treated to another feast by this octogenarian author. And she has come up trumps.
Anyone who had a relation in the Wrens during the war will find this intimate insight fascinating. Those who actually were Wrens will be unable to put it down. The author, whose own war was full of excitement and romance, has gathered together stories from lots of her contemporaries: snippets which illustrate the discomfort, fortitude and occasionally thrilling moments faced by those brave and loyal girls so many years ago.
By Jerome de Groot
In 1939 Christian Lamb is torn back to England from a comfortable sojourn in France and decides that she must do her bit. Joining the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) mainly on the basis of the tricorne hat (only worn by officers, as she discovers too late), Lamb is plunged into a world of utility and esprit de corps, of radar and parties in submarines. Part-memoir and part-social history of the part that the Wrens played in the war effort, the book mixes Lamb's own stories with accounts of others' experiences. Lamb is jolly and enthusiastic company; words such as "splendidly" and "heavenly" pepper the text. The stories reveal the extent of women's involvement in the war (particularly on active duty or espionage), and are as a consequence a valuable reminder of the social complexity of the 1940s.
The next book is for all ex Wrens who still have a yearning for the days when Wrens were women in the Womens Royal Naval Service (WRNS) and not serving matelots as they are today.
I Only Joined For The Hat is written by Christian Lamb and has a foreword by Countess Mountbatten of Burma. The book tells of Christian's life from 1939 when she volunteered to 'do her bit' for the war effort and her comfortable life was turned upside down, until 1945.
he book gives a rare insight into what life was truly like for wartime Wrens. Christian describes how class and snobbery had no place in a world of girls from all social backgrounds, suddenly plunged into life together.
THE OLDIE I ONLY JOINED FOR THE HAT
My dazzling godmother Ann was a Wren during the war and I always suspected that more went on than she told me as a child. Here one can read more of the real stories. Lamb describes a world of mayhem and maelstrom, scrubbing floors, squad drill, catering, decoding in Bletchley and, of course, the emotional lives of these intrepid young women who came from all walks of life.