Beyond the Sea by Christian Lamb: book review

Beyond the Sea: A Wren at War (2021) is the memoir of Englishwoman Christian Lamb during the Second World War.

Christian Lamb (1920-) begins writing her memoir – her fifth book – at the age of 101 during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She writes of growing up for two years in Malta in a naval family, and France for a year, before joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens) in 1940 as a coder. Her experience at the ‘wrenery’ in London included the wartime bombing Blitz in 1940-1941 in which 20,000 Londoners died. She quickly moves onto the war in the Atlantic and beyond, and her decoding work at Bletchley Park.

This memoir is the extraordinary life of duty in a secret and vital role in the British wartime radar and operations rooms: the training, the strict security, the incoming traffic, the intercepts, the orders, the codes, the translations of German messages, and Winston Churchill’s secret visits to Bletchley Park to thank the decoding wrens in September 1941. Churchill recognized the extreme importance of the wrens as ‘geese that laid the golden eggs.’ He gave directives to his staff to “make sure that they have all they want. Report to me that this has been done. Extreme priority.”

Christian Lamb writes of off-duty fun, and working with naval officers in Plymouth, and love letters from Lennox. She married John Lamb in 1943 after dating for 10 days.

She writes of John’s war, the importance of weather, and clairvoyant cats. And of her life after the wrens.

This book is a sweeping coverage of her life, so it‘s now time to read her previous four books – and hoping that she is currently writing her sixth book at the age of 102.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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