Farewell to the garden of a lifetime

Christian Lamb helped plan D-Day. Now, as she turns 100, she leaves a beloved garden

- Christian Lamb

There is something about big, wide, busy rivers that makes one long to live beside them. During the Second World War, I had the luck to work down near East Tilbury, where Henry VIII built blockhouses on both banks.

At Coalhouse Fort, one of these blockhouses, I worked as a 20-year-old Leading Wren – a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. I’d given up a place at Oxford in 1939 to become a Wren.

After a year of this, I again found myself beside the Thames, doing the officers’ training course, living under the white Palladian colonnades and domes of Greenwich Palace, arriving by ferry at the pier frequented by kings, queens, Drake, Raleigh and Pepys.

I met my husband, Lt John Lamb DSC, in Belfast when his ship, HMS Oribi, was sent there for repairs. I was a Plotting Officer there for the Battle of the Atlantic. We married in 1943. That was the year HMS Oribi famously rammed a U-boat.

Then, in 1944, I worked in Whitehall on the maps of the D-Day landings. We dealt with individual pieces of the enormous jigsaw. None of us knew or discussed what the others were doing.

My brief was to delineate everything that could be seen on every compass bearing from each landing position visible from the bridge of an approaching landing craft. Big-scale Ordnance Survey maps were spread out on the wall, showing railways, roads, churches, castles and every possible feature visible to an incoming invader and from every angle.

When D-Day happened, on 6th June 1944, I heard the announcement on the radio at 6 am. I was thrilled to know that, at last, we’d managed to carry out the plans, envisaged for so long by so many brilliant brains. We were there! It was the beginning of our campaign to help get back France for the French.