At the age of 99 Marjorie Corbett Lamb can still add numbers in her head in seconds.
“Still, I can look at a line of figures, I’ve got it in my mind and it comes together. It’s just bang on,” Mrs Corbett Lamb said.
She developed her arithmetical speed while serving as a cipher officer for the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or, as they are affectionately known, the Wrens.
Aged just 19 she signed up for the service in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War.
Now, 80 years later, she has written a book about her life during the war, in which she travelled across the world from a remote port town in the Highlands all the way to the Middle East.
Mrs Corbett Lamb, who eventually settled in Scotland and now lives just outside Glasgow, recorded her wartime memories back in the 1980s but her family decided to turn them into a book as a gift.
With help from her son to fill in the missing details from her original notes and her granddaughters to digitise and edit them, The Making of Me was born.
After printing a small batch of copies, which quickly sold out, her family said they will be printing more, perhaps even with a bigger publisher.
“I had no idea anybody else would be reading it but I’m awfully glad they do,” Mrs Corbett Lamb said.
Her father had served in the Army during the First World War as a cavalryman, and a painting of him atop his warhorse had hung proudly above the family mantle piece, so when the Second World War began she immediately knew she wanted to serve in the forces.
She signed up to the Wrens and was stationed across the UK in busy port cities, such as Plymouth and Liverpool.
As a cipher officer, her job was to decode messages coming in from allied ships who were fighting German U-Boats, such as those in the Battle of the Atlantic.
“Not all officers went to Bletchley Park, Bletchley was with machines, letters, the Enigma.
“But the ciphers, they were little groups of four figures so you didn’t see any wording at all and you converted the figures into messages,” Mrs Corbett Lamb explained.
After her coastal city stints she headed back to London for further training.
Aged 21 she became a qualified officer and when asked where she would like to be placed she hoped for another big city office.
But to her surprise, she was ordered to report to Invergordon, a small port town north of Inverness.
Though, she said she “never had a better deal” as this was where she met her sweetheart and future husband, sub lieutenant James “Jimmy” Lamb.
Jimmy met her from the train station, and when walking her back to the naval base he gave her no time to rest after her journey.
“He said, ‘What are you doing when you get up there?’ I said I’ll be unpacking, and he said, ‘Well, would you mind if you didn’t unpack except for your tennis things because we’re missing a fourth’.
“I’d just come off the train from London to Invergordon and this thoughtful gentleman said would you like to play tennis, but I quite fancied him, I expect,” she laughed.
She spent two years in the deep-water port before applying for an overseas posting.
And, despite their blossoming romance, the pair didn’t do “the done thing” and decided not to become engaged before she left.
Mrs Corbett Lamb was posted to Egyptian port city of Alexandria with four other Wrens.
She said: “Well, obviously, we were excited. They were incredibly nice to us – the people of Alexandria welcomed us.”
While stationed in the Middle East she and her “life long friend” and cipher partner, Helen, went on trips across the region visiting countries such as Palestine and Lebanon.
They drank fresh orange juice, which was not available back home, and spent hours exploring the markets – where she bought a sheep-skin fur coat which never quite lost its “musty smell”.
After rising to a senior rank in Alexandria, she and the other Wrens were ordered to head to Greece aboard one of the first allied ships to witness the Germans being pushed out of Athens.
“We actually saw some of them chased off, the Greeks were so thrilled. They were on the map, we could see where they were and they were being pushed away,” she said.
Although the Wrens were mostly accepted by their fellow sailors, Mrs Corbett Lamb said they did encounter some hostility.
During one nightshift aboard the HMS Ajax, she and Helen could hear a disgruntled sailor complaining about them from outside the cipher room. “He said, ‘It says in the King’s regulations that women are not allowed to do this’.
“We winked at each other, my friend opened the door and she said, ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’ He got the shock of his life,” she said.
At the beginning of her service Mrs Corbett Lamb and her fellow new Wrens fashioned their own uniforms, as there were no public funds to provide them.
“We were just girls doing a war job and we were determined to look like sailors,” she said.
By 1945, she returned home from the Middle East with suitcases full of handmade shoes for every member of her family, a musty sheepskin coat, 100 eggs and a full Navy commissioned uniform.
She eventually settled down with Jimmy Lamb, going on to have one son, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “I’m determined and it’s never worn off,” she said.
“I guess that’s why I was such a good Wren.
“You never stop being a Wren – you never stop being in the Navy.”
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