High f lier! 103-year-old former Wren relives daring Second World War f light
SHE is one of the last surviving female naval officers who fought for Britain during the Second World War.
Now aged 103, former Wren Christian Lamb took to the skies in a Miles Magister plane — 84 years after she was offered a lift home in one by a Polish officer.
Mrs Lamb, who joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service aged 19, looked thrilled as she soared into the air in the two-seater aerobatic aircraft.
She was watched by her family and friends as she re-lived her daring flight at the Shuttleworth Trust Air Show in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire.
In 1939, Mrs Lamb had been on a course in Bath, Somerset, when she missed the train back to her base in Plymouth and was saved by a ‘delightful Polish officer’ she had met at a party the night before.
Mrs Lamb recalled how the trip was made extra-thrilling by the pilot ‘divebombing cows’. She wrote in her wartime memoir Beyond the Sea: ‘ He astonished me by saying, “Shall I take you back in the old crate?”
‘I was nearly speechless when I realised he meant his aeroplane. Flying in an open plane, low over the River Tamar and seeing the whole estuary and coast as on a map, was an experience I’d like to relive even today.’ Now Mrs Lamb, who lives in London, had the chance to be a passenger again on a Miles Magister on Sunday.
‘That was incredible, to be so free up in the air and the wind in my face,’ she said. ‘It was thrilling and I feel so lucky.’
Mrs Lamb, the daughter of an admiral, she became an authority on plants after the war and wrote four books.