Before Diana Ladner died in 2012, she gave her God-daughter Caroline Cecil-Bose a folder containing the letters of her lover Bob Keddie, an RAF airman during the Second World War. The correspondence showed how they had met and got to know each other, and when Caroline managed to put them in order, decipher the handwriting and piece together the narrative that unfolded, she realised they told the poignant story of a passionate love affair, which developed in snatched moments between RAF training against the wartime backdrop of rationing, blackouts and bombs.

Diana and Bob married, and soon after he was killed - a scenario repeated all over the country as soldiers, sailors and airmen fought and died, leaving the women they loved to grieve them. Diana ultimately remarried, but she wanted their story to be known, and bequeathed Caroline the task.

Caroline Cecil Bose talks to Bridget Osborne, editor of The Chiswick Calendar, about what Bob's highly literate and thoughtful letters reveal about love and romance circa 1940; what it was like for a civilian adjusting to life in the RAF; operating Catalinas, the flying boats which escorted the Arctic convoys to Murmansk; and what life was like for civilians as the war dragged on day by day.

We have seen so many versions of similar stories, retold on TV and in films, but what makes this one distinctive is the direct and authentic voice of a young airman, edited without the embellishment of Hollywood flourishes, from letters and diaries cherished over all these decades, to be faithfully represented 85 years later.

The title, 'We’ve All Life Before Us', is a phrase Bob used in one of his letters; an assessment in which he proved tragically mistaken.

Will Chappell will be reading passages from the letters.

7.30pm in the Boston Room of George IV pub in Chiswick. Doors open at 7pm.