A passionate wartime love story is rescued from oblivion

Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue, or in this case out of a chance purchase on eBay. Thanks to a serendipitous sequence of connections, including a perspicacious dealer and a fast-moving literary agent, the wonderful (and super-latively edited) seat-of-the-pants romance of Eileen Alexander and fellow Cambridge student Gershon Ellenbogen has been saved from oblivion.

Having survived a serious car accident on the eve of the second world war with her only-just-platonic friend Gershon at the wheel, Eileen begins writing him some of wartime’s funniest, most unexpected and possibly unintentionally sexiest letters as she reports on her convalescence. During the unfolding correspondence of some 14,000 letters over six years, liberated in tone from any self-conscious intention of future publication, the brilliant but tentative young English literature graduate seduces and hopes to secure for romantic perpetuity the man she already knows she loves ‘on the other side of idolatry’.

During the first few illusory months of the Phoney War, the friends manage to meet; but as the war gathers momentum Gershon is posted abroad with the RAF and Eileen, having recovered, volunteers for work at the War Office, so the letters enable the relationship to move towards declarations of love and maybe more. Living at home in Primrose Hill, she occupies a state of ‘emotional claustrophobia’ with her intellectual, eccentric, opinionated Italian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish parents, a nanny, two young, annoying brothers and an aunt ‘with a boil in some remote and unmentionable zone’.

In her almost daily communications Eileen describes for Gershon her distinguished boss and her lust-deprived colleagues. She eavesdrops in buses, shops and air-raid shelters and overhears exchanges in ladies’ cloakrooms concerning the discrepancy in coupons required for ‘open or closed French knickers’.