‘We’ve All Life Before Us’ – Book launch, Wednesday 30 April

Image: ‘We’ve All Life Before Us’; Editor Caroline Cecil Bose

Editor Caroline Cecil Bose talks to The Chiswick Calendar’s editor Bridget Osborne

It is often said that for a soldier, war is experienced as short bursts of terrifying violence interspersed with long periods of boredom, when the troops entertain themselves in whatever way they can until the next action.

For RAF airman Bob Keddie, a Catalina pilot during the Second World War, stationed in Cheshire for his initial training, then Hastings in Sussex, Torquay in Devon, and finally Monkton in Ayrshire, this meant playing tennis, going to the pub, sailing, swimming and sunbathing on the beach.

He was amazed when they were billeted with a retired Colonel (India) in Scotland, to find there was an unlimited supply of fresh strawberries and cream, ‘fish, pork, cake, toast, home-made bread and scones for high tea.’ And clean sheets to sleep in.

We hear about Bob’s war from his diaries and letters, which have been edited by Caroline Cecil Bose for a new book, We’ve All Life Before Us, published this month.

Image: Bob Keddie and Diana Ladner

Bob had met Diana Ladner, who later became Caroline’s godmother, in March 1940, two months before he was called up. He was 23, she was 19; they were both from Essex; and they fell in love on first meeting, at a performance of The Beggar’s Opera in London, which they went to with friends.

Through his letters and diary entries, and a few of hers, their love affair unfolds. In an age where there were no mobile phones and even landlines were hard to come by if you were in training in the forces, and expensive to use, their communication was mostly by letter, sometimes on scraps of bags because paper was short.

Within a month of knowing her, he was writing love letters about moonlight and nightingales singing, but also of wanting children, and quite frankly about being suspicious of wartime marriages.

He loved flying. He had been very sporty at school, playing rugby and tennis, swimming, boxing and learning to sail. He had passed his flying certificate in 1937 and took part in the 1939 Cresta Run, the famous toboggan race in St Moritz, in which he was a star performer, winning all his races. If it had not been for the war he might have taken part in the 1940 Olympics.

Image: Bob (R) and his brother Dick (L) taking part in the Cresta Run in 1939; Bob with his toboggan at the start of the race

This is the account he gives of flying in Scotland during the summer of 1940:

’20th July. This is now 4.30. Finished flying for today and just waiting for the word to go home. Four and a quarter hours in the air today. It was absolutely marvellous. I can’t describe the view.

‘About 5,000 feet up, people like pin points, the Isle of Arran fifteen miles away and below us – mountain 2,000 feet high – and beyond Arran the coastline of rocky headlands, long peninsulas of land jutting into the sea for about seventy-five miles…

‘… For twenty miles or so inland the fields, towns, woods, rivers and purple moors; but then a cloud bank merging horizon with sky – earth, sky and sea all one in the distance. Little cotton-wool clouds adding the finishing touch.’

Image: Diana at her parents’ home at Little Baddow, Essex

Diana had trained to be an actress at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Her acting career lasted precisely four weeks in a repertory company in Plymouth, before it was curtailed by the war. We hear of her boredom over the summer before she could take up a post as a teacher with a class of young children.

What comes across most of all in the letters is their longing to meet up with each other, and the frustration of not being able to, of having leave cancelled at the last minute, and arranging snatched meetings that are all too brief. Their love is almost painful.

Image: Bob, July 1940; Diana with Bob’s brother Dick

He passes his exams with top marks and is deemed to be an ‘exceptional’ airman. Eventually they get married, and he starts flying in earnest. After being stationed for a short while in South Africa, he is based at Sullom Voe in the Shetlands, where there are no married quarters, flying Catalina flying boats doing reconnaissance over the Norwegian coast, protecting the North Atlantic convoys to Murmansk.

After a brief few months of living together they are again restricted to just writing to each other, as telephone calls are not permitted. Because he cannot describe operational matters, he just says they’ve been ‘very busy’ or ‘there’s a flap on.’

Images: Diana arriving for her wedding at St Mary’s Church, Little Baddow, with her father; Diana and Bob leaving the reception at the village hall

She is four months pregnant when the letter comes from his commanding officer in May 1942 to say his plane has disappeared without trace off the coast of Norway and the crew is missing, presumed dead.

A love affair which lasted just two years, and which Diana, although she later married someone else, very much wanted to be remembered. Before she died, she asked her god-daughter Caroline to make a book out of the letters, diaries and photographs she had faithfully kept for decades.

Image: Bob’s Squadron 210 crew at Sullom Voe, April 1942 – Bob in the centre of the front row; Photograph Bill Balderson

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

Caroline will be talking to the editor of The Chiswick Calendar Bridget Osborne on Wednesday 30 April in the Boston Room of George IV at 7.30pm and will be signing books afterwards.

Will Chappell will be reading passages from the letters.

Tickets available here: Eventbrite