Reading through your letter makes me feel very humble and yet strangely proud. At each crisis in our lives, you've always revealed such a depth of character and understanding, and an inspired sanity, that I feel both very humble and immature beside you, and yet terribly proud that I have such a wonderful person as my wife.

That sounds rather like sycophantic adoration, but isn't meant to be at all. But the more I know of you and the more I meet other people, particularly other women, so much the more am I lost in admiration for you and so much the more am I bewildered at my luck in having such an exemplary wife. This feeling is cumulative and each reminder of the depth of extent of my love and admiration for you only serves to kindle again that searing, devastating nostalgia for you and to resurrect that awful feeling of terror that something may happen to me before I've had a chance to see you again and tell you just how much I love you.

Oh darling, darling, if you only knew the agonies I go through sometimes when I think of the thousands of miles that separate us. For my own peace of mind, I repress and repress the thought of that distance, but sometimes it is quite impossible. I daydream much too much of the past, reminiscing mentally of all our wonderful happinesses together, hoping wildly and blindly that tomorrow will see us together again, by some miraculous stroke of the good fortune that used to be ours in days of old.

Tomorrow is a lovely day – when tomorrow comes. I'm afraid that when I do come back I shall be nothing but a humble and devoted lover, fearing to raise my voice lest it displease my lovely lady, or to be angry lest it distress her. Can you imagine me that way? Asked that question a few years ago, I should have replied ‘Bloody nonsense’, but knowing now the acute feeling of remorse that occurs when I recall quarrels and bickerings, as we only knew how, and how much I wish I hadn't said a lot of things I did say – I can only reply in the affirmative.

Do you see what you've done to me, even at these thousands of miles distance. Oh Mary, my beloved darling Mary, I love you to eternity and am only existing for the day we come together again – physically, mentally, spiritually and in any other way in which we can absorb each other into the one being. Existing till the moment I can hold you close in my arms, fuse your body with mine and say: ‘Time stand still’, ‘Time don't move’, and stay locked with you till the end of eternity.

Your DAVID

First look at poignant love letters sent between a WW2 bride and her secret soldier husband