Married while planes duelled in the skies over the church, young sweethearts Alan and Peggy Horton were soon separated by war and the years he spent in German prisoner-of-war camps.

Their letters - described by historians as one of the most complete sets of their kind - have now been published and tell a tale of love enduring amid the horror of the conflict, as reporter Rhys Griffiths discovers...

"In spite of time and space you are as near to me now as you were a year ago."

From the confines of a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany, Alan Horton put pen to paper as he wrote home to his beloved wife Peggy.

His heartfelt words are among a trove of wartime correspondence discovered languishing in the loft of the couple's Dorset home by their son, John, six decades on.

"When my mother died nearly 20 years ago we found a great big box of letters in the roof of her house, where both my parents had lived," he recalled.

"We knew that they had written to each other during the war years but had never seen the letters, so we started reading them, my twin sister and myself."

John's discovery offered up an intimate portrait of the early years of a marriage that would last decades; a time spent in separation as conflict raged across Europe.

Like many men and women who have served in wartime, Alan did not really like to speak about the events of the Second World War with his family.

Although the bank manager would occasionally give talks about his time in Germany as a prisoner of war, more often than not they would be light-hearted recollections of the more ridiculous moments experienced while held in captivity inside Hitler's Third Reich.

For John, the discovery of the letters offered a chance to learn more about what his parents had really experienced in those war-ravaged years.

"My sister's husband had recently retired from the Army, and he got somebody from the Imperial War Museum to look at the letters and they said it was one of the most complete sets of letters they had seen written between a husband and wife through those war years," he said.

"My mother was able to write more letters because the prisoners were only given four postcards and two airgrams to write each month.

"It was very limited compared with today's communications. One or two of them got through in about two weeks but many of them took three months.

"There was one point when my mother was ill with appendicitis, and she wrote to tell him about that and how she was recovering.

"He wrote back months later saying he knew she was better before he knew she was ill because all the letters came in the wrong order. So yes, communication wasn't easy.

"There is a card from him, he just had to sign it and date it, saying that he was alive. That was written in June, it didn't arrive until mid-September, so my mother wasn't really sure of my father's whereabouts or what state he was in for about three months.

"It was a pretty difficult time."

Alan grew up in Deal and was educated at Sir Roger Manwood's School in Sandwich, while Peggy - who would go on to serve on the home front in Folkestone and Bobbing - was originally from Chislehurst.

They married in Sittingbourne in the autumn of 1940 - he aged 29 and she 22 - as the Battle of Britain was being fought in the skies over Kent. Weeks later, Alan set sail for war.

Serving with the Royal Artillery, he eventually ended up stationed on the Greek island of Crete, a strategically-important base for the British armed forces in the Mediterranean sea.

"They were transported for seven days and seven nights across Europe..."

The island fell to a German airborne invasion in the early summer of 1941 and Alan, along with many of the survivors of the battle, was taken via the Greek mainland to captivity in Germany, where he would spend the next four years.

"The Germans and the Allies lost vast numbers of people there," John said.

"I don't think the Germans ever again practised an airborne assault like that in the war because they did lose so many people.

"The Germans took the Allied prisoners across to Greece and they were put on trains, 37 to a cattle truck, and they were transported for seven days and seven nights across Europe.

"Father said that they all had dysentery - some of them, including himself, had jaundice - and the train would stop for just five minutes every day for them to relieve themselves. So the cattle trucks must have been pretty foul by the time they arrived."

Eventually Alan was taken to a POW camp in the Bavarian town of Eichstätt, where he would spend the remainder of the war until the eventual surrender of Germany in 1945.

The couple spent their first wedding anniversary separated. While he was imprisoned, she was serving the war effort on the home front here in Kent.

"It's a bit thick beginning a job on our wedding anniversary," Peggy wrote from a country house in Otham, near Maidstone, where she was billeted.

"If I get a chance after supper, I want to run outside for a walk round on my own.

"It's damp you know, just like it was last year when we went out for our first walk as man and wife. How sweet a memory, darling."

Alan, writing on the same day, told his wife: "In spite of time and space you are as near to me now as you were a year ago.

"Now I can only write 'I love you' knowing that only you can read into it all that I mean..."

"How I have lived to bless that day, darling, and thank God we decided as we did.

"Next year, with luck, we shall celebrate the day as it should be celebrated. Now I can only write 'I love you' knowing that only you can read into it all that I mean."

The couple would spend three further wedding anniversaries apart, but their correspondence would endure despite the passing of the years.

Conditions in the camp would have been basic, and occasionally captives would be mistreated as reprisal for actions against German prisoners. But despite the animosity between enemies there were still light-hearted moments where common humanity shone through.

On occasion the prisoners would be taken to see a film, and were even once marched out of the camp to visit the circus.

Peggy's words also offered Alan light amid the darkness, as she told her husband to think of home.

In one letter she wrote: "I'm afraid I can't write any more for a while, so I'll bid you good night my sweet - forget the war and dream about me and us.

"Faith, hope and courage are in our hearts - we are young and strong and full of our love."

Alan felt more comfortable recalling the brighter glimpses of his wartime experience in the years that followed, and he returned to civilian life working in towns across the country for Lloyds Bank.

"I think my father, like a great many people in the armed forces, they blank it out of their minds and they say very little about it," said John.

"Father used to be asked to give talks about being a prisoner of war and I actually heard one once. It was full of absolutely ridiculous stories but it told you nothing at all about being a prisoner of war.

"The letters themselves give you glimpses into it, but because he doesn't want to upset my mother he doesn't say that much."

John, a former aid worker and Christian minister, has long hoped to turn his parents letters into a book, called Behind The Wire: A Prisoner of War in Nazi Germany. It was a combination of retirement and lockdown which finally gave him the opportunity to collate all the material.

"The letters between my parents, family and fellow officers, the Red Cross and others depict a side of war not commonly revealed but they are, none the less, very interesting and informative," John added.

"They are also made more pertinent as war once again rages in Europe and the issue of prisoners of war and their treatment is again on the agenda of European countries."