Esdaile Carter’s book Pilot and Pacifist: A World War Two History (£6.85) was born when Freda, her aunt by marriage, left a trunk full of letters, including several hundred to a bomber pilot called Jack. The author, who lives in Cuddesdon, has written a biography based on the letters, and her research into their wartime lives took her from London, York and Norwich, Rome and Palestine, to Berlin and to the cemetery in the Reichswald Forest on the border between Germany and Holland. Freda Smith later lived in Astons Upthorpe and Tirrold.