IN 1915 Pleasance Walker, of 30 Norham Gardens in Oxford, left her family to join the Voluntary Aid Detachment, as so many women did during the First World War.

She began her war service in a hospital in France as a VAD, but three months later she joined the French Red Cross, with whom she stayed until she was decommissioned early in 1919.

A series of letters she wrote to her mother and father provide a rare first-person story of a young woman witnessing the horrors of the frontline.

Now the letters have been published for the first time in a new book edited by former teacher Caroline Roaf.

She made copies of the letters in the 1970s after a trunk containing them was found in an Oxford attic sale in the 1960s.

Inspired by the centenary of the Great War, Ms Roaf embarked on a dogged quest to sort and edit Pleasance Walker’s remarkable correspondence and get her story told.

Ms Roaf said: “Paper was in very short supply, which is why Pleasance covered all available space and wrote without paragraphs in her letters home.

“Pleasance almost invariably dated her letters. Her address was normally an Army hospital or postal sector number, giving no indication, for security reasons, of geographical location.”

In one letter Ms Walker wrote: “I am afraid you will find I have grown much older when I come home.

“I have aged much more than a year warrants and my hair is well streaked with grey now. Perhaps it is not surprising; one can’t live face to face with death and see death nearly every day of one’s life and bear no marks.”

The correspondence makes it clear that her wartime experiences are a world away from her genteel life in leafy north Oxford to which she often refers.

Ms Roaf grew up in Ireland. Bringing up her family she taught in Oxfordshire comprehensive schools. Following retirement she rediscovered the box of Ms Walker’s letters.

Trenches and Destruction: Letters from the Frontline 1915-1919 is published by Oxfordfolio, £10.