A chance discovery of wartime letters has inspired a romantic novelist from the Okehampton area to pen her third novel.

Lin Treadgold, who lives near Sampford Courtenay, read her father’s letters of his service in the Army after coming across them in the attic during lockdown.

She was fascinated to discover so much she did not know about his wartime service with the 4th Battalion, Green Howards, an infantry regiment.

For one thing, she found out that he had been at Dunkirk and was rescued from the beaches.

He then went to Italy, where he was captured, and spent time in a prisoner of war camp, the Fonte d’Amore prison in Sulmona in the Abruzzo mountains.

He escaped and set off through the mountains south, to where the Allies were advancing. He and his friend Bruno are helped by people living in the mountains, who shelter them.

Lin felt that she wanted to tell her dad’s story, to keep the story of what he and his comrades went through alive for young generations. It is also a tribute to the Green Howards regiment.

As a romantic novelist, with two published novels under her belt, Lin tells her father’s wartime journey, through the fictional tale of a young couple Ellie and Harold, divided by the war.

Ellie and Harold become involved as teenager in the quiet North Yorkshire town of Saltburn-by-the-Sea, which is where Lin grew up.

Their meeting in the years before the war sees the only obstacle to their courtship being Ellie’s mother Agnes. When war breaks out, though, they are parted by a larger foe, the Nazis and war in Europe.

Harold joins the Army while Ellie stays in Yorkshire, joining the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the Army.

In writing what Lin calls Harold’s journey, she draws on the tale of her father’s escape from a prisoner of war camp in Italy, in the part of the country occupied by the Germans with assistance of the Italian fascists as a bitter civil war raged.

His journey over the Abruzzo mountains south to reach the territory being held by the Allies, is taken the novel by the young soldier Harold, determined to get back to Ellie and home.

Lin said: “It started a few years ago when I found my father’s wartime letters. I had them for quite a long time and then I thought it is about time I read them. I found out that he had been at Dunkirk, which I hadn’t known about, and that he had been rescued from the beaches, but also that he was a prisoner of war in Italy.

“I started reading them and I was fascinated that he had been at Dunkirk and also that he had done his training at Okehampton Army Camp which is only four miles away from my home now, so there were a lot of coincidences.

“I thought perhaps I should write a book, but not a memoir, a novel. I wrote a fictional novel based on my dad’s journey. I created Ellie and Harold and I took them on this journey.”

Lin would love to hear from anyone who had family members who had been in the Fonte D’Amore prisoner of war camp in Sulmona during the war, like her dad.

She sees the novel as a tribute to what her dad’s generation went through. “There is a lot of action in the book and there is a lot of sorrow as well as happiness.

“It is based on a lot of what my father wrote about [from the prisoner of war camp] about the things he was struggling with. For instance having to wash in the same water as ten other people. Until you experience that, you wouldn’t know what it was like.”

“Harold and Ellie are fictional characters, but the book is my dad’s journey. They had been to hell and back, they’d been to Dunkirk, and the next thing they were back out in it again. I wanted to write this to make sure their story isn’t forgotten.”

The Trail to Freedom by Lin Treadgold is published by Silverwood and is available as a paperback or on Kindle. Find out more and contact Lin at https://lintreadgold.co.uk