Love letters, life in India during the days of the British Empire and the Second World War were part of the life of a man who was a lawyer in Tolworth for 28 years, write Ellie Cambridge and Craig Richard.

Bill Towill’s extraordinary life has been documented and published by his wife, who now lives in Tadworth. Mr Towill, who died aged 93 in 2013, worked at WG Towill and Co, behind Tolworth Tower, from 1950. His wife for 65 years, Pamela Towill, 89, of Motts Hill Lane, had her sixth book, Love Letters from A Chindit and a Lifetime of Memories, published last month.

The book, published under Mrs Towill’s maiden name and nom de plume, Pamela Justine Dowley-Wise, is a poignant memoir of her life with her late husband Bill, but also touches on the history of the last years of the British Empire.

Mr Towill was a pacifist when he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1939. In 1940 he was in Belgium and the German Army was approaching – he volunteered to stay behind to look after the wounded and be taken prisoner, but drew a blank lot after too many volunteered and made his way to Dunkirk.

After this He transferred to the Gurkha regiment and fought with the Chindits during the Burma campaign of the Second World War. The Chindits were a British India special force that served in Burma and India in 1943 and 1944, where he met his future wife. Mrs Towill was born in 1926 to British parents in Calcutta, and enjoyed an opulent start to life, before being sent to boarding school in Britain aged just eight.

She returned to India in 1940 and would work as a decoder during the war, but it was her whirlwind romance with Bill, and their subsequent years of marriage, that would define her life. Mr Towill was made a major aged 23 and later wrote a book called A Chindit's Chronicle. The couple returned to England and eventually settled in Tadworth in 1971, where, with their youngest daughter Anthea Chambers, they started the Wildwoods Riding Centre in 1976. Anthea and her sister Diana motivated their mother to write the memoir after seeing the love letters.