A former BBC researcher from Osterley has published a novel inspired by her late father-in-law's ordeal as a prisoner-of-war in Germany.

Estella McQueen, of Syon Park Gardens, never got the chance to speak to Vincent McQueen while he was alive about his time in the Heydekrug and Fallingbostel POW camps.

Like many veterans, she says, the former flight engineer found it hard to open up about his harrowing experiences during the Second World War.

But a series of postcards written while he was interned, and a short account of bailing out over German territory he penned for Questors Theatre, in Ealing, where he was an amateur actor, helped her piece together a picture of life behind the barbed wire.

"We found these postcards he'd written to his family, which only arrived after he returned home, and they got me thinking," said the 45-year-old mother-of-two.

"You imagine these prisoners spent their whole time trying to escape but the truth is they were so bored and hungry they were mostly just trying to keep themselves entertained. They would sit exams, make and play musical instruments or, like him, put on plays."

Vincent had been due to appear in Romeo and Juliet at the camp, only for a fire to break out on the eve of the performance.

It later turned out Allied agents had deliberately started the blaze as a diversion so they could smuggle in radio parts.

That real-life story is a backdrop to Ms McQueen's fictionalised account of a wartime romance, The Man at the Back, which follows the fortunes of lovers on both sides of the Channel.

The hero of the book is a failed actor who joins Bomber Commander and becomes interned in a Gernab POW camp, where he spies an unlikely opportunity to revive his flagging theatrical aspirations.

As you would expect from a woman who spent more than a decade researching facts for the likes of David Dimbleby, she didn't just rely on Vincent's accounts.

She also visited war museums and an RAF camp in Lincolnshire to help flesh out the story, with a little help from her husband Gavin McQueen, who works at Richmond Library.

Although her teenage sons perhaps unsurprisingly showed less interest in the novel, which she has self-published as an e-book available on Amazon Kindle, her elder son Finn, 17, did design the cover.

One regret for Estella, who has written several romantic novels previously but never before published one, is that she never got to speak to her late father-in-law about the war in person.

"He never really discussed it with his family. One he got home he just wanted to get on with his life, like a lot of men. The only time I ever brought it up he shuddered and I knew then to stop," she said.

* The Man at the Back is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon for £3.10.