For me, there’s history and there’s history. Start telling me about when James 25th. reigned or how Henry 8th. had to sleep with the Pope so that he could marry Anne of Cleethorpes and sell some monasteries, and those dancing cats on OnesTube suddenly seem so, so interesting. But give me some context about how life was for ordinary people and I might just look up from my ‘phone. Make it modern history – industrial revolution onwards – and it begins to touch me and to Hell with Tango Tiddles.

On the face of it, Posting Letters To The Moon promises little by way of historical insight. The show is essentially a reading of letters exchanged between the upper-middle-class actress Celia Johnson (she of the anally-retentive liaison with a barely-moving actor on Carnforth station in “Brief Encounter”) and her army officer husband Peter Fleming, whilst he was serving as Head of Military Deception in South East Asia during WWII.

Yet just a minute or two into the readings and you realise that these are, in fact, important records that document the personal fears and struggles of a certain level of British society trying to do the right thing in trying times.

We learn how Johnson juggled her acting career with supporting the war effort by taking in refugees, driving a tractor and volunteering as an auxiliary policewoman, while her husband did his damnedest to keep her cheerful at a distance of 4,000 miles whilst serving his country willingly and bravely – a sort of bipartisan noblesse oblige with no trace of malice or cant.

Yes, there’s lots of “I’m in a terrible funk, those beastly Germans have bombed London again, such a frightful bore” kind of prose and it would be easy to poke fun. Easy, but very, very wrong. These are heartfelt, personal chronicles of life for the officer classes in a bygone age and, as such, should be viewed as part of our shared history.

Read by Johnson’s daughter, the actress Lucy Fleming (“Smiley’s People”; “Rosemary and Thyme”) and her husband Simon Williams (“Upstairs Downstairs;” “Dinner Ladies”) there’s humour, sadness and despair but, above all, there is love. It’s entertaining, sweetly endearing and a great way to remember the contributions made to our freedom by a rapidly-disappearing generation.

Of course, not every legacy of WWII is quite so charming. Now, if only they could remake Brief Encounter using dancing cats.

Chris Parkinson-Brown