A MAN of letters and a resourceful soldier, Myles Hildyard gave affection generously, variously and widely. He loved his house, Flintham Hall, near Nottingham, his garden, his paintings and handsome young men, to whom he showed a touching devotion throughout his life. He had little interest in business but had clear views about what was worth his time.

He looked on the Second World War as the most interesting years of his life. Rather uncertainly, during a party on the eve of war, he joined the Nottinghamshire (Sherwood Rangers) Yeomanry. The regiment was horsed and went to Palestine with the 1st Cavalry Division in 1940 to replace the 7th Infantry Division, sent to the Western Desert to face the Italians in Libya. On mechanisation, his regiment was initially converted to artillery.

With no action in prospect, he took military duties lightly, making every opportunity to visit the archaeological sites in Palestine and Syria and the Pyramids at Giza, while reading T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Stendhal (in French), all the time sending long, lucidly descriptive letters of all he saw and much of what he thought to his parents and his brother, Toby, in the RAF.

The spell the Middle East held for him was not broken when his battery was ordered to Crete for coastal-defence duties in February 1941. “The island is quite lovely, am beginning to learn Greek,” he wrote home, while remarking snobbishly about having to share a mess with anti-aircraft artillery officers. The German airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941, after the collapse of the Allied defence of Greece, brought an abrupt halt to this idyll and put Hildyard to severe test.

The fight for Crete was marked by acts of great gallantry and fortitude, but lack of air support against the Luftwaffe and the uncharacteristic hesitation of the overall commander, General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC, led to disaster. Hildyard and his friend, Michael Parish, were among thousands of Commonwealth troops obliged to surrender when the Royal Navy’s capacity for evacuation was exhausted. But he and Parish slipped away from their loosely guarded prison camp as soon as they had overcome their own exhaustion from being marched there and had gathered a few basic provisions.

The frustrating saga of the ensuing three months until the pair reached Turkey in early September is candidly told, his fears, hunger and pain in particular, in Hildyard’s diary kept in lieu of letters home. The trauma of walking through the White Mountains with lacerated feet and doubts of escape was moderated by the brave hospitality of the Cretan peasants and his wonder at the beauty of the shepherd boys who brought them milk and grapes. Getting off German-controlled Crete was dangerous and difficult but they hired a sailing vessel with two English bank cheques and got away in mid-August, first heading north to land some Greeks escaping from the island.

By coincidence, when their boat touched on the beach of Polyvos, Hildyard found the emaciated corpse of an acquaintance he identified by the signet ring. After burying the corpse, the party — by then reduced to five and the Cretan captain — began an island-hopping voyage to Turkey. Fortunately, the captain knew someone on every inhabited island, allowing replenishment of food stocks even in tiny ports where people were starving. They were welcomed in Turkey and sent on to Egypt without delay.

Hildyard was awarded the Military Cross for his escape. During his recuperation leave before reporting back to the Sherwood Rangers in the Western Desert, he drove up the coast to Beirut, visited Baalbec — he wrote home ecstatically, describing how he stood alone marvelling among the gigantic columns as the rest of the party waited a little way off — then back to Cairo via Damascus.

After a brief spell with the Sherwood Rangers, by then an armoured regiment equipped with Sherman tanks, he joined HQ 10th Armoured Division as an intelligence officer. News from Flintham alternately exhilarated and exasperated him. Furious at reports of the possible requisition of the pony paddock and potato field, he wrote: “I never pretended I was fighting for England and democracy, for both are absolute sods.” After the battles of Alam Halfa and El Alamein in the autumn of 1942, he reported: “Monty came and gave everyone medals; he couldn’t be a sweeter little thing, rather like Aunt Muriel.”

Recalled to his regiment as adjutant, he was deeply affected by the death of his hero and sponsor Colonel “Flash” Kellett, towards the end of the North African campaign, during which Hildyard was mentioned in dispatches. He took part in the early stages of the Italian campaign on the intelligence staff of 7th Armoured Division, and returned with it to England in January 1944 to prepare for the Normandy invasion. His letters home during the fighting in northwest Europe speculated increasingly on the postwar world and concerns over his homosexuality. A selection of his letters is to be published by Bloomsbury in October under the title It Is Bliss Here. He was mentioned in dispatches again in 1945 and appointed MBE for his services on the staff of 7th Armoured Division.

Myles Thoroton Hildyard was the eldest son of Judge Gerard Thoroton Hildyard, QC. He was educated at Eton, excelling in athletics, and read law at Magdalene College, Cambridge — of which later he claimed to remember only the celebrated negligence case of the snail in the ginger-beer bottle; he never practised.

In his middle years, the Grade I-listed Flintham Hall, its garden and grounds became the love of his life. The garden he made and the woods he planted are the principal legacy of his vision and appreciation of natural beauty.

He worked for the protection of rural England, and the National Trust and, for 40 years, was president of the Thoroton Society devoted to the history of Nottinghamshire. At Flintham he received an endless stream of visitors, including those devoted to the writing of letters, the arts and conversation.

He did not marry, and his two brothers predeceased him.

Myles Hildyard, MBE, MC, TD, was born on December 31, 1914. He died on August 13, 2005, aged 90.