Joan Rice was a writer whose abilities became apparent to a significant audience only when she reached her late eighties, when her Second World War diaries were published by HarperCollins in 2006. Sand in My Shoes — also the name of a popular wartime song — is an account of her service in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force based on diaries that she kept at the time. “We weren’t supposed to keep diaries, so it was rather naughty. But everyone did,” she said.

Her record of her life in the WAAF begins in September 1939 when she was aged 20 and continues until December 1942, by which time she had been posted to Cairo and was engaged to be married. Much more than a straightforward account of wartime experiences, the book paints a fascinating picture of optimistic and romantic youth in horrifying situations amid dangerous uncertainty, from the air bases in the Home Counties to the deserts of Palestine and Egypt.

Joan Odette Bawden was born in Kensington, London, in 1919, the elder daughter of George and Florence Bawden. Her father was an entrepreneur in the fashion trade and her mother was a former model and, later, an executive in the fashion business. Joan was educated at Maida Vale High School in London and after leaving she worked as a secretary for Shell. Her sister, Pamela, died aged 13 in 1935.

By her own account Joan could not wait to break away from dull, middle-class life with her parents in Surrey and leapt at the chance of freedom and adventure in the Services. Within two years she was in North Africa with a team tracking enemy troop movements, and in Egypt she met a tall army officer, Major Hugh Rice, who was “refreshingly unsentimental and with unbelievably beautiful manners”. Her diary goes on: “My heart is singing wildly and madly with joy. Here he is come at last and he has never so much as held my hand.”

After a whirlwind romance they were married in Cairo on December 23, 1942. Rice always had an ambition to write, but the war, marriage and three children restricted her opportunities. However, throughout the 1950s and 1960s she wrote dozens of short stories and humorous articles that were published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, including The Times and Punch. She also wrote and broadcast for the BBC on programmes such as Woman’s Hour.

Her diaries remained unpublished until her granddaughter, Eva Rice, the author of The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, read them and showed them to her agent, who recognised their worth. Here were stories of young people living for the moment, only too conscious that there might be no tomorrow and abandoning themselves to fun and laughter. Rice wrote of “going to the pictures, smoking ourselves silly and then coming back, spreading a rug before the fire and eating chips and my sponge cake from home, oranges and the last of Eric’s chocolates”. (Eric was an earlier suitor.) She had her “first adult kiss”, decided that remaining chaste before marriage was “a lot of hooey” and fell into the arms of the man of the moment.

Reflecting on her youthful antics in an interview with The Times after the book’s publication in 2006, Rice said that she could barely recognise herself. “I thought, surely I wasn’t as flighty as that,” she said.

Her husband’s postwar career in aviation and the diplomatic service led to a great deal of travel. After the war, in which he saw action in North Africa, Italy and Normandy after the D-Day landings, he joined De Havilland and became its Far East representative in 1950, travelling extensively for the next 20 years, including a year living in Japan. His final career move was to Amman in Jordan where he was an adviser to the Ministry of Overseas Development for four years. Extracts from his own wartime diaries were included in Sand in My Shoes.

After Hugh’s death in 1988, Rice lived in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, before moving to London. She is survived by her three sons, the eldest of whom is the lyricist and cricket connoisseur Sir Tim Rice.

Joan Rice, writer, was born on August 15, 1919. She died on May 19, 2009, aged 89