You might think that nothing more could usefully be added to the debate over P. G. Wodehouse’s wartime broadcasts from Germany. But you would be mildly wrong. A new title, P. G. Wodehouse: The Unknown Years, covers the two summers he spent with an aristocratic family in Degenershausen in 1941 and 1942, from the point of view of the ten-year-old daughter of the house. The story covers Wodehouse’s early release from internment in a lunatic asylum in Upper Silesia to the refuge from Berlin that he found at the family’s estate near Magdeburg on the slopes of the Harz mountains.

The author, Baroness Reinhild von Bodenhausen, has plundered her diaries and those of her mother, Baroness Anga von Bodenhausen, to create an affectionate memoir of her childhood domestic life with Wodehouse, “Uncle Plummie”.

She details the torment that Wodehouse suffers when he realises, while staying at their house, that his innocuous radio broadcasts to the US have been commandeered by Goebbels for propaganda purposes. He replays the gramophone recordings of the broadcasts he made “over and over again” on the veranda: “Uncle Plummie walked up and down, taking long strides, his hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes he stopped to lift the record needle to place it back and to listen again to certain phrases. He was clearly in anguish, as we children could see.”

Her mother appears to have been so incensed at the misuse of Wodehouse’s broadcasts, which the German Ministry of Propaganda transmitted to the UK without the approval of the German Foreign Office, that she went to Berlin to try to put a stop to any further recordings. Reinhild recalls Wodehouse “pacing up and down outside the house when it was time for her to return. Again it was dark when she came home and he met her in the entrance hall . . . ‘It’s all over, Plummie. I told the people in the Ministry in Berlin that you would not come any more, and that the radio speeches are stopping immediately. They had to agree’. He listened to her like a drowning man who would be rescued.”

Wodehouse’s stay at Degenershausen came about through Baron von Barnekow, a friend from his days in Hollywood in the 1930s, who came up with the idea of offering “Plum” and his wife Ethel a writer’s retreat after his first broadcast to the US was recorded in Berlin. The couple were subsequently allowed to stay on licence with Raven von Barnekow’s cousin and then fiancée, the widowed Baroness Anga von Bodenhausen, at her manorial estate in Degenershausen.

In his foreword, Wodehouse’s step-grandson, Sir Edward Cazalet, writes of the “enormous debt” that is owed “this remarkable and courageous woman (Anga) in enabling him to be isolated from the traumas of life which were then so all-encompassing”.

Certainly there is a seam of anti-Nazi protest in this book, which comes through strongly in Anga’s behaviour. Her late husband, Baron von Bodenhausen, was involved in anti-Nazi activities and was found shot dead in Kenya, where he owned two farms. It was never established whether he was murdered or if he committed suicide. Her fiancée, Raven von Barnekow, also opposed the Nazi regime and later shot himself in despair at its actions.

This book may not offer any earth-shattering revelations about Wodehouse but it stands as a touching footnote to the episode that defined the rest of his life. It is also a revealing account of rural German resistance to Nazism, and how feudal links proved stronger than nationalist ties. Anga’s gardener, for example, knew that she was a fervent anti-Nazi “but it never crossed his mind to denounce her. His loyalty to her was absolute and so was everyone else’s in the house”.

P. G. Wodehouse: The Unknown Years by Reinhild von Bodenhausen is published by Stamford Lake in Sri Lanka. www.lakehousebookshop.com $15 plus postage