The enduring popularity of the BBC TV series Dad's Army has focused attention on one of the strangest and least military armies ever formed - the British Home Guard. What started as an improvised band of volunteers had grown by 1942 into a conscripted, disciplined and well-equipped force with a strength of nearly two million men. Norman Longmate, himself a Home Guard veteran and an authority on wartime Britain, has collected together a wealth of hilarious anecdotes as well as all the unlikely facts to produce the first popular history of the Home Guard to be written since the war. Longmate, ex-Private 'F' Company, 3rd Sussex Battalion, Home Guard, joined 'Dad's Army' at the same age as the fictional character 'Pike', and to this day he contends that the much-loved sitcom was remarkably accurate in its portrayal of life in the Home Guard.

'An immense and impressive assembly-Must surely remain an invaluable essay in the remembrance of things past.' The Times

'Superbly detailed and illustrated-From stirrup pumps to Spam, Norman Longmate's marvellously comprehensive panorama misses nothing-Excellent.' Sunday Telegraph

'A landmine of information covering every field of civilian life in wartime from the grandeurs of the blitz to the miseries of dried eggs and the six-inch bath.' Cyril Connolly

'Much of it is extremely interesting; some of it is fascinatingly out-of-the-way; and all of it contributes to building up a true picture of everyday life in England from September 1939 to August 1945.' Observer

'For those who lived through those wartime years, How We Lived Then will be not merely a refreshment of memory-but also an enlargement of experience; how other people we did not meet lived then.' Times Literary Supplement