IMAGINE the scene more than 70 years ago.

A Herefordshire schoolboy is working as a farm lad alongside a German Prisoner of War.

What do you want to be when you grow up, asks the soldier.

“A POW like you,” comes the reply.

It's one of the lighter moments in a new book chronicling county life during the second world war.

And it's told - in words and pictures - by the people who were there.

Herefordshire’s Home Front in World War Two is based on people’s pictures and memories, collected by the group Herefordshire Lore group.

Author Bill Laws, a Hereford-based journalist and historian, interviewed many of the book’s contributors.

"This is the story of one of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century, told by the people who were there,” says Bill.

Following the fateful announcement of war 80 years ago in September 1939 schoolboy Henry Moss was dispatched to hide Aconbury’s church silver from the Third Reich; a hastily formed Home Guard prepared to make a final stand against the expected invasion of Herefordshire; and clandestine local Covert Auxiliary Units were instructed, as one county landowner put it, “to lay low then kill off important Germans.”

Teenagers started working on farms after school while their mums shouldered the men’s jobs, made munitions, or joined the Land Army, the Timber Corps or the Auxiliary Training Service.

The older generation dreaded another war: “It was only 21 years since the last one which killed two of my uncles and my mother’s fiancé,” recalled RAF recruit Jim Thomas, who, personally, found the prospect of war exciting.

Children, however, were frightened and confused: “A bomb fell near Canon Pyon: I thought Hitler had followed me,” reported little London evacuee Bruce Leonard. “We were put on the trains without our mothers,” wrote another evacuee, Mavis Matthews: “I cried bitter tears.”

The county received a flood of new faces - Canadians, Indians, black and white Americans, Italian and German prisoners of war, displaced Polish families.

There was the Tupsley Home Guardsman who hit his own house with a mortar during training; and friends Barbara and Gwen learning to jitterbug in Hoarwithy Road with wounded GIs awaiting transport. “My experience taught me to smile even in the face of tragic times,” recalled Barbara.

Colonel Andy Taylor is curator of the Herefordshire Light Infantry Museum, which is hosting the book launch: “The war touched everyone, but there was a determination and camaraderie born from shared hardships and a common purposed. Bill Laws shows these highs and lows of life in Herefordshire: it is a valuable record based on individual experience.”

The launch is on Thursday, May 16, 6.30-7.30pm at the Hereford Light Infantry Museum, Suvla Barracks, Harold Street.

The book is published by Logaston Press, price £10. Funds from sales will further the work of Herefordshire Lore.