On 10th May Anthony Eden announced the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, and before he had finished the broadcast I had telephoned Richmond police station to join. I attended the first few parades, with an enormous personal superiority, for no one else had any weapons, and I had six pistols and a rifle. But the records of the L.D.V. show that on 13th August 1940, long before it became the Home Guard, I was given a discharge, ostensibly on the grounds that my services ‘were no Longer Required’, this being a curious euphemism for the fact that they were by then more urgently required
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