When newly commissioned Royal Engineers Second Lieutenant Lawrence (Tommy) Bond was ordered overseas in February 1943, he left behind his wife Millicent and their two small children. They would not be reunited for more than two and a half years. How, in those pre-internet days, did they not only hold their marriage and their family together but plan their post-war future? The answer is, of course, that, like tens of thousands of other couples in that and every previous war, they wrote letters; literally hundreds of letters. Edited by their second son, born just a year after his father’s return, this is living social history, providing insights into, on the one hand, middle class provincial life in the second half of World War II and, on the other, the dying days of the Raj, as recorded by a most unsoldierly soldier.