Little Rays of Moonshine

by A.P. Herbert

A collection of comical stories and essays, including "Wrong Numbers," "The Genius of Mr. Bradshaw," "Five Inches," "Reading without Tears," "On with the Dance," "The Autobiography," "The White Spat," "The Art of Drawing," "About Bathrooms," "A Criminal Type," "The Art of Poetry," "The Book of Jonah," "The Mystery of the Apple-Pie Beds," "The Grasshopper," "Little Bits of London," and "The Little Guiggols."

168 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1921

About the author

Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, CH (usually writing as A.P. Herbert or A.P.H.) was an English humorist, novelist, playwright and law reform activist. He was an independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Oxford University for 15 years, five of which he combined with service in the Royal Navy.

Reviews

[Darius Ferent · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, being as old as it is, it uses some occasional wording that is more offensive today. Besides that, these essays seem to be very intertwined with the societal happenings of the time it was written. Hence, some essays have no meaning for me due to not knowing much about that era of time. However, there are a good number of short stories that you don't need to know the history of them to be able to give a chuckle or smile.

Personally, my favorites included the one about the wrong number game and the apple pie beds. Humorous, indeed.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of good-naturedly facetious pieces, most of which originally appeared in Punch. I can tell that there are a lot of topical references that I'm not getting (not knowing the society and politics of Britain around 1920 in the same detail as someone who lived there), but I still found them amusing. I especially enjoyed the piece in which Herbert proposed songs along the lines of the Labour movement's The Red Flag for other political parties; the Tories' one is to the same tune and called The White Spat.

Occasional use of language that, a century later, is considered offensive.

[Teaspoon Stories · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been struck by how many British writers from the first half of the 20th century styled themselves using the same distinctive format: their first two initials followed by their surname. For example, DH Lawrence, AJ Cronin, TS Eliot, AA Milne - the list’s endless. And now we also have AP Herbert.

I don’t recall many Victorian writers publishing under two initials plus surname. CJ Dickens, WM Thackeray, WW Collins, OF Wilde anyone? Part of their identity as full-blooded Victorian writers seems diminished without their first names in full. 

I wonder if the surname-with-two-initials formula began as a schoolboy thing which then became the military standard – clipped, official and impersonal, rather like stiff upper-lip speech. 

The standardisation certainly helps conformity. Sometimes I get writers mixed up because their names look similar on book spines. It took me a long time to find a book by AP Herbert because I seemed to have difficulty recognising his name as I browsed along bookshelves. For some reason I kept confusing AP Herbert with CP Snow (as it turns out, a very different kind of author indeed). 

I bought AP Herbert’s “Light Articles Only” at a local antiques centre for two pounds. I would have paid far more than that for the illustrations alone – delightful, whimsical drawings by one George Morrow. The book, published in 1921, contains 24 light-hearted articles (hence the title) that had mostly appeared previously in “Punch”, a once vastly-popular magazine that I remember last seeing in dentists’ waiting rooms in the 1980s. 

I wasn’t expecting to find these short pieces by AP Herbert so very funny. I actually giggled out loud in places. While many of his contemporary writers channeled the horror of their wartime experiences into weighty novels or experimental verse, AP Herbert  – a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front – chose to fight off his demons with flippant humour and satire. 

In the article called “Five Inches” the “great joke” at a reunion of his ten old platoon pals is that they have “only ten legs between them”. Amidst the banter and laughter it emerges that all of them, AP Herbert included, have lost limbs. The “great joke” of the  title is pretty sardonic – that the amount of war pension you’re entitled to is calculated by “the length of your stump”, so five inches either way makes all the difference. 

The humour turns to the surreal, I found, in the piece called “The Art of Drawing”. AP Herbert gives his practical top tips on how everyone can draw a pretty decent sketch – leading to slightly bizarre results (“He was meant to be another Bolshevik but he has turned out to be a lady, so I’ve given him a bun“).

Clearly unimpressed by the writers of the so-called Celtic Twilight being feted in the arty London salons of the time, AP Herbert does a great spoof on “The  Book of Jonah” from the Old Testament, reinterpreting it “as almost any modern Irishman would have written it” – sending up Mrs Jonah in Monty Python-esque fashion (“knitting, washing socks, or perhaps just thinking”). 

But my favourite piece in the book is called “Reading Without Tears”. It’s an account of the exasperations and comedy of trying to teach a child the alphabet. It’s full of warm, self-deprecating humour. I’m fond of it for another reason – relating to the fact that I spent six years of my life in the County Town of Berkshire and so read the title differently.