It Was Good While It Lasted

Presenting It Was Good While It Lasted (1943) by Henry Longhurst, published by Amalgamated Press—a wartime wink of a book in which a gentleman columnist surveys the smoking ruins of normality and still manages to find a decent punchline (and, if memory serves, the 14th fairway). ISBN: none—because in 1943 you were lucky to get paper, let alone barcodes. Offered by the splendidly plain-spoken Crappy Old Books, this copy is Condition: Good—meaning the covers are steady, the pages civilised, and the only thing blitzed is the author’s schedule.

What’s inside? A brisk parade of essays and reminiscences in Longhurst’s best club-lounge voice: dry, companionable, faintly incredulous that the world insists on being this dramatic before luncheon. He inventories life’s pre-war comforts and mid-war absurdities with equal affection—trains that ran on time (sometimes), golf rounds that did not (usually), dinners that were rationed, and friendships that weren’t. Between air-raid sirens and anecdote, he perfects the national talent for understatement as morale. The tone is part memoir, part social sketch, part pep-talk whispered across the tablecloth.

Expect:

• A connoisseur’s tour of lost routines—clubs, pubs, and seaside weekends remembered with just enough sentiment to be nutritious.

• Wartime domestic comedy—queues, coupons, and the quiet heroism of making tea taste like optimism.

• Athletic interludes—because Longhurst can’t help viewing life as a series of lies to the green, even when the bunker is history itself.

• Elegant resignation, briskly phrased—not despair, just that peculiarly British shrug that says, “Right, then—onward.”

Longhurst’s great trick is to find the good manners in catastrophe: he writes as if he’s hosting us through the blackout, keeping everyone talking until the lights come back. The jokes are dry, the insights unfussy, and the overall effect is a portable tonic—the literary equivalent of a well-timed gin, or at least a very convincing lemonade.

About this particular volume: Good means the binding is sound, the pages neat, and the patina honest—read, but not ransacked. The boards still salute; the text blocks remain tidy; no margin mutinies, no tea-cup catastrophes. It looks like it has sat politely on a shelf, occasionally pressed into service when a room needed five minutes of sanity and a well-turned sentence.

Buy it if you’ve ever:

• Suspected that nostalgia is a practical tool, not a personality.

• Needed proof that wit can be civil defence.

• Enjoyed writers who pack a bag with one sweater, three jokes, and a working sense of proportion.

• Wanted a reminder that “good while it lasted” is not an epitaph but a toast—and perhaps a challenge.

Why Henry Longhurst? Because he could spot the line between melancholy and merriment and plant his flag on both sides—reporting cheerfully from a world between times. Why Amalgamated Press? Because even in 1943 they contrived to print books that feel like company. And why Crappy Old Books? Because behind the puckish sign is a reliable stash of previously loved titles—like this Good copy—ready to restore your faith in lightly ironised resilience.

In short: It Was Good While It Lasted is a clipped, humane, quietly sparkling tour of what we missed, what we managed, and how to laugh politely while carrying on. Delivered in Good condition from Crappy Old Books, where the only thing truly “crappy” is how quickly you’ll finish it and start quoting lines at breakfast. 

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