A Thoroughly Modern Doe

The Voluble Topsy by A.P. Herbert

Nov 26, 2023

Lady Topsy Trout, later Haddock, is a dedicated and determined correspondent, firing lengthy missives from London to her long-suffering provincial friend Trixie. Her spelling is erroneous, her fantastic coinage manages to be wide-of-the-mark yet simultaneously spot-on, and her utter disregard for the rules of punctuation speeds us breathlessly, but joyously — like happy terriers at the open window of a moving car — towards total immersion in both her world and her worldview.

An independent girl not constructed to pattern
A.P. Herbert, The Voluble Topsy

The epistolary stories collected as The Voluble Topsy started life in A.P. Herbert’s humorous columns for Punch magazine, and begin with The Trials of Topsy from 1928. On first acquaintance, Topsy appears to typify the Drones and Bright Young Things of the Roaring Twenties: a single girl-about-town, titled and sufficiently monied to live life to its fullest extent. She pursues a somewhat frenzied round of nightclubs, parties, rural weddings (‘the most agonising of all proceedings’) and evenings at the greyhound track, interspersed with fitness fads and charitable impulses, and fuelled by quantities of gin — ‘juniper juice’ is always her tipple of choice. Yet this impression highlights precisely the risks of judging a book by its cover (paradoxically so, given the by now almost legendary care which Kate Macdonald at Handheld Press devotes to selecting their books’ cover images). Behind her flippant façade, Topsy harbours sharp and strong opinions on a range of topics, opinions that engage our admiration but are often the source of misadventures and embarrassment, too. Fortunately for her, there is no catastrophe which cannot be overcome, or dragon bested, by powdering one’s nose, and this comes in particularly useful when Topsy is elected by the constituents of prosaic and puritanical Burbleton, unexpectedly and almost by accident, to be their Member of Parliament. Herbert’s observations on the workings of Westminster’s less-than-esteemed institution and the machinations of the government, pre-dating his own parliamentary stint by some six years, are some of the most perspicacious in the book. For Topsy MP (1929), now married to a writer named A.P. Haddock (Herbert’s regular alter ego in the pages of Punch), many of her preoccupations during her parliamentary career — when not falling foul of the party Whips or playing golf with Nancy Astor — are naturally Haddock/Herbert’s own. The wording and intent of the legislation she proposes are a joy, although even she does not go so far as to draft a Private Member’s bill in rhyme, as her creator eventually did.

WHEREAS in every lawn and bed the plucky crocus lifts his head, and to and fro sweet song-birds go, the names of which we do not know:
Whereas the woods no more are dumb, the Boat Race and the Budget come, the Briton swells his manly chest, his mate, as eager, scrubs the nest, and Spring, with light but lavish hand, is spreading madness o’er the land:
It is expedient—but in rhyme—to legislate for such a time.
A.P. Herbert, Spring (Arrangements) Bill

After a pause during which the Depression, parliamentary responsibilities and then wartime service supervened (with the added obligations of young motherhood to twins in Topsy’s case), Herbert’s inspired creation made her joyous return to print. Topsy Turvy, the third volume included here, opens in October 1945, and sees her negotiating the hurdles of Britain’s battered and austere post-war landscape, when shortages and rationing seemed to get worse every day, yet never entirely defeated by her state of comparative drudgery. She continues to sparkle with the same gloriously reprehensible humour and profligate use of italics over the state of the nation, international affairs, her finances and — with shades of E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady — her garden bulbs.

I always believe in grasping the nettles of this nettlesome life
A.P. Herbert, The Voluble Topsy

A.P. Herbert was a man with many strings to his bow. A law graduate who had served in the Royal Navy in World War One, he was called to the Bar, wrote for London’s West End stage, and was already a published author, although with limited financial success, when he was invited to join the staff of Punch, the long-running satirical magazine to which he had been contributing pieces for over a decade. During his pre-WWII parliamentary career (he sat as the Independent member for Oxford University from 1935 to 1950), Herbert proposed legislation in many areas, including reforms to betting, bookmaking and the sale of alcoholic beverages, and repeal of the Entertainments Duty.

Well of course he’s a Tory Anarchist, because my dear I heard him say that once at a night-club, well for instance I said he thinks that the Constitution is too divine, but he thinks that lots of Tories are utterly molluscular and ought to be quite painlessly dispensed with at once, and as for the Labour Party he thinks they mean well think badly and talk worse, because he says they’ve got one idea and that was mildewed about seven thousand years ago, and he says the Liberals have got two ideas only they cancel out and the Tories have got no ideas which is too desirable, because as soon as politicians get big ideas they rush to the head, well I said all this promiscuous gup about nationalisation and everything, one side saying it must never be done and the other saying you must do nothing else, well as I said it’s just like cooking eggs sometimes you boil ’em and sometimes it’s best to poach ’em it depends on the eggs, but I said nobody outside politics would think of saying It’s utterly fallacious to boil an egg, they’d have a look at the eggs first, but that’s what all these incurable politicians call a matter of principle as I said if you want a man of principle don’t vote for Mr. Haddock because those sort of principles give him the most awful mental indigestion, and I said the reason he’s a Tory is that they have fewer principles and get more done, and the reason he’s an Anarchist is that they never do what he wants!
A.P. Herbert, The Voluble Topsy

As a right-leaning Independent, Herbert took every opportunity to criticise the false starts and mis-steps of the Labour government which had come to power by a landslide in Britain’s post-war election, and used Topsy as his mouthpiece. His own campaigning on the issues which mattered to him continued, too; one of these, the abolition of decree nisi in divorce cases, is a running theme throughout the third volume.

If only the world would take me seriously instead of treating me as an irrelevant bubble
A.P. Herbert, The Voluble Topsy

It should not really have come as a surprise, when so many aspects of modern life feel as though we have been propelled back to the depressed, depressing and politically populist inter-war years, but — whilst Topsy was of course a thoroughly modern doe — what I did not expect was the degree of topicality to be found in these pages almost a century later. Blood sports (she foresees the ban on foxhunting, which is ‘too likely to be anti-social and the undone thing,’ p.272), the building-over of the countryside, the crisis in the cost of living (‘and what is the good of having cheap food if people have no money to purchase same,’ p.142), and even the drive for renewable energy and, more obliquely, the troubling aspects of the internet age (‘the stark menace to humanity is easy communications,’ p.257) are all grist to Topsy’s charmingly opinionated mill.

Do you never feel you’d like to withdraw to a nunnery with a good book?
A.P. Herbert, The Voluble Topsy

Handheld Press continue to build an fascinating list — women’s weird writing, intriguing biographies, and delightful nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction.1 Topsy is described to us as ‘the Bridget Jones of the 1920s, as if written by Nancy Mitford.’ Although it’s many years since I last read Bridget, and far too long since I read Mitford, I would venture to say that while Herbert’s satirical slant is just as winning as Helen Fielding’s (we are drawn into Topsy’s way of thinking before we notice what’s happening) it is also far wider in reach and more cunningly excoriating in tone. Topsy — by her own definition, ‘a sort of universal electric butterfly’ — is never as inclined to be sorry for herself as Bridget, and whilst her outlook is most definitely ‘U,’ I also detected echoes of Anita Loos’s style in its eccentric delivery. Lastly, I am always thrilled by the reissue of books contemporary to the early and mid-twentieth century, which cast new light on otherwise unknown concerns of the time. (Nowhere else in my Home Front reading, for example, have I come across the question of G.I. widows’ difficult status at the end of WWII.) For my fellow amateur social historians, Macdonald’s crisp endnotes are helpful, if sometimes frustratingly silent. There are rabbit holes a-plenty.

I realise that I have used variations on the word ‘joy’ repeatedly in this review. This is intentional, but I lay responsibility for it at least partly at A.P. Herbert’s door. The Voluble Topsy reads from cover to cover as an effective manifesto for ‘Topsy’s Own Society for the Propagation of the Sense of Humour and Joy among the People’ … and why you should always keep a piece of holly in the hall.