When Caitlin, 35, met Jilly, 73… - Press Awards

This is where Rupert
Campbell-Black was
playing tennis, naked,
when he first meets
Taggie,” Jilly Cooper says.
It’s an overcast day
in Gloucestershire, and
we’re standing on a soggy
lawn, taking a tour of
Cooper’s wisteria-fringed house and gardens.
She is holding a bottle of champagne.
Our glasses are half-full. We’re both a bit
staggery: we’ve been on the sauce since
1pm, didn’t bother much with lunch, and it’s
now gone four. I’ve missed two trains, urged
to ignore their departure by Cooper howling,
“Oh, do stay. We need more gossip!”
On our way down the hall, Cooper
bumps gently off the wall. “Whoops!” she
hoots, veering to the left, then bumping
off the opposite wall. “I’m a bit tight!”
We are combining the “more gossip”
with sightseeing around Cooper’s grounds,
which double – as anyone who has read her
legendarily filthy novels will know – as
the setting for her fictional “Rutshire” canon.
Cooper’s house is Rupert Campbell-Black’s.
To the right is the Bluebell Wood, where
Billy first rolled around with Janey in the
wet nettles. And this tennis court is, indeed,
where Campbell-Black – for many women,
a literary hero the equal of Mr Darcy – played
mixed doubles in the knack. (“Cock fault! You
must be at least ten inches over the line!”)
I am, essentially, being given a dirty tour
of Bath by a pissed Jane Austen.
As this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,
I feel I must tell Cooper my thesis on her
legendary output. I’ve long had the theory
that Riders – the incendiary 1985 book that
launched the whole Rutshire series; current
sales: more than 15 million – must have been
the result of a blazing hot affair. Cooper had
just moved from London to Gloucestershire,
and fallen in with a set – Andrew Parker
Bowles; Michael, Earl of Suffolk; Rupert
Lycett Green; the Duke of Beaufort – that she,
in later years, described as “wildly dashing and
exciting”. Indeed, in 2002, she admitted that
swaggering, sexy Campbell-Black was
conceived as an amalgam of all four of them.
She must have been shagging one of
them, I surmised. Riders is a book written by
someone ablaze with desire – written with the
born-again ardour of someone coming alive
for the second time. Come on! It’s obvious!
“Were you having an affair?” I ask her,
gently wobbling in the breeze. There is a
pause. Cooper looks out across the pale,
rainy valley – she’s now 73, but with the same
pale fluff of hair and fox-like eyes she had
at 35, when she was the hot young Sunday
Times columnist, racketing around Fleet
Street in a miniskirt, playing table tennis
‘People weren’t worried
about sex. We had
contraception, no Aids.
It was joyful, exploratory’
with Melvyn Bragg in a see-through dress,
and kissing Sean Connery in the hallway.
“I just fell in love with the countryside,”
Cooper says, eventually, looking out across
the landscape. “That was what made me come
alive. I was having an affair with the whole of
the Cotswolds. Leo [her husband] stayed in
London at the time, and I moved here, and
everyone said: ‘Oh, if you move to the country,
you’ll get in trouble.’ But I never did. It was
the impact of the country. The liberation.”
We stand in the rain a while, looking at
the wet beeches. Then Cooper looks down
at the champagne bottle in her hand. “Oh,
it’s empty,” she says, disconsolately. There
is a pause. Then: “We must open another!”
For a generation of women – my generation
– Jilly Cooper is totemic: a combination of
role model and storyteller who made being
As a Sunday Times
writer in the Seventies
The NOVELIST
a woman seem like fun. Her columns
in The Sunday Times were, at the time,
revolutionary: the novel ruse of getting
a woman to write humorously about
her domestic, metropolitan life.
She goes to jumble sales, walks the
dogs, gets squiffy at dinner parties, gets
squiffy on sports day, boggles over the newly
published Hite Report (“The method of orgasm
achievement is rather quaint: ‘I bang my mons
against the sink,’ said one housewife”), frets
about her weight (“Who wants to be 8st 5
if they look like a flat-chested weasel?”), finds
out she’s infertile and adopts two children
with breezy can-do-ness, and confesses
all of her most inappropriate thoughts (“One
of the compensations of getting old is flirting
with friends’ offspring. I quite fancy myself
as the ‘close bosom friend of a maturing
son’”) with both self-deprecation and a
winning, underlying confidence. Ultimately,
she doesn’t really care what anyone thinks,
because she’s having such a hoot.
Where all the female columnists of the
21st century – and, indeed, eventually, Helen
Fielding’s Bridget Jones – tread now, Cooper
trod, slightly unsteadily at first. With a few
tweaks here and there (references to “blacks”,
slight wobbliness when it comes to gays),
you could run any of her Seventies columns
today and they wouldn’t have dated at all.
But Cooper claims she never intended to be
a writer. “Well, I just thought I’d get married
and have children,” she says, settling into
an armchair. It’s earlier in the day – we
haven’t opened the champagne yet.
We’re in a drawing room – shabby,
warm, plant-filled, with almost every nook
and cranny taken up with animalalia: china
dogs, a stuffed badger, cushions with pictures
of late pets. Cooper is a renowned defender
of animal rights. She was one of the major
fundraisers for the gigantic Animals in
War memorial on Park Lane, London.
“I didn’t have any idea of a career,” she
continues. Cooper applied for Oxford having
flunked her A levels, and instead sat its
entrance exam. She failed that too in a blaze
of typical behaviour. “I hit Oxford and went
berserk,” she beams. “I went to parties every
single night. It was the first time I’d ever had
a drink. One of the graduates had to carry
me home, like a coffin – it was so funny.”
Hungover at the interview, Cooper was
turned down flat. Her parents – an Army
brigadier and his “nervous” wife – were
heartbroken. “But I’m rather glad I didn’t go,”
Cooper says with her trademark cheerfulness.
“I’m glad I’m not academic. I would probably
have gone on to write boring biographies.”
That, of course, is exactly what didn’t
happen. For in 1985 Cooper progressed
from Fleet Street columns (bagged when
she amused the Sunday Times editor at
The Times Magazine 39
11 September 2010
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