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

PETER ROSENBAUM/SCOPE FEATURES
a dinner party) to her first big novel, Riders.
It was so risqué that her bank manager asked
Leo, in horror, “How does Jilly know about
such things?” “Showjumpers are not like
this,” Horse & Hound thundered.
“I read it now and my hair stands on end,”
Cooper says, looking scandalised by herself
– but also, to be fair, looking like she’s greatly
enjoying being scandalised by herself as well.
“Blowjobs! There’s blowjobs everywhere.
I remember my editor saying: ‘Darling, do
you think you should have this bit about
sperm trickling down the thigh?’ I mean,
it’s not nice. But we were in this little pocket
– from the Sixties to the mid-Eighties – where
people weren’t worried about sex. We had
contraception, it was before Aids; it was joyful
and exploratory. We were a young couple –
the Coopers. We had a lot of people asking us
to go to bed with them. Although we didn’t!”
This can-do-you attitude feeds into the
books, which – much like those of her rival of
the time, Jackie Collins – are full of enjoyably
diva-ish characters landing on the lawns of
their mansions in helicopters, ordering crates
of Dom Pérignon, then rutting all night long.
Unlike Collins’, however, Cooper’s books
are unmistakably British, and all the better
for it: people crack puns mid-coitus, there
are breathless descriptions of herbaceous
borders and darling spaniels, and there’s an
air of uplifting jolliness to the whole thing,
which makes sex seem like a total hoot.
Pre-internet, this was how most women
of my generation learnt about sex. Get any
group of thirtysomething women together
now, and the chances are that, after a couple
of cocktails, they can still quote the filthy bits
from Riders, Rivals, Polo, The Man Who Made
Husbands Jealous and Pandora word for word.
Cooper’s Rutshire was the world we escaped
to as teenagers. It was Sex Narnia. When I
needed a nom de plume for writing, I named
myself after one of the characters in Rivals, for
goodness’ sake. Without Cooper, I would still
be plain old Catherine Moran.
It’s fitting, then, to discover why Cooper
has such an affinity with the escapist desires
of teenage girls: as a teenage girl, she had
some escaping to do herself. Becoming
distressed at the mention of it – her hands
start to fly around, like birds – she mentions
how terribly “anxious” her mother would
get every time they had to move house to
follow Cooper’s father from Army posting to
posting. Sometimes, her mother would have
to “go away” for a while – to hospital – to
recover. When Cooper went away herself,
to an all-girls boarding school, she left
early, having told her parents she was
“dying of emotional anaemia”.
I suspect it was around this time that
Cooper began to develop her characteristic
life-long cheerfulness, the kind of merriness
Jilly and Leo still light
up around each other.
There’s a teenage air to
their teasy conversations
that has its roots in a steely determination not
to give in to melancholy or despair, because
the consequences of that are known all too
well. I wonder if it’s also Cooper’s upbringing
that triggered her other notable trait: an oftproclaimed
unwillingness to be a writer.
In a corner of the drawing room, on
a chair, sits a rackety old manual typewriter
called Monica. Cooper wrote every single
one of her books on Monica, including her
latest, Jump!. I ask her if she feels happiest
behind her typewriter, in control of her
world, as you would expect from someone
who’s been writing for 41 years.
“Goodness, no!” Cooper says, horrified.
“I’m awful when I’m writing a book. My
editors and agents are always so lovely, but
I take for ever, and there’s always a point
where I think I can’t finish it, and I stretch
the deadline and stretch the deadline, and
they worry they won’t ever see it at all,
and I struggle terribly. Terribly.”
She says she was forced to start writing
Rivals “because we’d lost all our money.
I was terribly worried about money”, and that
she still writes now out of financial necessity:
the upkeep of the house and, increasingly, the
cost of care for Leo, who has Parkinson’s.
I met Leo earlier. He has a nookish,
book-lined office, cheerfully insists, “You must
smoke if you want to smoke. I believe in that,”
and has a wheelchair he lets me sit in while
I drink my tea. He and Cooper are clearly
very fond of each other – they still light up
With Leo, her husband
of 49 years, who now
suffers from Parkinson’s
The NOVELIST
around each other, after 49 years of
marriage, and there’s an almost teenage air
to their teasy, nudging conversations. Cooper
recently had a health setback herself: a
stroke, although minor. As she perches on
Leo’s desk, a small but still livid scar from
a subsequent operation is apparent; the
only visible consequence, it seems. One’s
first instinct might be to pity this 73-yearold
woman with a scar on her neck, still
forced to write gigantic blockbuster novels
in order to keep the family afloat.
But as we repair to the kitchen, get stuck
into the champagne and start a gossip session
that is never less than 100 per cent libellous
(“So has [big name Fleet Street columnist]
gone completely mad? And you know, of
course, that [huge political figure] was having
an affair with [another huge political figure]?”),
and Cooper talks about writing, and the
media, with the passion of a master of
her craft – someone with the whole awful,
drunken, amazing, ridiculous industry in their
blood – a suspicion starts to form in my mind.
Finally – as we open the third bottle
of wine, over the laughably untouched
quiche and salad – I trot it out.
“I think that, secretly, you’re glad your
financial situation means you have to keep
writing,” I say, unsteadily pushing my glass
towards Cooper’s equally unsteady bottle.
“Because if you didn’t have to write, you would
never have had the excuse to go and lock
yourself in your room with your typewriter
in 1969, and just sit down and write. I think
women writers almost always need an excuse
to indulge in the selfishness of creativity.
I think when you started, the only way
you could ever have said, ‘Go away –
Mummy has to write now,’ is if it were
from dire financial need. And you still feel
that you need that excuse now, even though
you’re 73 and have sold 15 million books.”
Cooper stares at me for a moment,
wine-ishly. “You’re quite right,” she says,
finally. “Brilliant. Brilliant. You’re quite right.
It’s absolutely true about that, isn’t it? It is
self-gratification, isn’t it? You’re so right.
So right. More wine?”
When I finally pour myself onto a train,
an hour later, I spend the first half of the
journey gloating that I’ve cracked the essential
conundrum at the heart of one of my all-time
heroes. God, I’m great. I’ve totally nailed it.
Look at me, with my insights.
Around Reading, however, it occurs to
me that Jilly Cooper is so lovely, and was so
tipsy, she would probably have said anything
at that point to get me out of her kitchen. ■
Jump! by Jilly Cooper is published by Bantam
Press on Thursday and is available from The
Times Bookshop priced £16.99 (RRP £18.99),
free p&p: 0845 2712134; thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
The Times Magazine 41
11 September 2010
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