When Caitlin met Jilly

The NOVELIST
When Caitlin, 35,
met Jilly, 73…
…they got drunk and fell over. But not before Caitlin Moran, who
named herself after a character in Rivals, asked her all-time hero,
Jilly Cooper, about affairs, Fleet Street and her infamous sex scenes
PORTRAIT Jude Edginton
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The NOVELIST
T
his 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
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
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PETER ROSENBAUM/SCOPE FEATURES
The NOVELIST
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
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
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