Sadly, Jilly Cooper has died at 88. Last year, she told Harry Mount about sex, her football novel and her new friends, Alex Ferguson and Gareth Southgate.
Torrential rain is thudding down on Jilly Cooper’s enchanting house – her medieval chantry in Gloucestershire, aka Rutshire in her Rutshire Chronicles series of novels. And we are giggling away about sex.
‘There’s not nearly as much sex as there was before,’ she says of her new book, Tackle!, her new novel about football. ‘The publishers thought there might be some more.’
Warming to the sex theme, Jilly says, ‘I’ve forgotten how to do it. Writers ought to write about what they know. I couldn’t go to football during the pandemic, when I was writing it. And, at 86, I don’t leap up and down any more.’
Jilly fans, don’t despair! There’s still plenty of sex roiling away in Jilly’s tale of her hero Rupert Campbell-Black taking over an ailing local football team, Searston Rovers.
Campbell-Black is still the best-looking man in England. His wife, Taggie, is being treated for cancer. Enter the younger generation, in the form of their daughter, Bianca, and her ace striker boyfriend, Feral Jackson. The rutting temperature is raised by a whole first eleven of hunks and their sex-crazed Wags.
‘Footballers must have lots of sex,’ says Jilly. But their lust is controlled by the management: ‘I noticed that there’s CCTV in their rooms. There’s a very tough regime. The bosses don’t like them having sex the night before games. Still, footballers are so glamorous that everyone must want to go to bed with them.’
The sex scenes in the book are compelling because of her refusal to use the sort of euphemisms – ie love pump – that make so much writing about sex laughable (thus the late Auberon Waugh’s institution of the Bad Sex Prize at Literary Review magazine). Jilly calls a spade a spade – and a testicle a testicle.
‘Testicle’s an awful word!’ she says, before embarking on a disquisition on new sexual terminology.
‘The bonus hole?’ she says, bursting out laughing. ‘There are a limited amount of ways to do it, even with the bonus hole.
‘That’s a vagina, isn’t it? Or is the bum the bonus hole? You must look it up. I thought that was absolutely hysterical.’
In fact, Jilly, a master of charming self-deprecation knows exactly what it is.
She does her research meticulously, as she has ever since becoming a reporter for The Middlesex Independent in 1957, when she was 20. She covered football then. She says, “I was completely hopeless. One of my lines was “Oh, Brentford! How could you?”’
Her research for her hero Rupert Campbell-Black was impeccable, too. He is said to be based on Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, the Queen’s former husband, the designer Rupert Lycett Green and the late Earl of Suffolk.
Jilly says, ‘Middle-class Jill comes down to the Cotswolds in 1982. I knew Andrew already. He helped me with Riders. I met Micky [Suffolk] then. He was lovely and so funny and so naughty.
‘I was having lunch with the publisher George Weidenfeld and said, “I’m writing a book about the handsomest man in England.”
‘I looked over and there he was – David Beaufort [the late Duke of Beaufort]. He was funny, too.’
Talk of Andrew Parker Bowles leads on to talk of the Queen: ‘Isn’t Camilla lovely? She and Andrew got a brilliant, brilliant divorce. Adorable children. They all get on and share each other’s lives.’
Jilly was ‘heartbroken’ at the death of Elizabeth II. ‘She was lovely, wasn’t she? Oh the thought of everyone in Australia running off and leaving us.
‘I met her a few times. She asked me, “Do you write a bit?” I don’t think she read much.’
Sadly that golden generation of charming seducers is on the way out. She says, ‘That lot’s old enough not to give a stuff. It’s terrifying for the younger generation. You can’t put your hand anywhere. All this cancelling is very frightening, isn’t it?’
‘Of course women want passes made at them. People come out of the woodwork from centuries back and say, “You leapt on me when I was 14 and you were 15.”
‘Do you think people are too tired to have sex now? They don’t seem to do it so much now. There aren’t any parties, are there?
‘Everybody was behaving horribly before. The upper classes have always behaved horribly. People were behaving quite badly round here. That was quite nice to observe.’
Tackle! is blissfully cancellation-free. She says, ‘The only reference to MeToo is a cat called MewToo.’
Jilly came up with the idea for the book after sitting next to former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson at lunch. ‘He’s divine. Charming. We had a giggly, drunken lunch and I thought it would be fun to write a book.’
In her self-deprecating way, she claims in the book’s acknowledgements not to understand offside. She proceeds to give me the perfect dictionary definition of the rule.
She wasn’t brought up in a footballing family. Her father played rugby for Cambridge and her late husband, the publisher Leo Cooper, played rugby for Radley: ‘He talked dismissively about “soccer schools”.’
And so Jilly gave herself a crash course in football. She talked to Alan Curbishley, a player and manager at West Ham. Arsenal and England legend, Tony Adams, and his wife, Poppy, are friends and Gloucestershire neighbours – ‘He sent me a bottle of Adam’s Apple – a sort of fruit juice. He’s just sweet!’
She met Howard Wilkinson, former Leeds manager, at St George’s Park, the national football centre in Staffordshire. Michael Howard, the former Tory leader (‘I love him – he’s gorgeous’), took her to Anfield, where she met ‘the revered Steven Gerrard’.
Her new friend is England manager, Gareth Southgate. A framed shirt from him is in her sitting room, signed with the words, ‘Dear Jilly, Congratulations on finishing “Tackle!”. Happy Birthday. Best Wishes, Gareth Southgate”.
Jilly was gripped by the footballing life: ‘It’s such a ruthless world. The first thing you do as a manager is decide who you’re going to ask to your leaving party.
‘Then you have players like poor Harry Maguire, with people ganging up on you.’
It’s completely different from the world of horses that Jilly knows so well.
She says, ‘I remember Peter Robeson, the showjumper, when it was at its height, saying that the FA took him out to lunch to ask, “How do we make football nearly as popular as showjumping?”
‘Football is different because it’s team. Racing is a team within the yard but not at the racecourse. In football, you’ve got to fight the opposition rather than each other.’
All the research for Tackle!, along with the pandemic, meant it has been seven years since her last book. She also had to do 15 months of rewrites. On top of all that, her adored greyhound Bluebell – who appears in pictures all over the house – died. She recalls, ‘I said to myself, “I’m not going to get another dog till I’ve finished my book.”’
And now she’s going to get another greyhound.
Jilly says she forgets things – but she is razor-sharp in our time together. ‘Quite often I can do a crossword in the morning that I couldn’t do the night before.’
In fact, ‘Darling Penelope Keith’ told her, it’s not that she’s forgetful; it’s that ‘Your brain’s full.’
Despite selling millions of books since her first, How to Stay Married, in 1969, Jilly remains ego-free. She keeps on breaking off from answering my questions to ask me questions, particularly about Jeremy Lewis, the late Oldie deputy editor, who she worked with at Collins, the publishing company.
My theory is that she has a fundamentally low opinion of herself, despite her enormous success – from her first novel, Emily (1975), to the 10-novel series, the Rutshire Chronicles, which started with Riders (1985) and continued via Rivals (1988) and Polo (1991) to her last book, Mount! (2016).
When I put my low self-esteem point to her, she agrees – but then again that might be her extremely good manners.
She has had her share of rough times. Jilly says, ‘I got sacked from 22 jobs after leaving school, always coming sobbing home to my parents, and then got a job in publishing.’
Her big break came in 1969, when she sat next to Sunday Times Magazine editor Godfrey Smith at dinner. He was so amused by her disastrous tales of married life that he signed her up to a column which lasted from 1969 to 1982.
‘We git a bit pissed together and I told him what a lousy wife I was,’ she says. ‘I threw something red into the washing machine. And Leo said he was the only member of the team with a pink jockstrap.’
She was married to Leo Cooper from 1961 until his death from Parkinson’s in 2013.
‘Parkinson’s is such a sod that you get to a stage where you say, “Please God, do take him.” And then you feel terribly guilty. He died 20 years after he was diagnosed.’
They adopted two children, Felix, who works in property, and Emily, a make-up artist. They both live nearby. In Tackle!, Rupert and Taggie Campbell-Black have an adopted daughter.
‘Adoption brought me so much happiness,’ she says.‘‘It’s much more difficult to adopt now. Social services investigate whether the background is suitable. So you come out and you don’t have a family at all. Can you imagine not having a family?’
Her marriage withstood the revelation that Leo Cooper had had an affair.
‘Of course I’ve forgiven him,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t that good myself. I did because I loved him. And it was OK. But it was awful.’
In her desire to lift spirits, Jilly can’t let the conversation remain gloomy for long, adding, ‘What was so lovely was that I went down to seven and a half stone. I was so thin. It was a good diet.’
She sympathised, too, with Leo’s position as a successful publisher married to a mega-successful wife.
‘Poor Leo was at the Hatchards Party and Elizabeth Jane Howard said to him, “How do you feel being Mrs Jilly Cooper?”
‘He was very macho. It’s quite difficult for Wags, too, everyone rushing off with your husband; no one coming to see you. It’s good to have an equality of attention.’
And then, in 1999, Jilly was in the Ladbroke Grove train crash that killed 31 people.
‘I remember thinking, “I was alive.” It was absolutely amazing. This ghastly thing happening. That moment when you suddenly think you are alive.
‘I was desperate to get to a phone to tell Leo and the children and say I was alive. I’ve had a very lucky life.’
But then again that might just be Jilly’s glass-half-full attitude. She even manages to put an optimistic spin on the day she left the only manuscript of Rivals on a bus, meaning she had to rewrite the whole thing.
She says, ‘I always have a fantasy about a West Indian bus conductor releasing the book years later.
‘The book was better when I rewrote it. I’ve always been lucky, touching wood.’
Jilly Cooper’s Tackle! (Bantam, £22) is out now
