Best-known for her rollicking blockbuster romances set in the horse-riding world, Jilly Cooper is one of Britain's most-read authors. Robyn Langwell meets the prolific writer at home, a setting straight out of one of her novels.
Pam's instructions seemed relatively simple. "Arrive at The Chantry in Bisley about midday on the 10th. Husband Leo will take you to the pub for lunch. Jilly writes all day and is never available to visitors until after 5pm. You can join her for dog-walking, feeding the cats and an evening chat."
The day before, ensconced in Brinscombe, Gloucestershire, just 15km away, it seemed simple to whistle up a cab for midday delivery, as per the personal assistant's directions, to the gate of Bisley's most famous citizen, the mega-selling "bonk buster" author, Jilly Cooper. But the best laid plans fall down for the want of a taxi in a small town with just three - all booked until 2pm.
I am saved by my B&B host who, for 10 quid, deposits me outside the corner shop in the perilously narrow but pertly pretty main street of market town Bisley.
I have no directions and mounting misgivings: what if the locals are sternly protective of their most beloved inhabitant?
Fortunately the shop lad isn't prissy: "Go back down the hill, past the cottage on the left that is being restored and take the second farm gate on the right."
The Chantry, a 17th century manor house, has been Cooper's home and haven since 1983. Its gate is unmarked and the driveway is rutted and lined by a riot of trees in summer green. There is distant dog-barking and several open doorways, one bearing a cautionary sign: "Go away, gone to the pub".
I knock and wait. Nothing. "Anyone home?"
At once there is a clatter of large dogs and a froth of signature silver fringe. Clad in trackpants, a singlet top, Crocs and socks, Cooper is refreshingly au naturel. With not a skerrick of makeup and bra-less, she extends welcoming hands slick with chicken fat.
She's taken a break from the tyranny of the typewriter and is mid-dissection of a bird - lunch for her "beautiful boys". She vainly commands coal-black greyhound Feather and "sex maniac" labrador/husky/german shepherd cross William to behave - with nil effect. This is my introduction to the ultimate mad dogs and eccentric Englishwoman's happy dog house.
Cooper has been earning a quid from her writing for half a century. At 73, she's written 47 books in 40 years, with little sign of a slackening in pace. Her "big break" from a lowly start as a junior provincial reporter came in 1969, sitting next to the editor of the Sunday Times' colour magazine at a dinner party.
She was a leggy, beautiful, gap-toothed blonde from the Yorkshire upper classes (Great-great grandfather was a Liberal MP and founder of the Leeds Mercury newspaper and Daddy was a brigadier). She was also newly married to rakish former cavalry officer Leo. Wine-warmed, she raved frankly about the shock of adjusting to being a new wife and homemaker to the charmed editor, who suggested she write a piece.
The essay segued into a 13-year stronghold on a Sunday Times column about marriage, sex and dog-walking, and saw Cooper's emergence as one of the media's first "It" girls. After columns and biting profiles of many of Britain's finest, came books. Lots of books.
Collections of her columns led to a clutch of non-fiction books (mostly about animals). There was a dabble with romantic fiction and children's books before she settled into the racy potboilers, which so neatly spear Britain's upper classes with their twisted relationships and torrid affairs.
Her emergence as the first lady of "chick lit" could have been a tragic tale: in the early 70s she'd written a first draft of a novel on showjumping, bringing to life her much-loved and many-lovered character, Rupert Campbell-Black.
"It was a nice, short, 200-pager, which took a year to write. I took the manuscript out to lunch and got pissed with a friend. We went to Selfridges' scent department and, smelling beautiful, I wobbled on to the bus back to Putney and there I left [the book]. For years I waited for a West Indian bus conductor to come out with a showjumping novel ..."
It took another 10 years to recreate what would become her first blockbuster of bonking, Riders, and again it was delivered amid difficult times.
"Debt certainly concentrates the writer's mind," she offers. "In 1985 we were very short of money. We'd moved from a doctor's house in Putney to The Chantry and 14 gorgeous acres [5.6ha], which is so expensive to run, and we had two children at boarding school. The bank manager came to stay and said 'what a lovely house and what a pity you will have to sell it. I don't think your dirty little book is going to save it'.
"Then Riders went straight to best-seller and got me out of the financial fire. The day it went to No.1 I ran round the fields crying with joy - and I bloody well changed bank manager the next day."
True to PA Pam's word, I am bustled into a nondescript banger of a car, all dog scent and hair, and whisked off to the local pub, aptly named The Stirrup Cup, by a staggering Leo and his cheerful factotum, a Polish lad called Jack.
"He bosses me," says the curmudgeonly but courteous Leo, who has battled Parkinson's disease for eight years. He wobbles and twitches but has a twinkle still in his eye and a wry, dry humour.
The once rogueishly handsome Leo, now 76, was a publisher of well-crafted military books. Alas no more, his company went broke and Cooper is now chief breadwinner and estate-keeper of a staff of five.
Back in 1981 she published Intelligent and Loyal, a touching tribute to mongrel dogs, which could have been a teaser for things to come. When she found out in the early 90s that "poor darling Leo" had been having a longtime affair, she swallowed her pride and forgave him while batting off a scrum of tabloid scrutiny.
Small wonder that she is such a British media favourite. "I like happy endings," she says. "If you write a love story, you hope it'll end happily. I always thought that a marriage would be like building a cathedral, brick by brick. It seems an awful shame to smash it down."
She says the joys of fame are the simple things like getting into restaurants and "when I'm walking down the road in London, people lean out of their lorries and ask 'how is your husband?' and 'is he coping?' People are so kind."
After lunch I am shown to The Chantry's Green Room with a note from Cooper - "Hello and sorry. Feather has lately taken ownership of the guest room - and he is likely to arrive like a black bomber on the bed in the middle of the night ..."
We meet promptly after 5pm, when the day's writing is done and it's dog-walking hour, down past the fishpond and through the animal graveyard. There are 20-plus headstones with tender dedications. "Barbara our mongrel", Cooper's "best best dog ever" rests not far from her mother's ashes.
Beyond the vale of death we drop down the valley to a heavenly field where Cooper, stiff vodka and orange in hand, unleashes the hounds. In the late summer light she capers and croons to her "boys", the air tangy with the scent of freshly cut meadow hay.
All this frolicking in the hedgerows is not just idle time-wasting. These fields are all part of the rich tapestry of the bonk buster. All around are, literally, scenes from her books. Rogueish Rupert Campbell-Black's house is modelled on The Chantry and this valley is the model for Frogmore, where Rupert can often be read having his wicked way with women.
Not silly, this Jilly.
Back home, we drink wine in a cluttered kitchen dominated by a massive, soul-warming, black Aga. A tiled mosaic of terriers, cats, foxes, unicorns and a bright white moon shining down on badgers fills a corner and the surrounding walls are a pincushion of grandchildren, dog, horse and friends' photos. Not to mention snippets of favourite poetry and funny letters from fans (she gets 100 a week). Feather lounges on a massive dog bed in the corner, snoring and farting loudly.
If the centrepiece scrubbed pine table could talk, it would reveal lively debate and recent gossip fests with the likes of Liz Hurley and Cooper's longtime mate, Camilla Parker Bowles.
There's been some hate mail from the Camilla connection. Prior to her marriage to Prince Charles, which she and Leo attended, Cooper went into print: "I stuck up for her when people were saying nasty things."
While she prepares another chicken, this time for our dinner, Cooper talks dogs - "my joy and salvation".
There have been many in her 49-year marriage, but since 2005 when she got Feather from a greyhound sanctuary, she's been a convert to the "rehome the greyhounds" cause. "Darling Feather was found wandering in Ireland, starved and skeletal, with a muzzle still strapped to his elegant nose. I cry all the time about the plight of these wonderful creatures. There are 12,000 healthy greyhounds destroyed every year in Britain and 14,000 in Ireland."
She admits to being "not terribly maternal" - her two children, Emily and Felix, were both adopted after an ectopic pregnancy signalled "my last flicker of fertility". But she "melts over puppies, foals and kittens".
And badgers too: she was front page news in 2008 when she marched on 10 Downing St with MP/novelist Ann Widdecomb and a man dressed as a badger to try to stop a mass badger cull in the English countryside. "Farmers believe badgers give cattle bovine TB," she hisses, "but there is no scientific evidence."
Later we will gather the scraps from lunch and dinner and, slightly tipsy, go out into the moonlight to leave a feast for the foxes and the badgers.
Her latest campaign - she is "always tortured about something" - is that all children should be taught poetry at school. "Poetry matters," she asserts, lapsing into Shakespeare. The irascible Leo rolls his eyes and pleads, "For f**** sake, just cook the chicken."
The next morning she is the disciplined, focused writing Jilly.
She can't do computers. "I really should learn but I need to look down at the keys when I type, so I get terrible pains in my shoulders pounding away on 'Monica'."
Monica is an elderly (read all- but-antique) Adler portable typewriter, on which Cooper has typed most of her blockbusters. Her last, Wicked, was four years from thought to publication. In her unimaginably untidy office ("I'm typical Pisces, totally disorganised and I can't remember where anything is") there are the "seven pillars of Wicked" - seven large boxes of erratically typed and retyped pages, many daubed with muddy cat-prints and taped-on notations.
There's a certain joy in doing these brick-size books, she assures: "Even though at times I feel I will die with the weight of the tale, it's total immersion, like doing an A-level in opera/orchestra/art/polo/racing - and then you get to meet all these heavenly people.
"My characters excite me. Each has a file and I love making them real. There are too many big, blue-eyed characters out there, so I feel the need to make mine have small, grey ones."
Her multitudinous characters are sensuous beasts: "Now that I'm older it's quite difficult keeping up. The young these days are light years ahead in sex and the things they are getting up to. It wasn't as if I ever did all those things, but I can still imagine."
She has no particular "typical reader" in mind: "Someone once said my target audience is middle-brow women. Me, I just write. I like to think my books can be read after a couple of gins and tonic and then into bed with a book."
The critics can be downright "horrid - and that's their right" but international sales of more than 12 million and rising give Cooper a very sexy, throaty, last laugh.
She got an OBE for services to literature in 2004, which was "lovely and quite a giggle. It read to 'the Queen's trusty and well-beloved servant', making me sound like a faithful black labrador ..."
When there's a book on the go, Cooper crosses the daisied lawn daily at 10 and parks herself in front of Monica, perched atop an old picnic table. And there she sits, tapping away, honing the plump chapters, one A4 sheet at a time, while Leo, portly and shirtless, basks in the summer sun.
She takes Berocca at 11.30am "for zing" and has a thermos of black tea at hand. A box of dog biscuits is the only other prop as Feather trots the lawn with a huge bone in his mouth. Feral, a formerly wild, black cat keeps tabs on his mistress while curled in the flowerbed.
The new book hot off Monica started out with the working title Village Horse, and was four years in gestation.
Kind, beautiful 68-year-old grandmother Etta Bancroft, who adores racing, is at the heart of the 728-page story. When Etta's bullying husband dies, her children hijack her from her lovely old Dorset home and plant her in an ugly, modern bungalow in the Cotswold village of Willowwood, to mind their children.
Walking home one night after more child-minding, Etta stumbles upon a filly tied to a tree in snow-laden woods and near death. She rescues the horse, which turns out to be a thoroughbred whose microchip has been gouged out with a chisel, and forms a village syndicate to race the horse. It is trained, of course, by sexy love rat showjumper-turned-racehorse-trainer Rupert Campbell-Black.
The horse, named Mrs Wilkinson, proves good enough to be entered in the Grand National. She will be ridden by girl jockey Amber Lloyd Foxe, Rupert's god-daughter, in the hope of being the first mare and girl jockey combination to conquer this iconic race.
Cooper, needless to say, has fallen in love with National Hunt (steeplechase) racing in the past 48 months. And particularly with all the "darling" sexy trainers and jockeys she has spent so many hours interrogating.
She's not afraid of asking questions. She once rang the local Stroud police late at night when she was stuck with the sprawling 200-plus-character thriller Score. "I was killing off Rannaldini, the sex-mad conductor, and I needed to know whether the male member stayed up at the moment of death. They were so sweet and confirmed it did."
For total immersion in the racing scene, Cooper joined the Thoroughbred Ladies, an owners' syndicate started by Sophie George, the wife of a local trainer. "There are 30 of us in the syndicate, all ladies of a certain age. We have such fun, going to lunches where we meet the horses, lovely parties where we drink buckets of champagne."
Renamed Jump! by Cooper just as she thought she would "go mad for want of finishing it" her 47th book is not just all horsetalk. There's plenty of Cooperesque bonking in barns - "not nearly as much sex as there was in Riders, about the same as Polo, and there's even a bit of gay sex when the vicar takes a shine to the tree surgeon."
You'd think after all those million sales and all that animal angst, she might contemplate sliding into a comfortable retirement. Not so.
"I'll tell you what keeps me going: cash. I have to write my tits off to support this lot. I don't worry about age - can't afford to. Touch wood, I'm very healthy and there is still so much more I want to do. Writing is like wading through a river. You get to a stepping stone and then you wade back into the water again. Everyone says 'oh, you must have such great fun doing the books'. Sometimes I want to spear them ..."
So she'll take a small breather and then start a new file.
"I wanted to do golf, to go to the Masters and the Ryder Cup to capture the loneliness of the golfer. I wondered could I make golf sexy. But Tiger Woods has done for that. Motor racing, perhaps ..."
Now that Monica is momentarily stilled, it's time for the book tour diet. "I've got it down to a fine art. I want [3.5kg] off so I can look gorgeous in the photos. I do it with the cabbage soup diet. Pam makes pots of it and I don't eat anything but cabbage soup and the weight just rolls off."
And the trademark gappy smile? "I should do that too, it's getting bigger. But mine is such a familiar face with a gap, it would be like getting a face lift. People would know you had been at it."
Jump! by Jilly Cooper (Random House) is on sale from October 1. Robyn Langwell travelled to Britain courtesy of Cathay Pacific.
