Jilly Cooper - Between the Covers: Jilly Cooper on sex, socialising and survival

Jilly Cooper is a journalist, author and media superstar. The author of many number one bestselling novels, she lives in Gloucestershire with her rescue racing greyhound, Bluebell.

She has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Gloucestershire and Anglia Ruskin, and won the inaugural Comedy Women in Print lifetime achievement award in 2019. She was appointed CBE in 2018 for services to literature and charity.

Also by Jilly Cooper

Riders

Rivals

Polo

The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

Appassionata

Score!

Pandora

Wicked!

Jump!

Mount!

How to Stay Married How to Survive from Nine to Five Jolly Super

Men and Supermen Jolly Super Too Women and Superwomen Work and Wedlock Jolly Superlative Super Men and Super Women Super Jilly

Class

Super Cooper

Intelligent and Loyal Jolly Marsupial Animals in War The Common Years Hotfoot to Zabriskie Point (with Patrick Lichfield) How to Survive Christmas Turn Right at the Spotted Dog Angels Rush In Aramintas Wedding

CHILDRENS BOOKS

Little Mabel

Little Mabels Great Escape Little Mabel Wins Little Mabel Saves the Day

Emily

Bella

Harriet

Octavia

Prudence

Imogen

Lisa & Co

The British in Love Violets and Vinegar

For more information on Jilly Cooper and her books, please visit www.jillycooper.co.uk or www.facebook.com/JillyCooperOfficial

To the late Godfrey Smith With love and gratitude

Nineteen sixty-eight was a miracle year for me. At thirty-one, I was poised to give up my job in publishing, because my husband Leo and I were about to adopt a longed-for baby boy.

Then, at a dinner party, I sat next to the glorious Godfrey Smith, ex-president of the Oxford Union, great journalist, author of many fine books, one of which, The Business of Loving, was a Book Society Choice. Godfrey was also editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine. During dinner I regaled him with tales of how disastrous I was domestically as a young working wife. I cited one occasion when my red silk scarf strayed into a launderette wash, so my husband Leos rugger kit came out streaked like the dawn, and he boasted of being the only member of the rugger team with a rose-pink jockstrap.

Godfrey laughed a great deal and asked me to write a piece about it, which he published in the colour mag in early 1969.

This was enhanced by a very flattering photograph of me joyfully holding our new baby, Felix.

Imagine my excitement when a week later Harold Evans, the great overall editor of the Sunday Times, summoned me and offered me my own column to write about anything I liked. The column amazingly lasted for thirteen years through the seventies and early eighties, often chronicling my chaos as a wife and mother working from home, and our lunatic but hugely enjoyable social life.

Sunday Times readers did tend to like or loathe what I wrote, with my first column upsetting them so much, Harold Evans was able to fill my next weeks column with their furious letters.

I am therefore delighted that my dear publishers Transworld are reissuing a collection of some of my favourite columns. You will find the selection covers among other things our London life in the sexy sixties and seventies and our move from Fulham to Putney Common.

What I love most about the book is that it brings back, not only my macho, forthright, funny husband Leo, who died of Parkinsons disease in 2013, but also my children Felix and Emily as they were growing up, my sweet parents and so many friends and adventures.

On the other hand, rereading the pieces, some fifty years later, I wonder: Was this really me, so up myself and so utterly obsessed with sex? Did I really dare write that? But I do so hope that readers both young and old enjoy them.

Lots of love,

Jilly Cooper CBE xx

Looking back on the first fraught year of my marriage, I realise we lived in total screaming chaos. I spent most of my time in tears not tears of misery, but exhaustion. I couldnt cook, I couldnt sew, I had no idea about running a house, my knowledge of sex was limited to Eustace Chesser and Lady Chatterley yet suddenly I was on trial: sexually, domestically, commercially, socially, and aware that I was inadequate on every count.

My husbands remarks, like: Do you really think the book case is the right place for a mouldy apple? would wound me to the quick or that despairing Lets start as we mean to go on as he looked at the flotsam of clothes strewn over the bedroom, and resented the fact that I had already appropriated five and three-quarters of the six drawers and three out of four of the coat hangers.

As we made love most of the night, I found it impossible to get up in the morning, cook breakfast, do my face and get out of the house by 8.15. Then followed an exhausting day at the office, only punctuated by one of those scurrying, shopping lunches. I was seldom home due to the caprice of London Transport before seven oclock. Then there was the bed to be made, breakfast to be washed up, the cat to be fed and chatted up, the day to be discussed and supper to be cooked. This was a proper supper (garlic, aubergines and all). The way to a mans heart was supposed to be through his stomach, so there was no getting away with pork pie or scrambled eggs. When I cooked moussaka for the first time we didnt eat until one oclock in the morning.

We were very gregarious and were asked out a great deal. My husband also played cricket and rugger at weekends, so as a besotted newly-wed I was only too happy to abandon the housework and watch him score tries and centuries.

As a result the flat became dirtier and more chaotic. The only time we ever really cleaned it up was when in-laws or relations came to stay, and my husband would then say that it was just like a barracks before the annual general inspection. How pretty those dead flowers look, said a kindly aunt. Have they become fashionable in London?

The only other possible moment to clean the flat was on my husbands occasional TA nights. Then I would hare round like a maniac, dusting and polishing; hoping, for once, to welcome him home scented and beautiful in a neglige with a faint smell of onions drifting from the kitchen. It never worked. Invariably he would let himself in un-noticed to find me tackling a mountain of dust under the bed with my bottom sticking out.

It was only after nine months, when the ice compartment wouldnt shut, that I learnt for the first time about defrosting the fridge. Things in the fridge were another headache. There were always those nine reproachful bowls of dripping, the tins of blackening tomato pure, the fish stock that never graduated into soup and the lettuce liquidising in the vegetable compartment.

Laundry was another nightmare. It took me months to master the mysteries of the launderette. Very early on in our marriage, a red silk scarf found its way into the machine with the rest of the washing. My husbands seven shirts came out streaked crimson like the dawn, and for days he wore cycla-men underpants and claimed he was the only member of the fifteen with a rose-pink jock-strap. Once the washing was done it lay around in pillowcases for ages, waiting to be ironed. My mother-in-law once slept peacefully and unknowingly on a pillowcase full of wet clothes.