by Jilly Cooper
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jilly Cooper
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
ONE
The Golden Middle
Diamond Scullers Are A Girl’s Best Friend
Sad-Olescence
Trial By Jury
Nude Without Violin
Rat Race
Bally-Awful
Not In Front Of The Children
Turn Right At The Spotted Dog
When Daddy Came Marching Home
TWO Portrait Gallery
Neil Kinnock
David Gower
Princess Michael Of Kent
East Enders
Lord Hailsham
Beverly Harrell
Margaret Thatcher
THREE
Hunting With The Hoorays
Arsenic For New Lace
Dashing Away With The Smooth Iron Lady
The Teen Commandments
The English Lieutenant’s Woman
Great Slugs Of Cognac
Ping Pong In Wiltshire
Excuse Me, Your Slips Are Showing
Please Keep To The Footpath
Copyright
About the Book
After moving to Gloucestershire Jilly Cooper wrote regularly for The Mail On Sunday for a number of years. This collection contains the cream of those pieces, reflecting many aspects of country life.
The topics she covers in her inimitable style range from Hunt Balls and Henley to love and sex in the age of AIDS. She has interviewed Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, Lord Hailsham, the cast of East Enders and the proprietress of a famous brothel in the Nevada desert. She writes about her fellow human beings and their foibles provocatively, affectionately – sometimes outrageously. Her portraits of family life in the Cooper household remain the most ruthless and hilarious of all.
About the Author
Jilly Cooper is a journalist, author and media superstar. The author of many number-one bestselling novels, she lives in Gloucestershire with her husband Leo, her rescue greyhound Feather and her black cat Feral.
She was appointed OBE in 2004 for services to literature, and in 2009 was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Gloucestershire for her contribution to literature and services to the county.
Also by Jilly Cooper
The British in Love
Riders
Animals in War
Class
Violets & Vinegar
Intelligent & Loyal
Super Men & Super Women
Women & Super Women
Jolly Marsupial
Super Jilly
Super Cooper
Jolly Super Too
Jolly Superlative
Jolly Super
Little Mabel Saves the Day
Little Mabel
Little Mabel Wins
Little Mabel’s Great Escape
Octavia
Emily
Harriet
Bella
Prudence
Imogen
Lisa & Co.
Hotfoot to Zabriskie Point
How to Survive Christmas
Leo & Jilly Cooper on Rugby
Leo & Jilly Cooper on Cricket
Leo & Jilly Cooper on Horse Mania
The Common Years
Rivals
How to Stay Married
How to Survive from Nine to Five
Turn Right at the Spotted Dog
And Other Diversions
Jilly Cooper
To Hamish Aird with love and
extreme gratitude
Preface
THIS IS THE first volume of collected pieces to appear for five years. It is also the first volume to appear consisting entirely of articles which first saw the light of day in the Mail on Sunday as opposed to the Sunday Times, my previous platform. The move to the Mail more or less coincided with our move six months later to Gloucestershire from London. This will become clear to the reader, who will no doubt notice a more rural atmosphere among the choice of subjects. I am particularly pleased to see this book appear as it has given me the chance, once again, to repair the ravages of newspaper sub-editors and in some cases to add or expand a little bit where the exigencies of space led to hasty and sometimes ill considered cuts being made. In the piece about Princess Michael (which caused so much trouble), for example, I wrote ‘Occasionally she can be manipulative’ which the paper changed to ‘She can be very manipulative’. This, I am sure the reader will agree, puts a different perspective on the matter.
Moving to the country was indeed a culture shock, not just to me but the whole family. There are lots of things about London, and dear Putney, that I miss. However, as I am sure will be apparent, there is no lack of material here to write about. Anyone who regards the countryside, and particularly that of our part of the Cotswolds, as a sleepy backwater will certainly have their eyes opened; the place is buzzing with incident, intrigue, gossip and humour – fertile ground indeed.
I would like to thank Stewart Steven, the Editor of the Mail on Sunday for allowing me to reprint these pieces. I am eternally grateful to him and his colleagues for constant guidance and encouragement. The fact that I found it necessary to make a point about restoring some of my original material was in no way a criticism. I always write over length, and newspapers have to cut somewhere. It is just the way they work. I would like to thank Annalise Kay for typing and invariably re-typing the manuscripts. I hope the reader will enjoy, as I did, looking back on the last momentous five years.
Bisley, Gloucestershire
June 1987
ONE
The Golden Middle
EVERYWHERE NEWSPAPERS ARE banging on about the good life beginning at forty. Sex appeal, we are told, has nothing to do with age. All the most admired women – Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Joan Collins, the Lindas Grey and Evans – are middle-aged. No one breathes a word about the traumas of the menopause any more.
And this week Princess Michael has jumped on to the bandwagon. Sailing through the pain barrier of being forty, she maintains she is entering a golden age of confidence and maturity, when she will trust her own instincts instead of listening to other people.
I wish I felt like that. At forty-seven, I should be in my prime. But I find myself increasingly riddled with self-doubt and about as buoyant at the moment as a snowball in a microwave. If I am honest, what really worries me about advancing age is how much longer I will go on attracting the opposite sex. I have an adorable husband, whom I love dearly. But he’s in London half the week, and I worry, if I go off dramatically, that he’ll go off me, and go off.
I don’t actually want scores of men after me. I’m not talking about making out. I suspect having just emerged from seven months in enforced isolation finishing a book, I am missing all those consoling flirtations of everyday life that so boost the morale: the eye-meet in the tube, the chat-up at the party, the Gosh you’re looking great, the wolf whistle from the man on the scaffolding, who can’t see that the glow in your cheeks is a grid of red veins.
Perhaps I’m insecure because my sexual confidence took a bashing recently. Last year I did a television series, with a wildly handsome actor. As the weeks went by, he gently chatted me up, and I found myself looking forward to each programme with gently increasing excitement.
Then on the final night, just as we were going on, he led me away from the rest of the panel. Did I mind, if he asked me something, he’d been screwing himself up to do so for weeks.
‘Go on,’ I said faintly.
‘I’m madly in love,’ he blushed
furiously.
‘Go on.’
‘With the girl who does your make-up. Would you put in a good word for me?’
Talk about a woman of subsidence.
Then because of the book I only went to two parties this Christmas. On New Year’s Eve at midnight, I found myself alone in the hall under the mistletoe with the handsomest man in Gloucestershire – and he merely pecked me on the cheek.
At the second party, a man who was into Chinese birth signs asked me the year I was born. Bravely in front of the throng, I told him. But instead of going into flattering paroxisms of disbelief, he said: ‘You’re a buffalo. Stolid, dependable, and totally humourless. Absolutely you, in fact.’
Buffalo Jill – hardly attractive, is it?
Another problem is that Joan Collins has raised all our middle-aged expectations. If Alexis can still inflame men in her fifties, why can’t we? The trouble is that my generation were all warned at school that any wicked actions would show in our faces after a certain age, that if we wanted to look young, we should soft-pedal our make-up, wear pastel shades, and eschew smoking and drinking. And there’s Alexis, the archetypal Mrs Wrong, breaking all the rules, behaving appallingly, lurid in fuchsia pink, chewing on cigars and permanently plastered with slap and on dry Martinis.
But to return to Princess Michael and her new confidence, I suspect she is batting from a position of strength because she is a dazzlingly beautiful woman with an attractive, adoring husband. The real pain barrier, because of the chronic shortage of spare men, must be entering middle-age if you’re single, divorced or unhappily married and searching for a mate.
There’s only one remotely attractive single man in his mid-forties in our part of Gloucestershire, and his feet haven’t touched the ground for five years. To find a man, you’ve got to turn into Mrs Wrong, and poach a husband. Perhaps that’s what’s making us married women so twitchy.
Princess Michael also has very young children, who give her the air and the illusion that she is a young mother. Young children, too, tend to think their mothers are perfect. Only when they become teenagers does scepticism creep in.
In the old days, for example, I never worried about clothes. But my children at sixteen and thirteen have now reached the beady, ultra-fashionable stage, when a collar too long, a trouser leg too wide, a skirt a fraction the wrong side of mid-calf – or mid-cellulite in my case – is beyond the pale.
Nor does it help that they go into paroxisms of mirth as they rifle my wardrobe.
‘I had great success in that jump suit in the seventies,’ I mutter sulkily.
‘Pick-your-nose collars and disgusting flairs. Yuk!’ they screech. ‘You couldn’t have got anyone in that, it’s gross.’
And in middle age who am I trying to impress? Sucking up to the children, I wander round, shirt collars up, shirt tails hanging out from under my jersey – only to be told by my husband for God’s sake to tuck them in.
Nor do I have the courage of my convictions any more. Learning that vamps were in fashion, I dug my old plunging black out of mothballs to address the Farmers Union in November, then getting cold feet rather than cold cleavage, rammed my feather boa into the plunge all evening. I was a bit nervous, too, as a middle-aged buffalo, that the farmers might pack me off to market.
Mid-January, of course, is the worst time of year for wrinklies. How glamorous all the mothers looked as they gathered in their fur coats for the end of term carol service at my daughter’s school in December. Four weeks later, post Xmas, post school hols, battered by rows about impossibly untidy bedrooms, unwritten thank-you letters, and washing not brought down, the same mothers were virtually unrecognisable. Boots in Volvos, we all converged on the school like Valkyries, eyes tiny with tiredness, waists thickened by turkey leftovers and despair. My jeans are so tight at the moment, my eyes pop out every time I bend down.
One has to recognise, too, the signs of decay. At forty I wasn’t bad. I could at least count my grey hairs. Now I’m pushed to find a blond one. My body skin looks OK but goes into tiny pleats when squeezed, which is admittedly not a lot these days.
Perhaps it’s the Gloucestershire damp, but getting up in the morning, I find myself stumping into the bathroom as stiffly as the tin man in the Wizard of Oz. And if I don’t get to an oculist and a dentist soon, I’ll fail my MOT – never mind about jumpstarting my husband.
Nor, being such a drip about pain, am I likely to rush to health clubs and get my cellulite pummelled till I howl for mercy. I’d rather have my spirits lifted than my face. I tried lifting my face the other day in the mirror. But I just looked Chinese. Mrs Wrong may pull them in – but I can’t see the local bloods queuing up for Mrs Wong.
Finally, even if I wanted to, it’s not easy for the wrinkly to break out. Both the insecurity and the security are too great. No one is quicker on the draw than a teenager, which rules out any illicit incoming telephone calls. Last summer, to prove it, I actually had a date. My husband was in London. A friend was away and, with her blessing, her delectable husband asked me out to dinner. But, even with it all above board, I was so nervous I couldn’t even put on my make-up. It’ll come back, like riding a bicycle I kept telling myself.
The children hung around making helpful suggestions.
‘You’d quadruple the men after you, if you cut your hair short,’ yelled my son over the roar of the hair-dryer.
‘Eyeliner goes on better if you pull your eyelids out,’ said my daughter. ‘And you’re not wearing those gross patent leather sandals? Yuk!’
‘Yuk off,’ I snapped.
In fact I had a magical evening. But I did notice the moment we sat down to dinner, my date put on his glasses. I’d never seen him wear glasses before, and he’s far too young to need them to read the menu. Alexis, and no doubt Princess Michael in her new confidence, would have construed it as a compliment that he wanted to see me better. I read it as distancing. In my youth, men whipped off their glasses when they wanted to fascinate.
As we got home at midnight, even before I opened the car door, the front door opened, and there were my son, two dogs and four cats, brandishing magnifying glasses, looking for finger prints.
‘How did you get on,’ said my son.
Within minutes my daughter rang from a friend’s house: How had I got on?
Next morning the same enquiry came in quick succession from my husband in London, my date’s wife in Devon, my daily, my secretary and my very good friend the milkman.
‘Well I didn’t get off with him,’ I admitted.
I suppose it was comforting that they were all so relieved.
Diamond Scullers Are A Girl’s Best Friend
HENLEY WAS SO wet this year it should have been rechristened Duckley. Happily I was accompanied by two young men so glamorous I hardly noticed the damp and cold. One of them was man-about-town, Johnnie Service. The other, a lynx-eyed naturalist called James McEwan, was just back from stalking leopard in Nepal.
‘What a frightful season,’ grumbled Johnnie, as we drove past battered banks of meadowsweet through the rain-dark tree tunnels leading into Henley. ‘I’ve been pissed on at Ascot, Wimbledon, the Fourth of June and now Henley, and no doubt, I’ll be pissed on at Goodwood.’
Despite the deluge, the band was whizzing through The Marriage of Figaro as we arrived and the carpark filling up with cheerful, broad-bottomed men in coloured jackets and pink and blue caps. Their mouths watered as they unpacked lavish picnics, and chopped up apple and cucumber to make Pimms.
One party had even laid out silver candlesticks on a snow-white table cloth. There’s a Dunkirk (or rather a knife and forklands) spirit about the English which seems to make them enjoy outdoor jaunts even more if the weather is grisly.
Happily, too, Johnnie and James had perfect manners: so quick on the bottle and the umbrella that I never had a dry glass nor a raindrop falling on my head all day. Such a refreshing change from all those role-reversed males who snatch one’s umbrella in a panic in case their
perms kink in the rain.
In the distance, the river rippled olive green and shiny as a Harrods carrier bag.
‘Shouldn’t we be watching the races?’ I asked.
‘God no,’ said James refilling my glass. ‘Johnnie only watched two races in four days last year.’
‘Anyway it’s considered frightfully unlucky to look at the water,’ explained Johnnie.
All around us Bucks Fizz seemed to have been replaced by a foul concoction called Bellini, consisting of peach juice and champagne, and tasting like the remains of tinned fruit salad left too long in the fridge.
The rain was getting worse. A pretty girl in a straw hat and a blue mini squelched past in gum boots. Two Barbara Cartlands arrived in a large Bentley which progressed in a series of jerks, and ran over a deckchair to loud cheers. They were followed by a Range Rover full of yelling punks. One young blade had even dyed his rough-haired dachshund’s beard flamingo pink to match his hair.
Johnnie looked disapproving.
‘Do you know the difference between a Range Rover and a hedgehog?’ he asked. ‘The hedgehog has the pricks on the outside.’
James McEwan adjusted his panama hat, and said it was a shame the Henley colours were the same as the Argentinian national flag. Any minute now the band would break into ‘I love Paras in the Springtime’. The Harrier Jump Jet set were also out in force, large ladies in larger hats swooping on one another with an antler clash of umbrellas: ‘Deirdre, dar-ling, you’re not still with Beardie?’
‘My dear, I am,’ screamed back Deirdre. ‘Our house was so jolly cold last winter when the central heating collapsed, Beardie had to come back into my bed, and everything started up again.’
As the weather showed no signs of lifting, we went to lunch. Fortunately there was a bar halfway along the interminable queue so no one needed be without a drink for a second. A sweet girl in a boater told us about her ancient uncle who’d attended her sister’s school play this summer.
‘Uncle Willy’s head kept lolling on to his shoulder, and we all thought he was nodding off. Only later we discovered he had this straw through his buttonhole attached to a hip-flask in his breast-pocket.’