Our dear friend Jilly Cooper really should still be with us all this weekend. Her sudden and completely unexpected death last Sunday was the result, not of some deadly illness or bodily failure, but that great curse of age – a fall. Falls are the treacherous twists of fate that stalk the elderly. So many otherwise fit, healthy, mentally alert septuagenarians and octogenarians (Jilly was 88, fit as a fiddle and sharp as a scalpel) are undone by them. To lose Jilly to such a capricious happenstance is very hard for all those who adored her.
The Queen (Camilla) knew her for decades and led the shocked tributes hours after the bad news broke. “A wonderfully witty and compassionate friend,” she said, pointing out how “on form” Jilly was, right to the last. “It was a particular pleasure to see her just a few weeks ago at my Queen’s Reading Room Festival where she was, as ever, the star of the show… may her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.”
Well, if Heaven is, as many believe or at least hope, a version of our happiest times on Earth, then the Queen’s wish for Jilly’s personalised paradise is spot-on. We last saw Jilly at her honey-stoned country Cotswold home, on a sunlit summer evening in her rambling garden.
She was throwing a party(Jilly was always throwing parties) for the cast of Rivals, the smash-hit TV series based on her bestselling bonkbuster of the same name.
The garden was full of handsome men, beautiful women, and friendly, lolloping dogs. Jilly was in her element at the centre of it all, Champagne glass in one hand, a selection of doggy treats in the other, gossiping and flirting as only she could.
She had a particular favourite line that she used with men. The hero of her novels is Rupert Campbell-Black, “the handsomest man in England” (and biggest rake).
At some point in ANY conversation with ANY male friend – a bloke however old, however shaped, be he bald as a coot or blessed with a thick thatch – Jilly would lean in and whisper conspiratorially: “Of course, YOU’RE my Rupert… YOU’RE the one who inspired him.” She was shameless. It was very funny.
A huge part of Jilly’s appeal was her firm belief that being a grown-up could be and should be FUN. She couldn’t see why reaching adulthood meant you had to stop playing.
And her books draw you into that world. We defy anyone to read even a few pages of Rivals, or its predecessor Riders (set in the world of show-jumping) and not put the book down with a silly smile on their face.
We’ll always remember the words of one actor at that party. She’d never met Jilly before. “What do you think of her?” we asked.
“She’s like a glass of freshly-poured pink Champagne,” she said simply. “Bubbly, totally uplifting, and delicious.”
Chin-chin, Jilly.