HOW JILLY KEEPS BOUNCING BACK
AS FOOTBALL fans go Jilly Cooper, doyenne of the posh bonkbuster, is a rather unlikely sight in the stands. Yet just two months ago the 79-yearold was at Wembley cheering on her local Gloucestershire side Forest Green as they played for promotion to the Football League.
And on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs yesterday she revealed the reason for her new hobby. After 40 years of writing racy tales of bedhopping amidst the polo and horse riding sets she is penning her next about footballers and WAGs (wives and girlfriends).
Divulging that the book’s typically cheeky title will be Tackle she asked presenter Kirsty Young: “Don’t you think it’s a brilliant idea?”
Jilly’s famously raunchy books, including Riders and Rivals, have sold millions worldwide and her newest – Mount! – out in September will see the return of her readers’ favourite horsey lothario Rupert Campbell-Black.
Now though she’s swapping the polo field and racing stables for the football pitch.
“Forest Green are absolutely sweet. They went to Wembley this year and took me. They were beaten by Grimsby which was really heartbreaking,” she told Young, with her trademark jolliness, before introducing the club’s anthem, Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley, as one of her eight discs.
“This is a song that fans sing and to hear 3,000 men sing this song is… It was terribly exciting at Wembley, I thought.”
Though her only previous interest in football was an apparent passion for former England striker Emile Heskey, she is now a devoted fan of “The Green Devils” and friends with the club’s chairman Dale Vince.
Jilly says of her venture into the so-called beautiful game: “I don’t think football could not be racy. You have got the managers who are enormously powerful and the WAGs.
“You get some terribly goodlooking footballers, particularly now when they come back from their holidays so they are all bronzed and hot to trot. I am very excited. It’s all there.”
She started writing novels in the 1970s with each taking around four years to complete. Just like her other books, Tackle will not be written using modern technology. “I’ve got a sweet typewriter called Monica which has got string attached to the space bar with a pair of scissors for cutting and pasting paragraphs,” Jilly has said.
HER tools of the trade may sound twee but she has a track record for setting pulses racing. When her best-seller Riders was published in 1985 the photo on the front cover depicting a man’s hand on a woman’s jodhpur-clad bottom caused outrage.
Jilly recalls: “My daughter Emily came home saying, “Mummy, mummy, your books have been banned at school!”
“I rang the headmistress and said, ‘If you ban my books I won’t be able to pay the school fees,’ so they were reinstated.”
Ironically it was while she was a reluctant pupil at Godolphin boarding school in Salisbury that Jilly’s interest in the opposite sex began. Born in Hornchurch, Essex, she grew up in Yorkshire and has described being sent away to school as an experience akin to prison. “My parents were very loving but when I first went to Salisbury from Yorkshire they never came to see me,” Jilly told Kirsty Young. “I wrote a lot to them but one couldn’t say you were unhappy. I started writing to boyfriends to cheer me up.
“I was about 14 when I had my first boyfriend but I didn’t have my first kiss until about 19.”
She once said the best kiss of her life was with Sean Connery in the late 1960s and has also confessed that the main reason she applied to go to Oxford University – she didn’t get in – was because of the 10 men to one woman ratio: “It’s all you thought about when you’d been to an allgirls’ school!”
But the love of her life was her military publisher husband Leo. They married in 1961 and after an ectopic pregnancy adopted two “darling, darling babies” Felix and Emily. They and her five grandchildren have been her solace since Leo’s death in 2013 from Parkinson’s.
“I was lucky. I married a very nice man. Our bedsprings creaked with our hysterical laughter,” Jilly has said.
SHE now shares her bed with her greyhound Bluebell. “I’m sure my darling housekeeper thinks I’ve got a lover. Because Bluebell’s got such long legs I start off one side of the bed and then Bluebell sticks her legs out so I have to get over to the other side of this huge double bed – so both sides are slept on.”
She admits she’s a better dogowner than
“I’m an awful granny. I love my grandchildren, they come and see me all the time but I don’t get left to look after them,” she told Radio 4. “I forget and wander off and think about writing.”
It was her own grandmother who instilled in her the philosophy by which she lives.
“She told me that when you see somebody you look for something nice to say about them to cheer them up. I think that’s not bad advice.
“I like to cherish people and make them feel happier.”
As Jilly’s millions of fans anticipate a deliciously racy read about the world of football they will surely attest that she has achieved those aims. she is a grandmother. WHILE Boris Johnson wins plaudits for delivering a speech in French during a visit to Paris, political leaders across the Channel don’t return the compliment.
Both current French president Francois Hollande and predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy are known to have a limited grasp of English, while former leader Jacques Chirac was hostile to the very idea.
When a French official chose to speak English during a European summit in 2006 Chirac boycotted the event. SPEAKING of mastering languages, Tory veteran Ken Clarke – who has a grasp of Russian – was in nostalgic mood as football fans celebrated the 50th anniversary of England’s World Cup win at the weekend.
The former chancellor was in the Wembley crowd during England’s 4-2 defeat of West Germany in 1966 and jokily claims he influenced Soviet Union linesman Tofik Bakhramov’s decision to award Sir Geoff Hurst’s crucial second goal. Noting Bakhramov seemed to hesitate amid German protests that the ball had not crossed the line, Clarke, sitting just yards from the linesman, recalls loudly urging him in Russian to allow it.
As Hurst’s goal was duly given the politician light-heartedly observes: “It seemed to work.”
PRESIDENTIAL contender Hillary Clinton’s American accent has long been a source of suspicion. While hailing from the more northerly state of Illinois she used to curiously adopt a strong Southern dialect when campaigning alongside Arkansas-born husband Bill in the early 1990s.
Yet by the time she was running to be a New York senator a decade later the former first lady sounded like she was born and bred on the East Coast. Cynical types suggest Hillary’s accent will adapt according to which parts of the country she most requires votes from in the coming months.