Forgive affairs, make him do the ironing – and go to bed ANGRY!

50 years after her landmark book How To Stay Married, JILLY COOPER admits she got almost everything wrong. Her new rules for marital harmony..?

Jilly Cooper, doyenne of the bonkbuster and magnificently now 82, is reflecting on the sea changes that have occurred in the half century since she was asked to write a manual, How To Stay Married, dispensing advice to newlyweds.

The book has just been republished for a new generation to celebrate its 50th anniversary so Jilly, in an exclusive interview, is looking back on her old counsel — by turns hilarious, callow, sensible and often politically incorrect — with a mix of amusement and dismay.

‘What appalling presumption!’ she says of her 32- year- old self for dispensing such strident opinions on sex, affairs and the division of household chores.

‘ i nearly died of horror when i re-read it. What a smug, opinionated little know-all i was! i announced sternly that men detested seeing women slaving in the house, so their wives should arrange to work from 8.30am to 4.30pm so they could rush home to clean, iron, cook and make

themselves look pretty before their husband got home from work.

‘ “If you amuse a man in bed,” I went on, “he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it,” or even more hubristically, “be unlikely to stray”.

‘How could I have insisted that “a woman should be grateful her husband wants her,” and suggested that if a wife refuses her husband sex then she has only herself to blame if he’s unfaithful?

‘I wrote some appalling things, but in mitigation, it was a very different era.’

Her counsel on what to do if you found out that your husband was cheating had an uncomfortable prescience.

‘If you discover he is having an affair with someone and he doesn’t know, play it cool,’ she advised in her book. ‘But if he knows you know, raise hell.’

In the 1990s, her adored husband Leo — who died six years ago of Parkinson’s disease — had a long affair with publisher’s secretary Sarah Johnson which became painfully public when Sarah wrote about it in a newspaper.

Did Jilly then heed her own advice when confronted with her husband’s infidelity? Actually, she says now, although betrayal was ‘agony’ her advice is to be conciliatory.

‘Forgive. That’s my recommendation. And pray it blows over,’ she says, as it did in her husband’s case.

Some years ago, she admitted that she too had a ‘brief fling’ early in her marriage, but Leo harboured no desire for vengeance. ‘He welcomed me back with open arms.’

During their 52-year marriage, Jilly and Leo enjoyed and endured much besides infidelity, but their shared commitment to stick together was inviolable.

I ask her what was the worst thing she survived in her marriage and she says, after slow deliberation, that aside from the agony of watching Leo’s decline with Parkinson’s — it was her infertility. ‘It was absolutely awful,’ she says. ‘There’s something tragic yet ridiculous about those abortive threshings night after night.

‘We tried for seven traumatic years, trailing from doctor to doctor, to have a baby and there was just one flicker of excitement when one of them said: “you’re pregnant,” before adding, “but it’s ectopic.” BUT we were able to adopt Felix at six weeks and emily when she was a week old. We were so lucky to be offered those heavenly babies. now you have to go through all kinds of bureaucratic rigmarole and you finally adopt a child when they’re five or six, which is far more difficult.’

The couple’s children were there with Jilly when Leo died.

‘At the end, he was so ill I used to think, “Please God, take him,” then feel terribly guilty. He was ill for 13 years. I had time to say goodbye. How heartbreaking it would be if a husband died suddenly or just after you’d had a terrible row.

‘ I’d said all the things I wanted to say, and when he died it was lovely as I was sitting there with the children, reciting all the old poems and silly jokes he loved, when emily put her hand on his chest and said: “I think he’s gone.”

‘He is buried in a graveyard nearby and I talk to him and take flowers to his grave every week or so.’ For all that marriage is imperfect, it is an institution that must — and will — survive, she believes.

‘At our ruby wedding anniversary, I compared marriage to two people rowing across a vast ocean in a tiny boat, sometimes revelling in blue skies and lovely sunsets, sometimes rocked by storms so violent we’d nearly capsized, but somehow we’d battled on,’ she says.

The glue that bound them was their shared humour: a capacity for uncontrollable laughter that defused even the most acrimonious rows.

‘It will endure. I’m sure of that,’ she says. ‘Being married makes you stick at a relationship. There’s a grim statistic that 50 per cent of children today can expect their parents to have split up by the time they’re 16. And it’s telling that of these separations, 80 per cent happen to unmarried couples.

‘Marriage, for all its limitations, makes you try harder. And children, above all, long for their parents to stay together. When a teacher asked one little girl to define love, she replied wistfully it would be seeing her mummy and daddy getting married.

‘A happy marriage is the best that life can offer,’ she reflects. ‘ But they don’t happen overnight. you have to build them like a cathedral, brick by brick.’

So here, with the wisdom of age and a fund of hard-won experience, are Jilly’s revised tips for staying married . . .