People Like Us by Tabitha Lasley
i was nine when i discovered jilly cooper. I found a copy of Rivals in the bedroom of a holiday rental. There was no way my mother would have kept such seditious material in the house. She took a dim view of Cooper’s work. I’m sure the feeling would have been mutual. My mother is the sort of person Cooper lampooned in her books: a left wing, lower-middle class intellectual who didn’t know her place. To be fair, my mother doesn’t know her place. She suffers from the societal equivalent of body dysmorphia: she imagines she’s far posher than she is.
Before I read Cooper, I thought the same. My imaginary poshness was borne out by the other kids at school, who called me “posh snob”, a moniker I’d done little to earn beyond handing my homework in on time and
having a weird, posh name. In the 1980s, Tabitha was still rare enough that you couldn’t find it on mugs or doorplates. When I complained about this to my mother, she pulled a sententious face and said: “I gave you your name so you would have chances.” She was a teacher and had seen colleagues running through the names in their registers on the first day of school, saying: “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Hmmm, might be all right?”
It was for the most childish of reasons that I started reading Rivals. It was the first time I’d ever seen my name in print and I was fascinated. Looking through the list of characters (a roll call that would grow with every book Cooper wrote), I alighted on Tabitha Campbell-Black, daughter of Rupert Campbell-Black. Ex-show jumper, Conservative MP, and all-round bounder, Rupert C-B is the black heart of the Rutshire Chronicles. A recurring character, and the only one to appear in every book, his cameos lend a sense of continuity to the series. In a rapidly changing world, full of upstarts and arrivistes, RC-B is the one constant.
Cooper doggedly insists he is the handsomest man in England, something I always found hard to picture, since I don’t find blond men attractive, especially when they murder foxes for fun. This is exactly the sort of snitty remark, by the way, that Cooper would expect of a hairylegged feminist like me. Feminists of all stripes get very short shrift in her novels (which is interesting, given that she was the main breadwinner throughout most of her marriage), but hairylegged ones, by which I suppose she means second wave, are the worst.
Anyway, I was more of a Ricky France-Lynch girl, myself; he of the hard Slavic cheekbones and irreparably damaged elbow. He doesn’t appear until her next opus, Polo, but he knows RC-B, because all upper-class people know each other, and Cooper’s heroes are always upper class. They own vast “country piles”, in varying states of repair (“crumbling” if they can’t lay their hands on any capital; not-crumbling, if they can), and tend to be bit problematic by today’s standards.
Campbell-Black is a relentless philanderer who infects his first wife with gonorrhoea and at one point, orchestrates her rape (swoon). FranceLynch kills his three-year-old son, after kidnapping him in a whisky-sodden rage and driving into a bridge. He then expects everyone to feel sorry for him, which they do, because Cooper’s characters operate in a system of almost feudal morality. Posh people can get away with pretty much anything, while the lower orders have to adhere to a strict code. If they’re kind to animals, unpretentious and make no attempt to disguise their accents, they might past muster. Cooper plays fairy godmother to her favourites, conjuring up a coup de foudre at the end of each novel, where a damaged, dissolute, glamorous character falls for someone plain, available and kind: Daisy and Ricky in Polo; Lysander and Kitty in The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous; Lucy and Tristan in Score!; Harriet and Cory in Harriet.
The only one of these denouements that feels even faintly plausible is Rupert and Taggie in Rivals. But then, everything about Rivals feels more authentic than the bloated potboilers that came after. Reading Cooper’s later work may be a exercise in diminishing returns, but Rivals remains brilliant: tautly plotted, very funny, and peopled with characters you actually care about. It was here that Cooper really hit her stride, skewering Anglo Saxon attitudes to marriage, money and the tricky interface between the two.
The Rutshire Chronicles is often dismissed as airport fiction, but Cooper owes as much to Jane Austen as she does to Jackie Collins. Just as middle-class Lizzy Bennet bags rich Mr Darcy, with her probity and spirited backchat, so Taggie wins Rupert, for no other reason than that she’s nice. It also helps that she’s Irish.
Cooper often sidesteps matters of social miscegenation by marrying her aristocrats off to foreigners, in the manner of a scheming Tudor monarch (Campbell-Black’s first wife, the hapless Helen Macaulay, was American). Cooper elucidates her reasons for this in Class. If the Rutshire Chronicles is her set text, then Class is her CliffsNotes. It is helpful to read the two in tandem. In Class, she explains that you can correct a foreigner’s vocabulary without looking snobbish, styling it as cultural, not social, critique.
Arcane, complex, frequently telegraphed yet rarely discussed, the British class system must be a nightmare to negotiate if you’re born outside this country. It’s hardly a picnic for the natives. Yet Cooper distils it all so deftly. From Rivals, I learned it wasn’t just manners of speech and dress that could be classed as common. You could get common gardens (witness Valerie Jones’ clashing flowerbeds, full of scarlet and mauve petunias); common bedrooms (Valerie Jones again, with her oval suede bed, covered with dials); common toilets (the first giveaway being the word “toilet”; the second, a cistern filled with a mysterious substance called Blue Loo); common dogs (mongrels; springer spaniels with undocked tails); common food (nouvelle cuisine or anything “mucked about”; Cooper’s characters all seem to subsist on nursery food). You could even get common stand-offs, where one common character tells another common character that she is common, as when Tony Baddingham snaps at Valerie Jones for not knowing that “Belvoir” is pronounced “beaver”. This, we are led to understand, is unforgivably common. If the English upper class is a club, then its first rule is that you can’t talk about it. Not directly, anyway. You can make snide little remarks and acid asides, but upfront communication is deeply infra dig.
It was also through Cooper’s books that I learned I was quite common. The signs were all there: we said “toilet”, “lounge”, “mirror”, “TV”. My sister and I had stopped calling our mother “mummy” before we turned five. Our father would keep putting sauce bottles on the table, and calling dinner “tea” (which he insisted be served at a déclassé 6pm).
My mother denied it, of course. For her, class was an unfixed quantity; something mutable and shifting, that could be outstripped with a little ingenuity. And maybe she was right. A lot of it is context dependant. If I lost caste when I left primary school and ceased to be the only child who did her homework, then I slithered even further down the scale at university.
It was only when I moved to Aberdeen, to write my own book, that I managed to claw back some cachet. The research involved hanging round pubs and working men’s clubs, interviewing offshore workers. “What’s your name, love?” they’d ask. And when I told them, they’d smile disbelievingly, as if I’d been caught out in some shameful lapse of taste. “No one’s called that,” they’d say. “You must be so posh!”
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