Praise for Between the Covers
‘What better gift to give for Christmas than this wonderfully irreverent collection of the great Jilly Cooper’s columns from the 60s?’ i newspaper
‘No one else can make me laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time, quite like Jilly Cooper’
Gill Sims
‘Jilly Cooper’s non-fiction is just as entertaining as her novels’
Pandora Sykes
‘This book has given me so much pleasure’
Alan Titchmarsh
‘Britain needs this jolly Jilly Cooper collection . . . Line after line, anecdote after anecdote is laugh-out-loud funny, the prose bouncing along like a labrador puppy’
The Times
‘There are so many lifestyle columnists today, you forget that Cooper did it first and did it best’
The Telegraph
‘A collection of Jilly Cooper’s vintage newspaper columns is bitchy, sexy, insightful and, most of all, great fun’
Observer
‘She is simply a legend’
Daily Mail
Jilly Cooper was a journalist, author and media superstar. The author of many number one bestselling books, she lived in Gloucestershire where her groundbreaking Rutshire Chronicles series was set.
Awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Gloucestershire and Anglia Ruskin, she also won the inaugural Comedy Women in Print lifetime achievement award in 2019, and was appointed DBE in 2024 for services to literature and charity. She died in 2025.
FICTION
NON-FICTION
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
ROMANCE
ANTHOLOGIES
By Jilly Cooper
The Rutshire Chronicles: Riders
Rivals
Polo
The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous Appassionata
Score!
Pandora
Wicked!
Jump!
Mount!
Tackle!
How to Stay Married
How to Survive from Nine to Five
Jolly Super Men and Supermen
Jolly Super Too Women and Superwomen
Work and Wedlock
Jolly Superlative
Super Men and Super Women
Super Jilly Class
Super Cooper
Intelligent and Loyal
Jolly Marsupial Animals in War
The Common Years Hotfoot to Zabriskie Point (with Patrick Lichfield)
How to Survive Christmas
Turn Right at the Spotted Dog
Angels Rush In Araminta’s Wedding Between the Covers
Little Mabel
Little Mabel’s Great Escape
Little Mabel Wins
Little Mabel Saves the Day
Emily Bella
Harriet
Octavia
Prudence
Imogen
Lisa & Co
The British in Love
Violets and Vinegar
Between the Covers
sex, socialising and survival
Jilly Cooper
PENGUIN BOOK S
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First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers Corgi edition published 2021
002
Copyright © Jilly Cooper 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted Extract on pp. 6 and 7 from Love Poem by John Frederick Nims, used by permission of Chicago University Press. Lyric on p. 219 from When I’m Sixty-Four by The Beatles (lyrics by Lennon-McCartney).
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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To the late Godfrey Smith With love and gratitude
AUTHOR ’ S NOTE
Nineteen sixty-eight was a miracle year for me. At thirty-one, I was poised to give up my job in publishing, because my husband Leo and I were about to adopt a longed-for baby boy.
Then, at a dinner party, I sat next to the glorious Godfrey Smith, ex-president of the Oxford Union, great journalist, author of many fine books, one of which, The Business of Loving, was a Book Society Choice. Godfrey was also editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine. During dinner I regaled him with tales of how disastrous I was domestically as a young working wife. I cited one occasion when my red silk scarf strayed into a launderette wash, so my husband Leo’s rugger kit came out streaked like the dawn, and he boasted of being the only member of the rugger team with a rose-pink jockstrap.
Godfrey laughed a great deal and asked me to write a piece about it, which he published in the colour mag in early 1969.
Th is was enhanced by a very flattering photograph of me joyfully holding our new baby, Felix.
Imagine my excitement when a week later Harold Evans, the great overall editor of the Sunday Times, summoned me and offered me my own column to write about anything I liked. The column amazingly lasted for thirteen years through the seventies and early eighties, often chronicling my chaos as a wife and mother working from home, and our lunatic but hugely enjoyable social life.
Sunday Times readers did tend to like or loathe what I wrote, with my first column upsetting them so much, Harold Evans was able to fi ll my next week’s column with their furious letters.
I am therefore delighted that my dear publishers Transworld are reissuing a collection of some of my favourite columns. You will find the selection covers among other things our London life in the sexy sixties and seventies and our move from Fulham to Putney Common.
What I love most about the book is that it brings back, not only my macho, forthright, funny husband Leo, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 2013, but also my children Felix and Emily as they were growing up, my sweet parents and so many friends and adventures.
On the other hand, rereading the pieces, some fi fty years later, I wonder: Was this really me, so up myself and so utterly obsessed with sex? Did I really dare write that? But I do so hope that readers both young and old enjoy them.
Lots of love, Jilly Cooper CBE xx
The Young Wife’s Tale
Looking back on the first fraught year of my marriage, I realise we lived in total screaming chaos. I spent most of my time in tears – not tears of misery, but exhaustion. I couldn’t cook, I couldn’t sew, I had no idea about running a house, my knowledge of sex was limited to Eustace Chesser and Lady Chatterley – yet suddenly I was on trial: sexually, domestically, commercially, socially, and aware that I was inadequate on every count.
My husband’s remarks, like: ‘Do you really think the book case is the right place for a mouldy apple?’ would wound me to the quick – or that despairing ‘Let’s start as we mean to go on’ as he looked at the flotsam of clothes strewn over the bedroom, and resented the fact that I had already appropriated five and three-quarters of the six drawers and three out of four of the coat hangers.
As we made love most of the night, I found it impossible to get up in the morning, cook breakfast, do my face and get
out of the house by 8.15. Then followed an exhausting day at the office, only punctuated by one of those scurrying, shopping lunches. I was seldom home – due to the caprice of London Transport – before seven o’clock. Then there was the bed to be made, breakfast to be washed up, the cat to be fed and chatted up, the day to be discussed and supper to be cooked. Th is was a proper supper (garlic, aubergines and all).
The way to a man’s heart was supposed to be through his stomach, so there was no getting away with pork pie or scrambled eggs. When I cooked moussaka for the first time we didn’t eat until one o’clock in the morning.
We were very gregarious and were asked out a great deal. My husband also played cricket and rugger at weekends, so as a besotted newly-wed I was only too happy to abandon the housework and watch him score tries and centuries.
As a result the flat became dirtier and more chaotic. The only time we ever really cleaned it up was when in-laws or relations came to stay, and my husband would then say that it was just like a barracks before the annual general inspection. ‘How pretty those dead flowers look,’ said a kindly aunt. ‘Have they become fashionable in London?’
The only other possible moment to clean the flat was on my husband’s occasional TA nights. Then I would hare
round like a maniac, dusting and polishing; hoping, for once, to welcome him home scented and beautiful in a negligée with a faint smell of onions drifting from the kitchen. It never worked. Invariably he would let himself in unnoticed to find me tackling a mountain of dust under the bed with my bottom sticking out.
It was only after nine months, when the ice compartment wouldn’t shut, that I learnt for the first time about defrosting the fridge. Th ings in the fridge were another headache. There were always those nine reproachful bowls of dripping, the tins of blackening tomato purée, the fish stock that never graduated into soup and the lettuce liquidising in the vegetable compartment.
Laundry was another nightmare. It took me months to master the mysteries of the launderette. Very early on in our marriage, a red silk scarf found its way into the machine with the rest of the washing. My husband’s seven shirts came out streaked crimson like the dawn, and for days he wore cyclamen underpants and claimed he was the only member of the fi fteen with a rose-pink jock-strap. Once the washing was done it lay around in pillowcases for ages, waiting to be ironed. My mother-in-law once slept peacefully and unknowingly on a pillowcase full of wet clothes.
In fact my ironing was so disastrous that for a while we tried the laundry. Th is presented insuperable problems. One week we were too poor to get it out, the next weekend we’d be away, the next they’d shut by the time we got there, then finally we found they’d lost all our sheets. One laundry, we discovered afterwards from the butcher next door, was notorious for ‘losing’ sheets.
Our own dinner parties were not without incident. The first time my mother came to dinner the blanquette of veal was flavoured with Vim, and the chocolate mousse, left in the fridge all night, was impregnated with garlic and Kit-eKat. The cat once ate his way through two large packets of frozen scampi and, the night my husband’s boss came to dinner, stripped the salad niçoise of its tuna fish and anchovies.
The flat, as I have said, got grimier and grimier, and the same week that a fungus began to grow under the sink I overheard someone say at a cocktail party that we lived in ‘engaging squalor’. It was the last straw, and we hired a daily woman. It was not a success. I spent far more time than before cleaning up before she came, and after the first few weeks the standard went down. Then my husband came back one lunch hour and found her in our bed with the electric blanket and the wireless on.
The cats – we soon acquired a second – did not add to the ease of our married life. Whenever the doorbell rang I used to drench myself in scent to cover the smell of tomcat, and in summer there were fleas. The landlord forbade pets in the house, so the day he came to look over the flat the cats were locked in the wardrobe.
In spite of the ‘engaging squalor’, our spare room was permanently occupied; girls who had left their lovers or husbands who had left their wives, people who came from abroad or up from the country, all found a flea-bitten home there. The hall was always full of carrier bags full of knickers or the cornucopian suitcases of birds of passage. One man came for two days and stayed for four months. One drunken Irishman who started rampaging lustfully round the fl at in the still watches of the night was locked in his bedroom. Next morning we found him in the kitchen making coff ee, and the imprint of his huge sleeping body remained outside on the long grass we called our lawn.
‘When I was first married,’ said a friend wistfully, ‘I could never make mayonnaise. Humphrey kept kissing me and the oil would go in great dollops instead of drips, and the whole thing curdled. Now we’ve been married five years and can
afford a mixer, and I make perfect mayonnaise every time now – it’s my marriage that has curdled.’
We have been married seven years now – I still can’t make mayonnaise – but we’re not itching, and our marriage hasn’t curdled. Even so I asked my husband to name, after seven years, the things that irritated him most about me.
His answers came out pat and immediate: using his razor on my legs and not washing it out; not putting tops back on tonic or soda water, or the ice tray back in the fridge; those little balls of Kleenex everywhere; the eighteen odd socks in his top drawer; the red rings of indelible lipstick on his handkerchief; running out of loo paper/soap/toothpaste; forgetting to turn off lights/fires/the oven; and, of course, my friends.
‘OK, OK,’ I said crossly. Then I remembered a poem by an American poet called John Frederick Nims, which my husband had sent me when I was feeling suicidal early on in our marriage, which had suddenly made everything all right:
My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases, At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring . . .
Forgetting your coff ee spreading on our fl annel, Your lipstick grinning on our coat. So gaily in love’s unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt Bourbon fl oat.
Be with me, darling, early or late, smash glasses, I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty All the toys of the world would break.
Losing Face
I was sitting in the car with a teenage friend the other day, when a girl in a green shift and long blonde hair sauntered by.
‘She’s pretty,’ I said, thinking narcissistically that she looked faintly like me.
‘If you like that sort of thing,’ said my teenage friend, shifting her chewing gum to the other side of her mouth.
‘What sort of thing?’ I demanded.
‘Oh, those draggy clothes and that old-hat make-up. I mean, no one looks like that any more.’
I digested this and craned my neck to look in the driving mirror. Was I out of date, too? Did no one look like me either? I picked up the evening paper when I got home and found a feature on eye make-up. ‘This is the face of 1971,’ said the headline. ‘Lashings of false eyelashes but chuck out that eyeliner.’
Charming, thought I. Eyeliner is the only thing that transforms my eyes from very piggy to not so piggy, and the only