The Cotswolds village of Bisley is in mourning for its most famous and best-loved resident, Dame Jilly Cooper, who died aged 88 a week ago after a fall.
I grew up in Bisley and Jilly, always generous and warm, was one of my family’s dearest friends.
I remember her giving the address at my grandmother’s funeral – a brilliant portrait in which she imagined her sitting in heaven on a cloud with my late uncle drinking champagne.
No one but Jilly could have caught our grief and turned it into such grateful joy.
She was friends with the village milkman and the stockbroker alike, and always made time for young people. Jilly was very kind to me and gave such helpful feedback on my writing, replying at length to my letters in her tiny spider script.
When I was a girl in the 1980s, Bisley was in the less fashionable part of that now thoroughly chic bit of middle England. But it was an idyllic childhood, roaming in fields and getting lost on long country walks with our different dogs. We had a grocers’, a haberdashers’ and even a restaurant run by two air hostesses that opened intermittently depending on BA’s schedule.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but what we were really in was Riders country. The first of Jilly’s Rutshire Chronicles had clearly taken its inspiration from this lush rural patch in the Cotswolds.
Although it wasn’t trendy or chic, there was a never-ending supply of parties: dinner parties, hunt balls, drinks parties, garden parties, cricket parties and tea parties.
I remember at the age of 11 spraying a devastatingly handsome international cricket star with champagne after he led his team to victory at the village cricket match. Swoon. All of this was perfect for a romantic novelist such as Jilly.
Indeed, after all those parties I’m sure there were enough high jinks among the adults to inspire any number of best-selling bonkbusters.
So much has changed since then. Today the Cotswolds appears to have become more like Los Angeles, full of new celebrity residents who don’t like to drink and prefer to be in bed with a green tea by 9pm so they can be up at 5am to do ‘breathwork’.
Jilly was very kind to me and gave such helpful feedback on my writing, replying at length to my letters in her tiny spider script, writes Sybilla Hart
I didn’t realise it at the time, but what we were really in was Riders country. The first of Jilly’s Rutshire Chronicles had clearly taken its inspiration from this lush rural patch in the Cotswolds (pictured Disney Plus’ Rivals)
Did Dame Jilly approve of these clean-living incomers? I suspect not wholly.
I moved out long ago. And not by coincidence to a place that is as much like Riders’ country now as Bisley used to be.
Yes, it’s here in Suffolk that the spirit of Rupert Campbell-Black still lingers. Characters like Sarah Stratton still play tennis and latter-day Etta Bancrofts found syndicates in the village to train up young racehorses (see Jump!, ninth in the series).
While the Cotswolds is overrun by tourists crowding the chocolate-box streets, in Suffolk we’re left alone to get up to as much raucous fun as we like.
We didn’t necessarily want to leave 12 years ago. Yet we knew we could find a bigger farmhouse for our money in Suffolk, where my husband grew up.
I didn’t need underfloor heating or a membership to Soho Farmhouse, so we packed up the kids and off we went. We found the perfect place, with a pond, several resident cats and an old Essex barn. Much more than we could have afforded out west.
In fact, I was astonished to find that quite a few people I had grown up with in the Cotswolds popped up in East Anglia looking for an upbringing similar to our own. That was to say a pub that might still sell chicken in a basket (with a bar lady who’d look blank if you asked for avo on toast or a flat white) and a school car park that contained vehicles other than Range Rovers. What a relief.
When my mother came to visit, she said the towns reminded her of Stroud 30 years ago. She was right in more ways than one.
The parties and social gatherings in Suffolk are something else, and definitely give Dame Jilly’s bashes in Riders and Rivals (the second in the series) a run for their money. There was the time when, during an amateur production of The Tempest, a guest fell into a 12th-century moat whilst chasing the object of his affection both in the play and, it was whispered, in real life, too.
Or the occasion when, bored of opening champagne bottles the normal way, the beautiful birthday girl mounted a crate and proceeded to open four cases of champagne in quick succession with a sword formerly owned by one of Napoleon’s cavalrymen.
When I was a girl in the 1980s, Bisley was in the less fashionable part of that now thoroughly chic bit of middle England. But it was an idyllic childhood
Yes, it’s here in Suffolk that the spirit of Rupert Campbell-Black still lingers. Characters like Sarah Stratton still play tennis and latter-day Etta Bancrofts found syndicates in the village to train up young racehorses, writes Sybilla Hart
I remember being slightly baffled to discover the naked butler a friend had hired for her party couldn’t actually open a bottle of wine (I know because I asked him). You would have thought bottle-opening was a bare minimum, though I accept that wasn’t the point of his presence.
In the Riders era of the Cotswolds, there was a lot of wife-swapping, and often on a permanent basis. Perhaps that’s what comes from knowing the neighbours so well. Families would go on holiday and come back with a different husband or wife from the trip, as if it were perfectly normal. Affairs were rife, I suspect.
There seems to be a bit of that here in Suffolk, too.
One mother of three recently ran off with a hunky electrician who had been booked to fix her hot tub. (He looked like Mark Wright from TOWIE.)
Another dad took a well-trodden path and had an affair with the nanny. When asked why, he said the nanny was ‘at home more often’, which feels like a very 1980s excuse.
I bumped into a baffled dad the other day pushing a pram and asked him how the baby’s mum was. ‘She’s with another dad from the village hall toddler group,’ he told me glumly.
The hands-on dads aren’t very Jilly, but the village hall being a hotbed of sexual intrigue most definitely is.
Not all Cotswolds exiles can take it here. I know one who has fled back, telling me ‘no one was wearing the right shoes’ in Suffolk. But that is one of the many reasons I love this county. No one cares what shoes you wear or what you look like. People don’t care what car you drive or when you last had your hair done. It’s England, not LA.
They will forgive you for a lot of things apart from not being game for a laugh – just like Dame Jilly’s finest characters, in fact. And the brilliant, utterly irreplaceable woman herself.
