{"id":224234,"date":"2023-11-15T04:24:17","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T04:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/allworldreport.com\/?p=224234"},"modified":"2023-11-15T04:24:17","modified_gmt":"2023-11-15T04:24:17","slug":"my-teenage-jilly-cooper-obsession-made-me-hunt-down-a-cotswold-cad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allworldreport.com\/lifestyle\/my-teenage-jilly-cooper-obsession-made-me-hunt-down-a-cotswold-cad\/","title":{"rendered":"My teenage Jilly Cooper obsession made me hunt down a Cotswold cad&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>My teenage Jilly Cooper obsession made me hunt down a Cotswold cad&#8230; Thank goodness I grew out of it!<\/h1>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Cooper&#8217;s new Rutshire Chronicles novel Tackle! was published last week\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>READ MORE:\u00a0\u00a0EVERYONE&#8217;S TALKING ABOUT: Jilly Cooper<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I remember the first time I saw the boy I would nickname my Rupert Campbell-Black, after Jilly Cooper\u2019s infamous, heart-stopping anti-hero in the Rutshire Chronicles.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Marlborough? Isn\u2019t that a brand of cigarettes?\u2019 I gazed up at his strong jaw and chiselled cheek bones.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>He rested an arm on the stable door louchely (yes, we were at Pony Club camp) and sniggered. \u2018Haven\u2019t you heard of it? It\u2019s a school, silly. My school.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>I flushed with embarrassment. How could I not have known that? Jilly would have known, of course.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It was the early 1990s and I was nearly 15. After devoting most of my coming-of-age years to devouring Riders, Rivals, Polo and, not forgetting, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, I liked to imagine I was living in one of Jilly\u2019s magical novels.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/11\/13\/00\/77719887-12740515-image-a-10_1699834296377.jpg\" height=\"846\" width=\"634\"><\/p>\n<p>Georgina Fuller devoted most of her coming-of-age years to devouring Jilly Cooper&#8217;s novels Riders, Rivals, Polo and The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous<\/p>\n<p>Even now, 30 years later, I\u2019m thrilled to hear that devastatingly handsome Rupert once again features in her new instalment Tackle!, published last week, albeit this time as the rather less obviously lust-provoking owner of a local football club.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that Jilly would even consider such a job for Rupert is a measure of just how much times have changed.<\/p>\n<p>Today, of course, the Cotswolds \u2014 Rutshire\u2019s inspiration \u2014 plays host to a very different kind of Posh (and her multi-millionaire footballer), but back then Jilly would never have written a book about something as \u2018common\u2019 as football.<\/p>\n<p>In the 1990s, we still aspired to be Sloane Rangers. Princess Diana and Fergie were the IT girls of my childhood; Barbours, Norfolk sweaters and a Liberty hair scrunchie the look du jour.<\/p>\n<p>Yet I lived on the \u2018wrong side\u2019 of the Cotswolds divide \u2014 the Notswolds, as it\u2019s sometimes known, near Stratford-upon-Avon \u2014 and in large part thanks to Jilly, I felt it keenly.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I longed to be one of the girls from the local clique of farming families who seemed to own half the county and attracted the Rupert Campbell-Black types. But I lived in a house with a number, not a name, and couldn\u2019t compete with the posh set.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I had a pony, but I kept it at a livery yard rather than on my own farm. My provincial all-girls school was nowhere near as smart as the boarding schools frequented by the Pony Club kids.<\/p>\n<p>Today, all that sounds like ludicrous snobbery, of course. The idea that unless you belonged to one of three of four families or were exceptionally well connected, you didn\u2019t count, belongs \u2014 thankfully \u2014 to a world, pre-Beckhams, we have left long behind.<\/p>\n<p>But there it was in Jilly\u2019s Rutshire, and oh how I wanted it. It was all so impossibly glamorous. Her descriptions of rolling hills, tight jodhpurs and caddish horsemen with strong, muscular hands made me even more of a keen rider.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/11\/13\/00\/77719893-12740515-image-a-11_1699834312112.jpg\" height=\"634\" width=\"634\"><\/p>\n<p>Georgina grew up on the \u2018wrong side\u2019 of the Cotswolds divide \u2014 the Notswolds, as it\u2019s sometimes known, near Stratford-upon-Avon<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t care if it was fictional \u2014 to my romantic, impressionable teenage mind, it was compellingly real.<\/p>\n<p>And it was at Pony Club that I seemed most likely to step into it. Here I mingled with the likes of the Waley-Cohens (who lived in a nearby stately home, Upton House) and people who pronounced \u2018quiet\u2019 to rhyme with \u2018fart\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>I was one of the only ones there who didn\u2019t have a tuck box or my double-barrelled name sewn into my pants to prove they were mine at boarding school.<\/p>\n<p>Jilly didn\u2019t just offer me a tantalising glimpse of privilege and poshness, she also taught me, for better or worse, about men. Not much of it good.<\/p>\n<p>From her pages I absorbed the idea that men should be \u2014 like the philandering Rupert who treated his women only slightly better than his horses \u2014 \u2018bad boys\u2019 and leave women wanting more.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As one of his many mistresses, Cameron Cook, says in Polo: \u2018I know Rupert wouldn\u2019t have made me happy, but I\u2019d rather be miserable with him than happy with anyone else.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>It was the following summer that I met what I came to think of as my own Rupert, the boy with the foppish fringe, let\u2019s call him Jack, from Marlborough.<\/p>\n<p>A clandestine fumbling in a horsebox cemented our love and over the holidays we orchestrated several meet-ups at his house in (where else?) the Cotswolds, a few miles from what is now Lady Bamford\u2019s Daylesford Organic.<\/p>\n<p>I also became friends with a neighbour of Jack\u2019s, who spent her holidays riding ponies in the Cotswolds but lived in London\u2019s Notting Hill the rest of the time.<\/p>\n<p>I remember her mother, a lawyer, dropping her off at our modest cottage and looking around in horror at our low-beamed, poky downstairs.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/11\/13\/00\/77719891-12740515-image-m-13_1699834364315.jpg\" height=\"455\" width=\"634\"><\/p>\n<p>Growing up Georgina had a pony, which was kept at the livery, and went to Pony Club camp<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Where on earth do you all sleep?!\u2019 she asked. I managed to keep things going with Jack who was filled with a dazzling nonchalance, I thought \u2014 through letters and agonising phone calls but things culminated when we arranged a meet-up over New Year.<\/p>\n<p>He told me he would be staying with a school friend in South-West London. My mother told me that under no circumstances could I go to London on my own.<\/p>\n<p>I knew that no heroine from Jilly\u2019s books would let that stop them, especially not the feisty Perdita MacLeod from Polo. She was the character, \u2018with her outward insouciance and murderous wit\u2019, I was most desperate to identify with.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I wasn\u2019t going to let a piffling parental \u2018no\u2019 deter me. I was two weeks off turning 15 and madly in love.<\/p>\n<p>I persuaded my friend Kate, whose parents happened to live near a station with a direct train to Marylebone, to join me and later that night, we climbed out of her bedroom window and went to meet Jack and his friends in London.<\/p>\n<p>When we got there, Jack took one look at me and delivered a crushing Rupert-esque line which still haunts me to this day. \u2018Oh. You\u2019re not nearly as pretty as I remembered,\u2019 he said. What could be more devastating to a girl immersed in romantic novels?<\/p>\n<p>I had no comeback, but spent the rest of the night silently weeping into my Bacardi and coke. When my poor mother finally managed to track me down, she was incandescent with rage and promptly sent me to stay with my grandmother.<\/p>\n<p>I realise now that I had, through Jilly, been partly conditioned to think that this kind of behaviour from a posh boy was socially acceptable (and in keeping with his class, but not mine).<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/11\/13\/00\/77719885-12740515-image-a-15_1699834394106.jpg\" height=\"479\" width=\"306\"><\/p>\n<p>Cooper&#8217;s new Rutshire Chronicles novel Tackle! was published last week<\/p>\n<p>The women in Jilly\u2019s novels, especially Rupert\u2019s long-suffering wife, Taggie, put up with much worse.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, the character of the chivalrous Billy Lloyd-Foxe, Rupert\u2019s loyal best friend, who loves his capricious wife Janey beyond measure, showed me that men could and should be kind too.<\/p>\n<p>I eventually realised that someone like the fictional Rupert could never be a long-term prospect for someone sensitive like me. I am lucky to have found and married a very kind man who has never ridden a horse in his life.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s no denying that Jilly\u2019s books shaped me and the formative years of a generation of girls like me.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>She showed us how much fun sex could be (I still can\u2019t hear the word \u2018bush\u2019 without sniggering) but we also learned some rather old-fashioned lessons about class and masculinity.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t blame Jilly, she will always be an icon to me, but it has taken years to shake off those patriarchal ideals.<\/p>\n<p>I have since moved back to live on the scruffy side of the Cotswolds, which means I occasionally cross paths with middle-aged Rupert Campbell-Blacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d be lying if I said I didn\u2019t sometimes get a little frisson of excitement when I see a handsome man carrying a horse whip.<\/p>\n<p>But these days I don\u2019t chase after them. I may not have a double-barrelled surname but I\u2019ve realised that they are not a prerequisite for class, and my fondness for floppy fringes has long abated.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I rather like Jack Grealish. I hear Jilly is also a fan. Clearly, we have both moved on.<\/p>\n<p>Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/femail\/article-12740515\/My-teenage-Jilly-Cooper-obsession-hunt-Cotswold-cad-Thank-goodness-grew-it.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read Full Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My teenage Jilly Cooper obsession made me hunt down a Cotswold cad&#8230; Thank goodness I grew out&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224233,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>My teenage Jilly Cooper obsession made me hunt down a Cotswold cad... - All World Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/allworldreport.com\/lifestyle\/my-teenage-jilly-cooper-obsession-made-me-hunt-down-a-cotswold-cad\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My teenage Jilly Cooper obsession made me hunt down a Cotswold cad... - All World Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My teenage Jilly Cooper obsession made me hunt down a Cotswold cad&#8230; 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