My unlikely friendship with Jilly Cooper: We talked football over champagne and shepherd’s pie at her kitchen table, writes IAN HERBERT – now I will miss her letters so much

The first letter arrived perhaps four or five years ago – how dearly I wished I’d kept them all now – forwarded from the Daily Mail’s office and addressed in what became an unmistakable handwriting.

Jilly Cooper was researching the world of football for what would become her hugely successful bestseller Tackle, though rather than writing to ask my view on this aspect or that, it simply related that she’d liked a particular piece. That football thrilled her, that she loved Manchester City and to keep the articles coming.

It was hard to credit receiving such a letter – a card, in fact, adorned by with one of the many images of dogs which I came to know from her – because of the sender, and because letters don’t come any more. Certainly not ones radiating such light – ‘I like what you did.’ ‘I liked who you wrote about’ – in a hundred words or more.

So I wrote back, and another of her notes would duly arrive when some piece or other had struck her. It was generally because of the people they told of: Kevin Keegan, Ray Kennedy and Judith Gates, whose life with a footballer husband, Bill, in whose memory she now campaigns to make heading safer, was a love story, no less. Jilly liked that one, too.

Her research for her own book was tireless and after some time – a year perhaps – we met for lunch at her home near Stroud in Gloucestershire. It was after a glass of champagne, as we sat down to eat Shepherd’s Pie at her kitchen table, in front of the range, that I saw how many others had been blessed with this same correspondence. There, at the end of the kitchen table, were the dozens of cards sent back, relating the unfolding lives of so many she wrote to. Jilly was travelling far less, so the world came to the door.

It was the people of the football world she was asking me for a sense of, for her book, that afternoon. Harry Kane (she really loved Harry), Cristiano Ronaldo, Steven Gerrard, the Lionesses. What were these people, wonderful as she saw them, actually like?

Jilly Cooper and her beloved rescue greyhound Bluebell, whose death three years ago she felt so much. Her cards often had images of greyhounds on the front

I didn’t help so much and took far more away from that afternoon than she did. I had thoughts of writing a book at that time. ‘That sounds a bit gloomy. Write something fun,’ Jilly offered, when I told her of the one I was thinking I might write.

When I ended up writing a book about the Hollywood ownership of my team, Wrexham, who else but Jilly became my cheerleader. She included it in her round-ups of Christmas books in the Mail on Sunday and Good Housekeeping. We met up again at Forest Green Rovers, the club just down the road from her, who she also supported, on the day of a home game against Wrexham. She’d taken an executive box for family and friends and brandished my book, declaring all should read it.

A waterlogged pitch put paid to the game an hour before I reached the ground, but we all gathered for lunch anyway. Another indelible afternoon. I wrote some words about Tackle in my Daily Mail Sport column and was doing some work from Belgium a few days later when a landline call came from a number I didn’t recognise. It was Jilly, recipient of a million different write-ups, wanting to convey her delight 

I last saw her at the launch event for Tackle, in London’s Hatchards bookshop: A small, indistinctive figure amid the huge throng who had gathered on the narrow stairways and among the bookshelves, who then stepped up to speak. She brought that house down with her sparkling, engaging, fearlessly racy 20 minutes of talk.

Her book, needless to say, was a huge hit, propelling her to the front pages of newspapers of all stripes in a way that reflected why her magnetism transcended call divides of class and age. 

Looking back through her most recent cards on Monday, when news of her death, aged 88, came down, I remembered how my trip to Real Madrid to see Trent Alexander-Arnold, who’d spoken in Spanish at his introduction as a player, had caught her eye. ‘What a riveting adventure for him,’ she wrote. ‘We must all learn Spanish.’ 

We both mentioned meeting up several times and though it would have been easier for me, than her, to make that happen, it never did. How much I regret that, now. How much I will miss her wise counsel, her spirit and those so-distinctive letters. There is so much to take from her example. Live, love, explore – and write.