Jilly Cooper’s memorial last week started with the dean of Southwark Cathedral telling a story from her funeral last year: as the congregation made their way to her final resting place, five horses ambled majestically across a field, and came to stand in formation, looking at the grave. They would not be budged and their intention was crystal clear: they were paying their horse-respect (this is not verbatim by the way) to an author who did as much for equine-kind as she did for humans. The story was pitch perfect; you could imagine Cooper laughing at it, at the same time as believing it, at the same time as thinking no funeral was complete without five horses.
The combination of romance, magnitude, absurdity, delight and animals could have come straight off the pages of a Jilly Cooper novel, but how would a dean know that? Did they also, back in the day, pass a bashed-up copy of Riders around dean school? (My friend who is a librarian expressed some professional irritation that, at her school, they couldn’t get it together to buy more than one copy of a book in such demand. She said by the time they’d all finished it, it looked like Magna Carta.)
The memorial was star-studded – the actual queen was there. People of a certain vintage were awed, overwhelmed even, to be singing I Vow to Thee My Country in a room where Rupert Everett was singing it (albeit it’s a gigantic room, a cathedral) and, again, you could imagine the scene as written by Cooper, who had an uncanny knack for being solemn and funny at the same time.
She was an inveterate correspondent and, after she died last October, a lot of conversations went: “This is the worst news I’ve had in ages”, “Did you ever meet her?”, “No, but she sent me a card”. At the service, I was sitting at the back, next to the guy who made the cards, and she had got to know him so well over the years that she’d started to send him a Valentine’s card. I said, “Wow, that’s a pretty special, if strangely circular relationship,” and he said, “Not really, her Valentine’s list had 300 people on it.” OK, that’s a lot, but I’m sure every one of them would have felt as special as one of those horses.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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