My teenage obsession with Jilly Cooper sent me on the hunt for a Cotswold villain… Luckily I’ve grown out of it!

I remember the first time I saw the boy I would call my Rupert Campbell-Black, after Jilly Cooper’s infamous, heartbreaking anti-hero in the Rutshire Chronicles.

‘Marlborough? Isn’t that a brand of cigarette?’ I looked up at his strong jaw and chiseled cheekbones.

He put an arm on the stable door (yes, we were at pony club camp) and chuckled. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of it? It’s a school, crazy. My school.’

I blushed with shame. How could I not know that? Of course Jilly would have known.

It was the early nineties and I was almost fifteen. After spending most of my adulthood devouring Riders, Rivals, Polo, and, not to mention, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, I liked to imagine myself in one of Jilly’s magical novels.

Even now, thirty years later, I’m thrilled to hear that the devastatingly handsome Rupert appears again in her new episode Tackle!, published last week, albeit this time as the less obviously aphrodisiac owner of a local football club.

The fact that Jilly would even consider such a job for Rupert is a measure of how much times have changed.

Today, of course, the Cotswolds – Rutshire’s inspiration – are home to a very different breed of Posh (and its multi-millionaire footballer), but back then Jilly would never have written a book about something as ‘ordinary’ as football.

In the 1990s we still aspired to be Sloane Rangers. Princess Diana and Fergie were the IT girls of my youth; Barbours, Norfolk sweaters and a Liberty hair scrunchie create the look du jour.

Yet I lived on the ‘wrong side’ of the Cotswolds divide – the Notswolds, as it is also known, near Stratford-upon-Avon – and thanks in large part to Jilly, I felt that acutely.

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’t compete with the fancy family.

Yes, I had a pony, but I kept it in a stable instead of on my own farm. My provincial girls’ school wasn’t nearly as smart as the boarding schools the Pony Club kids frequented.

Nowadays, of course, that all sounds like ridiculous snobbery. The idea that unless you belonged to one of the three or four families or were exceptionally well connected, you didn’t count belongs – thankfully – to a pre-Beckham world that we have long left behind.

But there it was in Jilly’s Rutshire, and oh how I wanted it. It was all so impossibly glamorous. Her descriptions of rolling hills, tight riding breeches and crazy riders with strong, muscular hands made me even more of an avid rider.

I didn’t care if it was fictional; to my romantic, impressionable teenage mind, it was compellingly real.

And it was at the Pony Club that I was most likely to get into. Here I mixed with the likes of the Waley-Cohens (who lived in a nearby stately home, Upton House) and those who pronounced ‘quiet’ to rhyme with ‘fart’.

I was one of the only ones there who didn’t have a packing box or had my name sewn into my pants in double barrel to prove they were mine at boarding school.

Not only did Jilly give me a tantalizing glimpse of privilege and chic, she also, for better or worse, taught me about men. Not much of it good.

From her pages I took the idea that men – like the flirtatious Rupert who treated his women only slightly better than his horses – had to be bad boys and leave women wanting more.

As one of his many mistresses, Cameron Cook, says in Polo, “I know Rupert wouldn’t have made me happy, but I would rather be miserable with him than be happy with anyone else.”

It was the following summer that I met what I came to think of as my own Rupert, the boy with the foppish edge, let’s call him Jack, from Marlborough.

A clandestine dalliance in a horsebox cemented our love and over the holidays we hosted several get-togethers at his home in (where else?) the Cotswolds, a few miles from what is now Lady Bamford’s Daylesford Organic.

I also became friends with a neighbor of Jack’s, who spent her holidays pony riding in the Cotswolds, but lived the rest of the time in Notting Hill, London.

I remember her mother, a lawyer, dropping her off at our modest house and looking around in horror at our low, puny ground floor.

“Where are you all sleeping?!” she asked. I managed to keep things going with Jack, who was filled with a dazzling nonchalance, I thought – through letters and painful phone calls, but things culminated when we arranged to meet over New Year.

He told me he was going to stay with a school friend in South West London. My mother told me that under no circumstances could I go to London alone.

I knew that none of the heroines in Jilly’s books would let that stop her, especially not the feisty Perdita MacLeod from Polo. She was the character, “with her outward insouciance and murderous humor,” that I most desperately wanted to identify with.

I wasn’t deterred by a naughty parental ‘no’. I was off for two weeks when I turned 15 and madly in love.

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 evening we climbed out of her bedroom window and went to meet Jack and his friends in London.

When we got there, Jack took one look at me and delivered a devastating Rupert-esque sentence that still haunts me to this day. ‘Oh. You’re not nearly as beautiful as I remembered,” he said. What could be more devastating for a girl engrossed in romance novels?

I didn’t come back, but spent the rest of the night quietly crying into my Bacardi and Coke. When my poor mother finally managed to track me down, she became incandescent with anger and promptly sent me to live with my grandmother.

I now realize that I had been conditioned, in part, by Jilly, to think that this kind of behavior from a posh boy was socially acceptable (and in keeping with his class, but not mine).

The women in Jilly’s novels, especially Rupert’s long-suffering wife, Taggie, endured far worse.

Fortunately, the character of the chivalrous Billy Lloyd-Foxe, Rupert’s loyal best friend, who loves his fickle wife Janey excessively, showed me that men can and should be kind too.

Ultimately, I realized that someone like the fictional Rupert could never be a long-term prospect for someone as sensitive as me. I am fortunate to have found and married a very kind man who has never ridden a horse in his life.

There’s no denying that Jilly’s books have shaped me and the formative years of a generation of girls like me.

She showed us how fun sex can be (I still can’t hear the word ‘bush’ without chuckling), but we also learned some rather old-fashioned lessons about class and masculinity.

I don’t blame Jilly, she will always be an icon to me, but it took years to shake off those patriarchal ideals.

I’ve since moved back to live on the seedier side of the Cotswolds, which means I occasionally bump into middle-aged Rupert Campbell-Blacks.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes get a shiver of excitement when I saw a handsome man carrying a horsewhip.

But these days I don’t chase them anymore. I may not have a double surname, but I’ve realized that these aren’t a prerequisite for class, and my penchant for sagging edges is long gone.

That said, I prefer Jack Grealish. I hear Jilly is a fan too. Obviously we’ve both moved on.