The closest the girls got to a man for years was the local flasher, she says.”We used to have crushes on older girls too. There was one I saw in a school play playing an angel and I thought she was the most beautiful creature I ever saw Cupid’s arrow hit me and I couldn’t speak for days. I would leave bluebells in her locker.”The teenager who would later pen such modern classics as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Fourth Protocol, spent his formative years being flogged in a school that considered brutality an inherent part of a young gentleman’s education. Miss Harris raced into the room to save her only to find her crawling out from under the bed laughing.For the future writer of bodice-ripping block-busters, such as Riders and Polo, the absence of boys was the biggest disadvantage of a single-sex education. We weren’t allowed to have any cake for tea as a punishment.”Another time Cooper sewed her slippers to her pyjama bottoms, stuffed them with clothes and hung them out of the window while the girls shouted that she was about to commit suicide. She wriggled about like a fly and was completely distraught, the poor thing. The teenage Cooper was usually at the centre of mischief and tomfoolery.”On one occasion a group of us de-bagged poor Miss Harris down to her petticoats.

But she received a brilliant education and the teachers were wonderful, though she says she was often vile to them, which is probably why she was never made prefect. She was homesick and didn’t see her family at all during the first term. The headmistress was young and so pretty, and I remember the first time I met her she was wearing a lovely summer dress.”As a little girl Cooper had been steeped in Enid Blyton and expected school to be full of midnight feasts and protective older girls But the reality was not like that. “To be fair to my parents, I think I chose Godolphin myself because we were allowed to keep rabbits and guinea pigs. Heaven was the sight of Leeds railway station as she neared home after another term away from her family.

Holloway was her seeming incarceration at Godolphin School, in Wiltshire, where she spent six years as a boarder.
“Can you imagine as an 11-year-old being sent 300 miles away from home to go to boarding school?” she asks. Jilly Cooper recalls her school days as a “mix of heaven and Holloway”. He lives in South Wales and his children attend Welsh medium schools. Whether Wales can deliver a “new producerism” that updates the old ideology is also unclear. It would be a pity if the trust of local authorities, which many people would regard as inappropriate, were to negate the entirely appropriate trust of the Welsh teaching profession.The writer is Professor of Education at Exeter University.