My star teacher, though, was Miss Aphra Lloyd, who taught English. I dedicated a book to her, an anthology of poetry and prose entitled The British in Love, which pleased her - though she didn’t like it when I later started writing novels. She wrote to a friend: “Isn’t it tragic that Jilly now writes nothing but pornography?”

Miss Lloyd was Irish - she was tall, dark and elegant and looked like a glamorous bird of prey. She must have been about 32, but she seemed to me then, like all teachers, terribly old. She made English literature hugely exciting. She had us reading The Mayor of Casterbridge and Sir Roger de Coverley at the age of 11, and brought these great literary characters to life. We acted everything out. She also made us learn verse by rote so even now poetry constantly drifts into my head because I remember it from school. Nobody ever cheeked Miss Lloyd; she kept order well. If she noticed you daydreaming, she would sidle up to you and suddenly ask you to recite something you were supposed to have learned from homework.

Her classes were a joy. She would transfix us when she talked. She knew how to pick out the lovely bits so your hair stood on end. She set us essays with interesting titles. I remember “A Day in an Italian Square”, and “A Day in the Life of a Penny”. I wrote about Italian men for the first and about being stuck in the loo (which cost a penny in those days) for the second. I had a good imagination despite Miss Lloyd’s comments years later that she never thought I would go on to be a writer because I had no imagination.

I was never top, but I must have been quite good at English because I was expected to get to Oxford. I was all programmed to take the exam at school in the autumn, but was completely boy-mad, and bullied my parents into sending me to a crammer, where I went out with men every night for two terms and ploughed the exam. I had an interview at St Hilda’s College, but they took one look at me and said “no”. That was as near as I got to further education. Instead, I became a cub reporter on the Middlesex Independent, where, thanks to Miss Lloyd’s influence, I never went anywhere without some volume of poetry, which doubled as a notebook.

I was terribly badly behaved at school. I was known in the staffroom as the “unholy terror”. I think I was the worst pupil they ever had - I was always giggling, and awfully rebellious. I refused to kneel down in church and things like that. I was also untidy, and if you left two or three things out you got sent to the headmistress, Miss Gerrard. I lived outside her door. My three mates and I were terrible. It makes me blush to remember now that we de-bagged Miss Harris, our sweet junior housemistress. She was pretty but rather wet, and we took off her cardigan, her shirt, her tweed skirt and her shoes, and there she was, wriggling like a fly in her petticoat, when the housemistress caught us. I think our punishment was to be denied cake for a week.

I kept in touch with Miss Lloyd and Miss Pointon after I left - they came to my wedding. Miss Lloyd came on my This is Your Life though she seemed embarrassed about it. I was so pleased to see her I cried and cried.

Author Jilly Cooper was talking to Pamela Coleman

The story so far

1937 Born in Hornchurch, Essex

1948-54 Godolphin school, Salisbury

1957 First job as cub reporter on the Middlesex Independent, Brentford

1969-82 Columnist for The Sunday Times

1969 First book published, How to Stay Married

1982-87 Columnist for the Mail on Sunday

1985 First number one bestseller, Riders, published, followed by Rivals, Polo and The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

1988 Riders adapted for film

1998 Receives lifetime publishing achievement award

2001 Begins work on novel about teachers

May 2002 Publication of latest novel, Pandora (Bantam Press, pound;17.99)