A new start: Jilly Cooper on the night in a Kama Sutra room that led to her book Riders

While struggling to write the novel that would transform her career, she discovered the country pile that would prove inspirational

Being a very horsey little girl, I always dreamed about writing a novel about show jumping, but I didn’t get down to it until I was in my 30s, in 1972, when my publisher gave me an advance and my husband, Leo, and I moved to Putney in London. Ten years later, shamefully, I had made little progress, finding it difficult to describe the changing seasons in London and having only riding school horses to interview.

Then, in May 1982, Leo, I and our two mongrels, Mabel and Barbara, were invited to Longleat for the weekend. Our host, Alexander Thynn, the Marquess of Bath, was an adventurous artist and we were excited to find ourselves sleeping in the Kama Sutra room. This had a rhino horn sticking out of the bedhead of a large four-poster, a mirror on the ceiling and numerous couples in different sexual positions painted around the walls.

This story of change was published in the G2 special issue A new start on 31 December