Jilly Cooper made everyone feel special – and her memorial was the perfect tribute | Zoe Williams

CA memorial for Ellie Cooper began last week when the Dean of Southwark told a story from her funeral last year: As worshipers made their way to her final resting place, five horses rode majestically across the field, and came to stand in formation, looking down into the grave. They didn’t budge and their intention was quite clear: they were paying their respects to the horses (not literally, by the way) to an author who had done as much for horses as she had for humans. The story was perfect. You can imagine Cooper laughing at her, at the same time believing her, at the same time thinking that no funeral is complete without five horses.

The combination of romance, scale, silliness, joy, and animalism could come straight from the pages of a Jilly Cooper novel, but how would the Dean know that? Did they also, that day, pass a tattered copy of Raiders around the Dean’s School? (My friend, a librarian, expressed some professional annoyance because, at her school, they couldn’t buy more than one copy of a book in that order. By the time they were all finished, she said, it looked like Magna Carta.)

The memorial was star-studded, and the actual Queen was there. People of a certain class were in awe, even awe, of singing “I Swear to You, My Country” in a room where Rupert Everett was singing it (though it was a huge room, or a cathedral), and again, you can imagine the scene as written by Cooper, who had an uncanny knack for being both solemn and funny at the same time.

She was an established correspondent, and after her death last October, there was a lot of talk: “This is the worst news I’ve had in a long time.” “Have you ever met her?” “No, but she sent me a card.” At the service, I was sitting in the back, next to the guy who made the cards, and she had gotten to know him so well over the years that she started sending them for him Valentine’s Day card. “Wow, that’s a very special relationship, albeit a strangely circular one,” I said, and he said, “Not really, her Valentine’s list is 300 people.” Well, 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 columnist for The Guardian