A bohemian hunter

From the outside of Penny and John Mortimer's house situated down a dirt-track road, everything looks still and quiet. The gate says Beware of the Dog but there are, seemingly, no dogs. Everything is still. The heat is shimmering off the green slated roof of the 1930s rambling cottage John Mortimer's parents had built for them all those years ago. When I knock on the door no one comes, so I just open it, walk in through the kitchen and look through the glass of the Mortimers' conservatory.

What I see before me is a mid-morning equivalent of the Mad Hatter's tea party. Penny Mortimer is sitting at a large wooden table smoking madly and chatting on the telephone. A man in smart, but born-to-serve, black trousers and a white shirt seems to be Hoovering the flower beds. Another young man in sunglasses is picking up cigarette ends from under Penny's feet, and a slim, gorgeous young woman is lying sunbathing on the lawn. She is smoking and reading a book.

John Mortimer, now 80 years old, is seated in his Sunseeker, which seems to be a cross between a golf cart and a motorised disability chair. There are four bouncy dogs rampaging over everything. "Oh, go away!" Penny yells at them in her throaty, distinctively smoky rasp.

There's another lady, who seems to be called Maria, ferrying coffee and champagne backwards and forwards from the house and another one, slim, older, wearing white with a halo of blonde curly hair, kneeling down on the ground preparing what seems to be a foot bath.

"Ah, hello!" says Penny when she sees me. "Come and have a coffee. Or some champagne. Or a cigarette. Or all three."

The telephone rings. John Mortimer answers it. "My darling, you look beautiful!" he says into the receiver. He takes a sip of champagne. Penny looks at me and does a little shrug and a laugh. "I was once in Devon and he called me and said, 'Darling, you look beautiful', and I was just preening myself a bit in the mirror when I remembered he was miles away!"

"But you are beautiful," says John again. "He calls everyone beautiful," says Penny, raising her eyes to heaven. "Just everyone. He's always been such a charmer."

The Mortimers are, of course, legendary for their charm. He's the very English, slightly Pooterish character behind Rumpole of the Bailey and a variety of books, the most famous being Voyage Around My Father and, more recently, Summer of a Dormouse. She is ... well, years ago, she was famous for being John Mortimer's child bride.

She married him more than three decades ago when she was in her early twenties and he was in his mid-forties. "It caused quite a stir," she says. He had been married previously to the novelist Penelope Mortimer.

"She's Penelope the First and I'm Penelope the Second," says Penny.

The former once said to the latter, "If you were talented, I'd be very jealous, but now I've met you I don't have any fears."

"Well, what can I say about that?" says Penny. "It was a long time ago. When she wrote her autobiography, The Pumpkin Eater, I burned it on the fire. It's the only book I ever burned."

But Penny the Second would be the first to admit that John shone more brightly in the firmament than herself. "Well, he was at the Bar and he was so witty and he was older. I hadn't done anything but grow up on a pig farm. I went to university at Exeter but I hated that. It was the place where everyone went to find a husband, and I couldn't have cared less about men with leather patches on the elbows of their jumpers. I did once work in a gambling club in London but I met John pretty soon after that at a party and that was it really."

But everything has changed now. For, as John Mortimer physically diminishes and his eyesight goes and his mobility is virtually none ("bar the Sunseeker!" says Penny. "I bought it for him for Christmas and he zooms around in it!"), Penelope the Second, who looks much younger than her 53 years, seems to have grown in stature. She's still teeny tiny but she's now become the force field around which everything revolves. Everyone has a story about Penny Mortimer - how she merrily drives to parties in John's Sunseeker, how she once turned up at a friend's house looking to borrow a loaf of bread wearing nothing but pyjamas and a fur coat.

"Oh well, we're just a bit bohemian," says Penny. "We love loads of people being around. She ..." - and Penny gestures towards the blonde, curly-haired woman now kneeling before John, washing and dressing his feet - "was round here last night till 2.30am, weren't you, Jackie?" "Yes Penny," says Jackie, who is now administering healing potions and lotions. "Jackie's one of the Heavenly Twins. Her sister Vicki is married to John Lord. He used to be in Deep Purple. They look like angels and they come and look after John for me."

Penny has, over the past few years, also become involved in some serious issues. Twelve years ago she set up the Leave Country Sports Alone pressure group. She gets very exercised about her love of country sports and how disgusted she is by the Government's attempt to ban hunting. She's stood (and lost) as a Labour candidate for the local council. She's ignored death threats from the anti-hunting brigade despite being sent razor blades in the post, and she's spent a lot of time criticising the political party that she used to support devotedly.

"We loved Neil Kinnock," she says, "but we don't like what's happening in this country. You can't have opinions any more. I'm utterly against hunting being banned. It's ridiculous. It is a country way of life and a total negation of our civil liberties. I got into trouble when I tried to have a reception for Leave Country Sports Alone at the Labour Party Conference. I'd hired a room and then I was told I wasn't allowed to have the do. I was stunned. It wasn't illegal. Why can't I be a Labour supporter who also likes shooting and fishing and hunting?"

Then again, Penny Mortimer likes being mischievous. Today, she's camping outside Parliament on a womanonly protest against the hunting bill. "There's going to be loads of us," she says. "Clarissa Dickson Wright is cooking breakfast. We're trying to show that it's not just men who enjoy country sports."

Part of her probably likes the odd bit of confrontation. She got in trouble with the Blairs when she publicly revealed that Tony and Cherie got cross with her for smoking when she and John visited Chequers. "People label me a champagne socialist," she says.

For example, she is a fervent supporter of state schools, yet her youngest daughter, Rosie, ended up at Bryanston boarding school. "But she loved it!" says Penny.

"No I didn't," glowers the young girl on the lawn.

"Oh Rosie," says Penny, feigning exasperation. "She left in the middle of the sixth form," she says to me.

"I wasn't happy about it but Rosie's the kind of girl that if I'd said, 'You're not leaving school young lady,' she'd have turned up outside the headmaster's office holding a bottle of vodka and a spliff."

But Penny's daughters have really turned out to be something else. Rosie, who is 19 but looks about 15, is a model. "She's not going to be a model for ever," says Penny. "She just doesn't really know what to do with herself." Rosie perches on the arm of her father's Sunseeker and lights another cigarette.

"Oh, she's always been rude to me," says Penny. "Until recently she'd tell me to eff off and refused to speak to me, but now we get on marvellously. She telephones every day."

With her other daughter, the 32-year-old actress Emily Mortimer, it's always been different. "I thought I was a marvellous mum when I had Em," says Penny. "She was such an easy baby and she's a wonderful, intelligent girl." Emily Mortimer recently got married to American actor Alessandro Nivola. "Thank God it was him!" says Penny. "Most of her other boyfriends were dreadful." The wedding was a very starry affair with Ewan McGregor and Bob Geldof on the guest list.

"God, Ewan is so unbelievably adorable," says Penny. "Emily's in a new film with him and it's all about sex and I envy her." She's also pregnant with Penny's first grandchild. "I'm very excited," says Penny. "They're living in LA now but they're having the baby over here."

Penny herself was obviously very close to her mother, Anne Gollop. "God, are you surprised I married as soon as possible with a surname like that?" she asks. Mrs Gollop may have been a pig farmer's wife from Kent but she also sounds pretty formidable. "She swam naked in the sea every day," says Penny.

"When she found out I was seeing John she was furious. He was known as The Wicked Man, so when I brought him down to see my mother and she found out he was only a year younger than her, she was not too pleased!" In the end, though, Penny's mother loved John. "He'd take his clothes off and go swimming with her. That was the ice-breaker really."

It also helped that John clearly adored, and adores, Penny the Second. He once said of her, after he'd married her and ceased his endless bacheloresque affairs: "I always knew I'd find a sensible, dependable woman to settle down with." Well, she doesn't seem that sensible to me. She's great fun and tells naughty stories about people. She also spends a lot of her time travelling. She's just got back from Romania where she supports an orphanage and, last year, cycled through Jordan to raise money for charity.

"I think that's what he loved," she says. "The fact that I get up and go. But underneath that I've always been there for him. I read all his books. I always tell him they're marvellous and then a bit later I'll say, 'What about that paragraph?' and then John goes mad and says, 'You hate it all. I'm going to rip it up.' You know, when I married him everyone went on about the age gap, but it never bothered me."

Maybe it does now though. "He's not been well recently," says Penny, speaking quietly. "Does he seem okay to you? He does, doesn't he?" She doesn't deny that sometimes they both dwell on his and her mortality. "I suppose some things feel like swan songs," she says. His new book, out later on in the year, is called Where There's a Will.

"I always typed his manuscripts for him," says Penny, "but I was too busy to do this one." She's read it, though, as usual.

"It's about the legacy he wants to leave his children. Not a material one but a philosophical one."

The BBC has also made a film about John as part of Alan Yentob's Imagine... series, to be broadcast on 30 July. "It's wonderful," she says, but looks sad.

"When Rosie used to tell me to go and eff off and die I used to wave a glass of champagne at her and my cigarette and say, 'I'm trying as hard as I can, darling.'"

But now it's time for Penny and John to leave for London.The man who was Hoovering the garden suddenly reappears looking even smarter in his chauffeur gear. And with that they zoom off in a puff of dust and I go back to normality, rather sadly, again.

Alan Yentob's Imagine... is on BBC1 at 10.35pm.