I was a semi-literate truant who read Harold Robbins and the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley. Only my 'wicked' stepmother made me who I am today, writes MARTIN AMIS

The best-selling novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard died at her home in Bungay, Suffolk, last Thursday, after a short illness. She was 90 years old.

Acclaimed for her five-part series, The Cazalet Chronicles, which charts the lives of an affluent middle-class English family during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the author became equally well known for her colourful personal life.

She married the naturalist, Peter Scott, son of the Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Scott, when she was 19, leaving him four years later.

Her second husband was the writer, James Douglas Henry, while she had affairs with writers Laurie Lee, Cecil Day-Lewis, Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly and the critic Kenneth Tynan.

In 1962 she met Kingsley Amis, then married to Hilary Bardwell, and the two fell passionately in love. After their marriage, in 1965, they became London’s most celebrated literary couple but separated 15 years later and then divorced in 1983 amid bitter recriminations.

Amis never forgave Jane – as she was known to family and friends – for leaving him, refusing to speak to her and turning down her request to see him on his deathbed in 1995.

Here, Martin Amis pays his first tribute to his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard, and reveals the profound influence she had upon him as a young man.

Split: Martin Amis, his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard, and father Kinglsey Amis, pictured in 1980

You know your father’s got a fancy woman in London,’ said Eva Garcia, with her thick Welsh accent (‘Ewe gnaw ewe father’) and her thick Welsh schadenfreude (the simple pleasure of relaying bad news). Eva had served as our nanny-housekeeper during the family’s years in Swansea; and she was summoned down to Cambridge to help alleviate an opaque domestic crisis.

My father Kingsley was elsewhere, and no one had told me why. I was 13; I found Eva’s words completely unabsorbable, and I cancelled them from my mind.

A week later, as my mother Hilly dropped me off at school, she said that she and my father were embarking on ‘a trial separation’ (due to incompatibility). All I remember feeling at the time was numbness. I didn’t know then, of course, that trial separations were nearly always a great success.

When the summer holiday began Hilly took her three children (Philip, Martin, Sally, fifteen, fourteen, ten) to Soller, Majorca, for an indefinite stay. My brother and I were enrolled at the International School in Palma, while Sally attended classes, in Spanish, at a local nunnery.

By November we were missing our father so acutely that we spent an hour every morning waiting for the postman to stop by on his motorbike; and once in a while we received a brief and uninformative letter. When half-term came Hilly put Philip and me on a plane to Heathrow. All we had was the address of Kingsley’s ‘bachelor flat’ in Knightsbridge.

The flight was delayed, and it was past midnight when we rang the designated bell in Basil Mansions. My father, wearing pyjamas, opened the door and rocked back in astonishment (Hilly’s telegram had not arrived). These were his first words: ‘You know I’m not alone here.’ We shrugged coolly, but we were as astonished as he was. Silently the three of us filed into the kitchen. Then Jane appeared.

A modern youth would have thought, simply, Wow. But this was 1963, and what I thought was more like Cor (with the reluctant rider, Dad can’t half pull). Tall, calm, fine-boned, and with the queenly bearing of the fashion model she once was, in a spotless white bathrobe and with a yard of rich blonde hair extending to her waist, Jane straightforwardly introduced herself and set about making us bacon and eggs.

Our five-day visit was a saturnalia of treats and sprees – Harrods’ fruit-juice bar, restaurants, record shops, West End cinemas (55 Days At Peking, with Kingsley lying down on the cinema floor every single time Ava Gardner appeared on screen), punctuated by several agonising and tearful heart-to-hearts between father and sons (during one of which Philip – very impressively, I thought – called Kingsley a c***).

But there it was: He had made up his mind and he wasn’t coming back. On the last night, in the middle of a small dinner party, the telephone rang and my father answered; he listened for a moment, and shouted out, ‘No!’ Then he hung up and said four words. Jane wept. And one of the guests, journalist George Gale (or, as Private Eye called him, George G. Ale) grimly fetched his overcoat and headed off to Fleet Street and the Daily Express. It was November 22. Kennedy had been assassinated.

Howard met her third husband Sir Kingsley Amis in 1962 while the two were each having problems in their respective marriages

Over the next three or four years my lovelorn mother’s household in the Fulham Road – lax, bohemian, chaotic – steadily disintegrated; and, by the time Philip and I went to live with Kingsley and Jane, I was a semiliterate truant and waster whose main interest was hanging around in betting shops (where, tellingly, my speciality was reversible forecasts on the dogs).

The move was Jane’s initiative. She always had a pronounced philanthropic bent, and was strongly drawn to losers and lame ducks – to those who, as she put it, ‘led such terrible lives’.

She liked goals, tasks, projects; unlike both of my parents, she was organised. Philip was far bolder and far more rebellious than I was; he didn’t last very long in the elegant and mannerly house in Maida Vale (and by his own efforts he went on to the Camberwell College of Arts). But I felt fearful and confused, and I responded.

When Jane took me on I was averaging an O-level a year, and read nothing but comics, plus the occasional Harold Robbins and (for example) the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; I had recently sat an A-level in English – the only subject in which I showed the slightest promise – and I failed.

After just over a year of Jane’s tutelage (much of it spent in a last-ditch boarding crammer in Brighton), I had another half-dozen Os (including Latin, from scratch), three As, and a second-tier scholarship to Oxford. None of this would have happened without Jane’s energy and determination.

The process also had its intimacies. One day, early on, she presented me with a reading list: Austen, Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald, Waugh, Greene, Golding. I started, leerily, with Pride And Prejudice. After an hour or so I went and knocked on the door of Jane’s study. ‘Yes?’ she said, leaning back from her desk. ‘I’ve got to know,’ I said. ‘Does Elizabeth marry Mr Darcy?’ She hesitated, looking stern, and I expected her to say, ‘Well you’ll have to finish it and find out’. But she relented (and in addition she put my troubled mind at rest about Jane Bennet and Mr Bingley).

Not long afterwards we agreed that this was the simple secret of Austen’s narrative force, and of the reader’s abnormally fierce desire for a happy ending: With all her intelligence and art, Austen created heroes and heroines who were literally made for each other.

Jane took in Kingsley's son Martin when he was a teenager and in desperate need to tutelage



Howard married Amis in 1965. Their union lasted 18 years before descending into an acrimonious divorce



In the early years at least, Kingsley and Jane seemed made for each other. It was an unusual, and unusually stimulating, menage: two passionately dedicated novelists who were also passionately in love. Their approach to the daily business of writing formed a sharp contrast, one from which I derived a tentative theory about the difference between male and female fiction. Kingsley was a grinder; no matter how he was feeling (hungover, sickly, clogged, loth), he trudged off to his desk after breakfast, and that was that until it was time for evening drinks.

Jane was far more erratic and mercurial. She would wander from room to room, she would do some cooking or gardening, she would stare out of the window smoking a cigarette with an air of anxious preoccupation. Then she would suddenly hasten to her study, and you’d hear the feverish clatter of her typewriter keys. Very soon she would cheerfully emerge, having written more in an hour than my father would write in a day.

The great critic Northrop Frye, in a discussion of Milton’s elegy Lycidas, made the distinction between real sincerity and literary sincerity. When told of the death of a friend, the poet can burst into tears, but he cannot burst into song. I would very cautiously suggest that there is more ‘song’ in women’s fiction – more real sincerity, and less tradition-conscious artifice. This is certainly true of Elizabeth Jane Howard. She was an instinctivist, with a freakishly metaphorical eye and a sure ear for rhythmically fast-moving prose.

Kingsley once ‘corrected’ one of Jane’s short stories, regularising her grammar. All his changes were, strictly speaking, technically sound; and all of them, in my view, were marked disimprovements.

By this time mutual hostility was clearly looming; and an attentive reader of Kingsley’s novel, Girl, 20 (1971), could feel pretty sure that all hope was already lost. At the outset, one of the qualities that attracted my father to Jane was her worldliness, her social poise, her sophistication – her class, in a word. England in the Sixties and Seventies was stratified to an extent that now seems barely credible; and it is naïve to expect artists or intellectuals to be immune to the stock responses, the emotional cliches, of their time. The daughter of a prosperous timber merchant, Jane was educated by governesses and grew up in a large house full of servants. The son of a clerk at a mustard manufacturers, Kingsley was a Clapham scholarship boy and the first Amis to attend university (he was also a card-carrying Communist until the ridiculously advanced age of 35).

Self-confessed 'bolter': No-one was even mildly mildly surprised when, in 1980, Jane did a runner on Kingsley



That gulf in status was part of the attraction, on both sides; there is bathos as well as pathos in the fact that in the end it proved insurmountable. Kingsley would later write that many marriages adhere to a familiar pattern: the wife regards the husband as slightly uncouth and ill-bred, and the husband regards the wife as slightly over-refined and stuck-up. And it was as if Kingsley set himself the task of broadening that divide.

To take a relatively trivial example (while remembering that marriages are measured by trivialities), among her other accomplishments Jane was a culinary expert who expended a lot of time and trouble in the kitchen; Kingsley did not go so far as to smother her souffles with HP sauce, but with increasing frequency he reached for the pickles and the jams, muttering that he had to make this or that terrine or smoked-fish mousse ‘taste of something’.

In a good marriage the principals soon identify each other’s irritabilities and seek to appease them. Jane, and especially Kingsley, did the opposite. As he became coarser, she could not but seem snootier. The infection proliferated and ramified; it became a cold war.

Jane was a self-confessed ‘bolter’, and no one was even mildly surprised when, in 1980, she did a runner on Kingsley. My brother called me and said, ‘Mart. It’s happened’; and I knew at once what he meant.

Her disappearance seemed harsh, and certainly gave rise to many complications, due to my father’s lavish array of phobias (he couldn’t drive, he couldn’t fly, he couldn’t be alone after dark). That last complication necessitated a system of ‘Dadsitting’ by his three children – until we hit upon an unlikely arrangement involving my mother and her third husband, which endured until Kingsley’s death in 1995.

A man who abandons his first wife and is then himself abandoned by her successor loses everything: He becomes an amatory zero. But as soon as Kingsley was reunited with Hilly (if only platonically) he stopped ‘feeling cut-up’ about Jane. And thereafter, I’m sorry to say, he never had a civil word to say for her.



Elizabeth Jane Howard died on January 2 at the age of 90, around a month after her last letter from Martin



After 1980 I naturally saw far less of Jane. She wanted more from me – more than I felt I was able to give. It was always that way. From the very start I sensed emanations of love from her. I was always deeply fond and deeply grateful. But your father’s ‘other woman’, I fear, is doomed to love her stepson without full requital. The blood loyalty to the blood mother is simply too deep and too powerful.

‘I’m your wicked stepmother,’ Jane said to me after she and Kingsley got married in 1965. And it was true: she was wicked in the sense of ‘exceptionally and satisfyingly good’. In my last letter to her, written in December 2013 after a long telephone call of condolence, I congratulated Jane on her artistic longevity; and I cited the example of Herman Wouk, who had recently completed a novel in his late 90s.

I half expected her to duplicate that feat. But she died barely a month after her younger brother Colin, an unsung hero of this saga (charming, witty, not very happily gay, universally adored, and one of the most sweet-natured people I have ever known), who lived with Jane before Kingsley and through the lion’s share of the Kingsley years.

For reasons that no doubt go back to a dismal childhood, Jane was elementally desperate for affection; and at the same time she remained a disastrous chooser of men. Indeed, my father – by any standards a mixed blessing – was probably the pick of the bunch, standing out from a ghastly galère of frauds, bullies, and scoundrels. So maybe in the end it is Colin who will have to serve, and serve honourably, as the love of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s life.