Martin Amis, the unruly stepson she steered from dope to hope

JANE said she regretted she never had children with Kingsley Amis: instead she had to act as stepmother to two unruly teenage boys. Kingsley’s ex-wife Hilly never controlled their sons, Philip and Martin, who at 16 and 15 were bunking school, smoking dope and picking up girls in the Picasso coffee bar on Chelsea’s Kings Road.

Jane and Kingsley moved the boys into their Maida Vale home in the spring of 1965.

Kingsley left Jane in the role of nagging scold. She enrolled the boys at a tutorial college and gave them access to alcohol and cigarettes, but not dope. Then, in March 1966, Jane found a stash in Philip’s room.

‘It was no great feat of detection,’ wrote Martin. ‘They were kept in a box with PHIL’S DRUGS written in multicoloured capitals.’

Summoned for a dressing-down, Philip – already beyond their authority – left in a fury. ‘I don’t think anyone could have coped with me at that time,’ he later admitted. ‘I was just nuts.’

When Martin told Jane he wanted to be a writer, she scoffed: ‘But you never read anything.’

She gave him Pride And Prejudice and left him to it. Over the coming months he devoured Dickens, Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse, and read Middlemarch in three days.

He sat A-levels, discovered poetry, and learned how to write and think about books.

‘She salvaged my schooling, and I owe her an unknowable debt for that,’ he later said.

He also began to feel something more. ‘It is perhaps impossible for someone who loves his mother to love the woman your father left her for. However, I got very close to loving Jane.’