Martin Amis has paid tribute to his 'wicked' stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard who died this week claiming she made him the man he is today.
The author said acclaimed novelist Ms Howard, who was married to his father Sir Kingsley Amis for 18 years, helped transform him from a "semiliterate truant and waster" into an Oxford University scholar.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Amis, 64, explained how despite Ms Howard contributing to the break up his father's previous marriage to Hilary Bardwell, she was a positive force in his life and helped nurture his talent for English literature.
A few years after the marriage split, Amis and his brother Philip went to live with their father and Ms Howard, who was famed for her five-part fiction series, The Cazalet Chronicles.
Describing the move, Amis said: "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)."
He went on: "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."
