Tamasin Day-Lewis outlines, in a story drawing on her own youth, another set of connections. Her youth included living at times with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Howard's husband at the time was Kingsley Amis, and Howard's stepson Martin Amis, lived in that household before entering Oxford.
'I had already known Mart for years – he was the stepson of my godmother Jane [Howard] – and I was as in awe of him as my youngest daughter is now of her older brother's friends.
'When Jane and her husband, the novelist Kingsley Amis, Mart's father, moved to their house, Lemmons, in Hertfordshire, I used to go for weekends. I was, like most teenagers, desperate to escape the confines of home, the perceived illiberality of my own parents [Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon] and the stultifying tedium of being a teenager.
'Lemmons was full of impossibly glamorous older people and a core commune of writers, painters and inventors; even the dogs and cats shared a communal basket, and there were always stray writers and publishers whose marriages were unravelling. The drink flowed as freely as an open artery at family dinners. After all, "Kingers", as we knew Kingsley, wrote about drink for Playboy, which sent him crates of assorted liquor every week.....
[Martin Amis and I then] ....had hung out together, lived in the same house together, shared secrets, observed things, been conspiratorial when Jane's mother was dying at Lemmons.
'When Jane and her husband, the novelist Kingsley Amis, Mart's father, moved to their house, Lemmons, in Hertfordshire, I used to go for weekends. I was, like most teenagers, desperate to escape the confines of home, the perceived illiberality of my own parents [Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon] and the stultifying tedium of being a teenager.
'Lemmons was full of impossibly glamorous older people and a core commune of writers, painters and inventors; even the dogs and cats shared a communal basket, and there were always stray writers and publishers whose marriages were unravelling. The drink flowed as freely as an open artery at family dinners. After all, "Kingers", as we knew Kingsley, wrote about drink for Playboy, which sent him crates of assorted liquor every week.....
[Martin Amis and I then] ....had hung out together, lived in the same house together, shared secrets, observed things, been conspiratorial when Jane's mother was dying at Lemmons.
....[And then]...... my father was sick and I was at a crammer doing Oxbridge entrance .... My life was about to be turned upside down when we learned that my father was dying, and Jane and I conspired to get my whole family moved to Lemmons for the duration.
'Nobody ever spoke or wrote about Kingsley being kind, and it is not how Mart is ever described either, but I saw that side of both of them, noticed their similar way of showing affection awkwardly, embarrassedly, conveying real fondness nonetheless. While my father lay dying, I will never forget the kindness, the way both Kingsley and Mart appeared to try to imagine what it must feel like and almost to tiptoe around my feelings.
'Mart and I were – are – both the children of successful, well-known parents; the blessing and the curse of it linked us, however unspoken or unrealised back then. ....
'.... The night I heard I'd got a place at King's, I remember ringing Mart and he took me out to dinner to celebrate. That was the first time we had ever done anything like that, as we had always been at home in Maida Vale or at Lemmons. We had always been "the children". Mart was touchingly proud and pleased. That was surprising, too.
'Now, when we bump into each other, usually at each other's book launches, I am just terribly glad we can acknowledge something of our shared past by being genuinely pleased to see each other and pleased for each other that we have done what we have both done in life. ...'
The touching detail, "the dogs and cats sharing a communal basket," makes a frame for this story of literary Britain.
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