Sally Amis
Encyclopedia
Sally Myfanwy Amis was the youngest child of the writer Sir Kingsley Amis
, and his wife, Hilary "Hilly" Bardwell, now Lady Kilmarnock
. She lived for the most part out of the public eye, except for occasional interviews, but came to wider public attention posthumously in 2010, when her brother, Martin Amis
, based a character in his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow
, on her life. The novel is about feminism and the sexual revolution
of the 1960s—the metaphor of the pregnant widow comes from the Russian writer Alexander Herzen
, who used it for that point in a revolution when the old order has died, but the new one is not yet born, leading to what he called a long night of chaos and desolation.
Martin Amis has described Sally as one of the revolution's most spectacular victims. Plagued by alcoholism, depression, and promiscuity, and with a daughter born out of a brief encounter and given up for adoption at three months, she suffered a stroke at the age of 40, and died six years later of an unspecified infection—having used herself up, as Amis puts it. Her mother argues that Sally was a victim of herself, not of the times, while British journalist Julia Molony blames a dysfunctional family
life, with Kingsley as an elusive father figure able to relate to women only through sex.
Amis had talked to Sally about writing her story. "I once rescued her from some terrible situation and paid up what was necessary to release her from it, and took her home and patched her up. And she looked at me and I know she wanted to thank me, and she was wondering how to do that. Normally she thanked people by having sex with them. But she just said: 'Write about me, Martin. You can say anything you like. I won't mind.'"
, Wales, the third child and only daughter of Kingsley Amis (1922–1995)—the son of Rosa Annie Amis and her husband, William Robert Amis from Clapham
, a clerk for Colman's
mustard—and Hilary "Hilly" Ann Bardwell, daughter of Leonard Sidney Bardwell, a shoe millionaire.
Kingsley and Hilly met in Oxford in May 1946. He was reading English at St John's College, Oxford
, while she was studying at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art
, after attending Bedales
. The English poet Philip Larkin
, a close friend of Kingsley, said that Hilly was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met, without being in the least pretty. Kingsley was unhappy when she fell pregnant in 1948, and initially arranged a back-street abortion, though he cancelled it, fearful for her. They got married in the Register Office in Oxford Town Hall, reportedly by a drunken registrar. Philip — named after Larkin — was born seven months later in August 1948, an experience that gave Kingsley panic attacks and outbreaks of boils and cysts, occasioning a visit to a psychiatrist. Neither the birth nor his brief illness, nor the birth of Martin a year later in August 1949, diminished his interest in other women. He was famously unfaithful. He once took Hilly to dinner at his married mistress's home, where another man and his wife were dining too, and it was this third woman that Kingsley asked out on a date. Parties at the Amis household would involve every woman present being asked to accompany Kingsley to his greenhouse at the bottom of the garden.
Hilly's mother had left her some money, and she bought the house in Swansea with it, at 24 The Grove. Kingsley was working as a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea
, where he taught from 1949 to 1961, and was writing his first novel, Lucky Jim
. One student said Kingsley's arrival in Swansea was "as if a brilliantly-hued tropical bird had come winging into our still blitz-battered town," though the reality was that Kingsley and Hilly were so poor that she had to take a job as a waitress and take scraps home pretending they were for the dog. His promiscuity was such that Hilly started drinking herself and having sex with friends and their partners. "I asked Kingsley to stop," she said, "then I learned to live with it and then I did what women finally do, that is to start looking around themselves to boost their self-esteem."
It was around this time in 1953 that she became pregnant with Sally. Hilly said she didn't know for sure that Kingsley was the father, but he accepted Sally as his own, though there were always doubts. Sally was never made aware of this so far as Hilly knew, though Hilly was shocked once to hear her son, Philip, say as a family friend was leaving the house—the man she suspected might be the father—"What's Sal's Dad doing here?"
Lucky Jim was published just days after Sally's birth, bringing Kingsley overnight success. Larkin wrote a poem for her, "Born Yesterday," completed on 20 January 1954, and published in The Spectator, in which he wished her:
When she was two, Sally fell head first from a table in the garden onto a stone floor, fracturing her skull; there were fears for her life for the first day and night, but she recovered. Not long afterwards, in March 1957, her paternal grandmother, Rosa, died suddenly after having a stroke in her home in Shrublands Avenue, Berkhamsted. Sally, aged three, was being looked after by Rosa at the time, and was left alone in the house with the body for 10 or 11 hours, until Rosa's husband got home from work. He reportedly found Sally oddly dressed and wearing her grandmother's make-up.
Martin Amis has written about the unusual upbringing he and his siblings had, how they were "participants in what seemed then like an ongoing adult party." Every Christmas from the age of five, the boys were allowed to smoke one cigarette each, and at nine were given a whole packet; when they were 14 or 15, Kingsley took them out and bought them a gross
(144) of condoms. A petite and pretty girl according to her mother, Sally moved school several times as her father moved to Princeton University
in the U.S. for a year in 1958, where he taught creative writing, then back to Cambridge, England, where he became a fellow and Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse
in 1961. He resigned from Cambridge in 1963, declaring that he wanted to move to Majorca, though he never did.
In August that year, when Sally was nine, Kingsley left the family to live with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard
, whom he married in 1965. Hilly took Sally and her brothers to live in Spain in a house with no heating, and with no access to a car and the children speaking no Spanish. She said they were miserable and rarely heard from their father. She took them back to London, but became depressed herself, and the children were reportedly left to look after themselves, Philip and Martin bunking off school and taking drugs. In June 1964, Hilly was found drunk and drugged after taking an overdose. The boys eventually moved in with Kingsley, while Sally stayed with Hilly, though Sally did live for a time at Lemmons, the enormous house Kingsley and his second wife bought on Hadley Common, just north of London. In 1972, Hilly had a son, James, by Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock
. She moved to Spain with Boyd and their son; the couple married in 1977.
:
He said she was seeking protection from men, "but it went the other way, she was often beaten up, abused and she simply used herself up." She lived in the United States for a time—going to rock concerts with the Hell's Angels, taking drugs, wild. Amis said she was unrecognizable when she returned to England, a child adrift in an adult world. "The life she led was awful," he said. "Uncertain from moment to moment. She didn’t really like sex, so would get drunk, got drunk all the time, and got beaten up ... It was a miracle she made it to 46." Hilly came to dread her phone calls. "I was always waiting for the next awful crash, when she would lie and get into trouble and do stupid things, picking people up from pubs. How she didn't get murdered, I don't know." There was even talk at one point of putting her in the army as a way of finding her some discipline.
British journalist Julia Molony has taken issue with Amis's attribution of Sally's problems to the sexual revolution, blaming instead a dysfunctional early family life. She writes that Kingsley was the classic, elusive father figure, able to relate to women only through sex. He told Philip Larkin, "The only reason I like girls is I want to f*** them," though he added that it was a result of his "neurotic upbringing" and that he was trying to get over it.
Kingsley was present for the birth on Christmas Eve 1978, after an 18-hour labour. Sally said he was drunk, and that he insulted the Indian doctor who was preparing her for a Caesarean section
, saying he objected to an Indian performing surgery on his daughter. The doctor ignored him. "Once Dad saw the baby, it was 'How sweet! Bye'," said Sally. "But he had stayed 24 hours. Not many dads would do that for you." She called the baby Heidi but, unable to cope, placed her in foster care after three months. "I just couldn't cope without someone behind me," she said. "You seem to lose your marbles."
Heidi was adopted in the summer of 1979 by David Housego, an architect, and his wife, Helen, a teacher, who named her Catherine. They had been trying for a baby for years—one year after adopting Catherine, Helen found she was pregnant with another daughter, Louise. The Housegos told Catherine on Christmas Eve 1996, her 18th birthday, who her biological mother was. Sally had not added herself to the Adoption Contact Register, so Catherine was unable to reach her easily, and anyway believed she had plenty of time to find her.
for the conversion ceremony, she was carrying a can of Special Brew in her handbag. She had a stroke at the age of 40 in 1994, which left her with a limp, and from then until her death she lived on disability benefit of ₤73 ($116) a week in a tiny, spotless council flat in Kentish Town
, London. Amis writes that the flat was so small, he was able to hang up after one ring when he called her, because it wasn't possible for the phone to be out of arm's reach.
She was reportedly devastated by her father's death in 1995. He too had descended into alcoholism after the break-up of his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard, who left him in 1980. He ended his days living with his first wife, Hilly, and her husband, Alastair Boyd, who moved into his home as paid housekeepers, an arrangement suggested by Philip and Martin; he needed the help and they needed the money. Sally started looking after him too, doing his shopping and becoming his slave, according to her mother. He was taken to hospital with a suspected stroke in August 1995, and again in October after he fell and crushed some vertebrae, ending up in the St Pancras Hospital
. Sally spent hours by his bedside. She had been sitting with him for ten hours when he died on 22 October, while Philip and Martin smoked outside, after which Martin writes she stood, "electrified, as if italicized—as if so many urgent tasks awaited her that she couldn't for the life of her think where to begin. Kingsley had said he was worried she would lose her raison d'etre when he died. She fell into a long depression, erecting a shrine of memorabilia to him in her flat, including signed copies of his books and photographs, with his ashes on an urn on the mantelpiece.
in Hampstead
. She was already unconscious in the intensive care unit when Martin arrived, and died four days later. Her mother said her liver and kidneys had failed, and that her death was a relief in a way. Martin wrote in Koba the Dread:
He wrote to the editor of The Scotsman to correct an earlier story that implied she had been penniless and alone when she died; she had, in fact, left a considerable legacy, and had remained in touch with the family. A service was held at St Dominic's Priory Church
in Kentish Town, at which Amis recited the poem Larkin had written for her. Amis said he had a breakdown after her death, though it took him a while to see it for what it was. ""It was the pity of it," he said. "A certain amount of guilt, certainly. I didn't do as much for her as my brother did, and nothing like as much for her as my mother did. And nothing like as much as Kingsley did. He was always off to admissions wards and sometimes I'd go with him. But I couldn't bear it."
When Sally's daughter, Catherine Housego, by then a 22-year-old nursery school teacher, heard that Sally had died, she attended the funeral without making herself known to anyone. She wrote a letter to "The Amis Family" through the funeral director, and was later introduced to them all. Amis has described her as perfect, the "same weight of presence" as Sally, "a certain smile, a certain glance." She is also one of the last 30 or 40 people in the English-speaking world who doesn't say "between you and I"—proof, he writes, of both her nature and nurture.
James Diedrick writes that, a year before the publication of Koba—an examination of Joseph Stalin
's legacy—Amis had suggested the book would be about Sally, the story of 20 million tragedies through the portrait of one. In the end, only a few paragraphs are about her, but Paul Berman
suggests that Koba is, indeed, about the deaths of Sally and Kingsley—that Amis deals with his grief elliptically by studying Stalin instead of his own loss.
In The Pregnant Widow, Sally appears as the promiscuous and damaged Violet, the younger sister of the novel's protagonist, Keith Nearing, always drinking, always in hopeless relationships. Discussing the novel, Mark Lawson asked Amis during a BBC Radio 4 interview about the moral issues of writing about family. Amis replied that there is a process in writing fiction where you have to earn certain things:
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
, and his wife, Hilary "Hilly" Bardwell, now Lady Kilmarnock
Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock
Alastair Ivor Gilbert Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock was a British writer, Hispanophile, and Chief of the Clan Boyd.-Early life:...
. She lived for the most part out of the public eye, except for occasional interviews, but came to wider public attention posthumously in 2010, when her brother, Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
, based a character in his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow
The Pregnant Widow
The Pregnant Widow is a novel by the English writer, Martin Amis, published by Jonathan Cape on 4 February 2010. Its theme is the feminist revolution, which Amis sees as incomplete and bewildering for women, echoing the view of the 19th-century Russian writer, Alexander Herzen, that revolution is a...
, on her life. The novel is about feminism and the sexual revolution
Sexual revolution
The sexual revolution was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the 1960s into the 1980s...
of the 1960s—the metaphor of the pregnant widow comes from the Russian writer Alexander Herzen
Alexander Herzen
Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism...
, who used it for that point in a revolution when the old order has died, but the new one is not yet born, leading to what he called a long night of chaos and desolation.
Martin Amis has described Sally as one of the revolution's most spectacular victims. Plagued by alcoholism, depression, and promiscuity, and with a daughter born out of a brief encounter and given up for adoption at three months, she suffered a stroke at the age of 40, and died six years later of an unspecified infection—having used herself up, as Amis puts it. Her mother argues that Sally was a victim of herself, not of the times, while British journalist Julia Molony blames a dysfunctional family
Dysfunctional family
A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...
life, with Kingsley as an elusive father figure able to relate to women only through sex.
Amis had talked to Sally about writing her story. "I once rescued her from some terrible situation and paid up what was necessary to release her from it, and took her home and patched her up. And she looked at me and I know she wanted to thank me, and she was wondering how to do that. Normally she thanked people by having sex with them. But she just said: 'Write about me, Martin. You can say anything you like. I won't mind.'"
Early life
Sally was born at 24 The Grove, Uplands, SwanseaUplands, Swansea
Uplands is a suburb of Swansea, Wales. It lies about a mile to the west of Swansea city centre, and falls within the Uplands electoral ward. It is centred around the A4118 road, which links Swansea city centre and Sketty. The main road begins as Walter Road from the east, and becomes Sketty Road...
, Wales, the third child and only daughter of Kingsley Amis (1922–1995)—the son of Rosa Annie Amis and her husband, William Robert Amis from Clapham
Clapham
Clapham is a district in south London, England, within the London Borough of Lambeth.Clapham covers the postcodes of SW4 and parts of SW9, SW8 and SW12. Clapham Common is shared with the London Borough of Wandsworth, although Lambeth has responsibility for running the common as a whole. According...
, a clerk for Colman's
Colman's
Colman's is a UK manufacturer of mustard and various other sauces, based at Carrow, in Norwich, Norfolk. Presently an operational division of the multinational Unilever company, Colman's is one of the oldest existing food brands, famous for a limited range of products, almost all varieties of...
mustard—and Hilary "Hilly" Ann Bardwell, daughter of Leonard Sidney Bardwell, a shoe millionaire.
Kingsley and Hilly met in Oxford in May 1946. He was reading English at St John's College, Oxford
St John's College, Oxford
__FORCETOC__St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford, one of the larger Oxford colleges with approximately 390 undergraduates, 200 postgraduates and over 100 academic staff. It was founded by Sir Thomas White, a merchant, in 1555, whose heart is buried in the chapel of...
, while she was studying at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art
The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art
The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, known as The Ruskin, is an art school and research institute at the University of Oxford.Working collaboratively across two sites, the school provides undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in the study and production of visual art...
, after attending Bedales
Bedales School
Bedales School is a co-educational independent school situated in Hampshire, in the south east of England. Founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley in reaction to the limitations of conventional Victorian schools, today the school is one of the most expensive in the UK, charging £9,985 per term for a...
. The English poet Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...
, a close friend of Kingsley, said that Hilly was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met, without being in the least pretty. Kingsley was unhappy when she fell pregnant in 1948, and initially arranged a back-street abortion, though he cancelled it, fearful for her. They got married in the Register Office in Oxford Town Hall, reportedly by a drunken registrar. Philip — named after Larkin — was born seven months later in August 1948, an experience that gave Kingsley panic attacks and outbreaks of boils and cysts, occasioning a visit to a psychiatrist. Neither the birth nor his brief illness, nor the birth of Martin a year later in August 1949, diminished his interest in other women. He was famously unfaithful. He once took Hilly to dinner at his married mistress's home, where another man and his wife were dining too, and it was this third woman that Kingsley asked out on a date. Parties at the Amis household would involve every woman present being asked to accompany Kingsley to his greenhouse at the bottom of the garden.
Hilly's mother had left her some money, and she bought the house in Swansea with it, at 24 The Grove. Kingsley was working as a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea
Swansea University
Swansea University is a university located in Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom. Swansea University was chartered as University College of Swansea in 1920, as the fourth college of the University of Wales. In 1996, it changed its name to the University of Wales Swansea following structural changes...
, where he taught from 1949 to 1961, and was writing his first novel, Lucky Jim
Lucky Jim
Lucky Jim is an academic satire written by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. It was Amis's first novel, and won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction...
. One student said Kingsley's arrival in Swansea was "as if a brilliantly-hued tropical bird had come winging into our still blitz-battered town," though the reality was that Kingsley and Hilly were so poor that she had to take a job as a waitress and take scraps home pretending they were for the dog. His promiscuity was such that Hilly started drinking herself and having sex with friends and their partners. "I asked Kingsley to stop," she said, "then I learned to live with it and then I did what women finally do, that is to start looking around themselves to boost their self-esteem."
It was around this time in 1953 that she became pregnant with Sally. Hilly said she didn't know for sure that Kingsley was the father, but he accepted Sally as his own, though there were always doubts. Sally was never made aware of this so far as Hilly knew, though Hilly was shocked once to hear her son, Philip, say as a family friend was leaving the house—the man she suspected might be the father—"What's Sal's Dad doing here?"
Lucky Jim was published just days after Sally's birth, bringing Kingsley overnight success. Larkin wrote a poem for her, "Born Yesterday," completed on 20 January 1954, and published in The Spectator, in which he wished her:
When she was two, Sally fell head first from a table in the garden onto a stone floor, fracturing her skull; there were fears for her life for the first day and night, but she recovered. Not long afterwards, in March 1957, her paternal grandmother, Rosa, died suddenly after having a stroke in her home in Shrublands Avenue, Berkhamsted. Sally, aged three, was being looked after by Rosa at the time, and was left alone in the house with the body for 10 or 11 hours, until Rosa's husband got home from work. He reportedly found Sally oddly dressed and wearing her grandmother's make-up.
Martin Amis has written about the unusual upbringing he and his siblings had, how they were "participants in what seemed then like an ongoing adult party." Every Christmas from the age of five, the boys were allowed to smoke one cigarette each, and at nine were given a whole packet; when they were 14 or 15, Kingsley took them out and bought them a gross
Gross (unit)
A gross is equal to a dozen dozen, i.e. 12 × 12 = 144.It can be used in duodecimal counting. The use of gross likely originated from the fact that 144 can be counted on the fingers using the fingertips and first two joints of each finger when marked by the thumb of one hand. The other hand...
(144) of condoms. A petite and pretty girl according to her mother, Sally moved school several times as her father moved to Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
in the U.S. for a year in 1958, where he taught creative writing, then back to Cambridge, England, where he became a fellow and Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse
Peterhouse, Cambridge
Peterhouse is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It is the oldest college of the University, having been founded in 1284 by Hugo de Balsham, Bishop of Ely...
in 1961. He resigned from Cambridge in 1963, declaring that he wanted to move to Majorca, though he never did.
In August that year, when Sally was nine, Kingsley left the family to live with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Elizabeth Jane Howard, CBE is an English novelist. She was previously an actress and a model.In 1951 she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her first novel, The Beautiful Visit...
, whom he married in 1965. Hilly took Sally and her brothers to live in Spain in a house with no heating, and with no access to a car and the children speaking no Spanish. She said they were miserable and rarely heard from their father. She took them back to London, but became depressed herself, and the children were reportedly left to look after themselves, Philip and Martin bunking off school and taking drugs. In June 1964, Hilly was found drunk and drugged after taking an overdose. The boys eventually moved in with Kingsley, while Sally stayed with Hilly, though Sally did live for a time at Lemmons, the enormous house Kingsley and his second wife bought on Hadley Common, just north of London. In 1972, Hilly had a son, James, by Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock
Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock
Alastair Ivor Gilbert Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock was a British writer, Hispanophile, and Chief of the Clan Boyd.-Early life:...
. She moved to Spain with Boyd and their son; the couple married in 1977.
Relationships
Amis has said that Sally never grew up, but became fixed at a mental age of 12 or 13. Her mother said she was good at English, enjoyed singing and swimming, and had a talent for mimicry, which made her consider drama school. She tried to run away from home several times, and was sent to boarding school, but left at 16 and embarked on a series of casual jobs and inappropriate relationships, becoming "pathologically promiscuous", according to Amis. He told Mark LawsonMark Lawson
Mark Gerard Lawson is an English journalist, broadcaster and author.-Life and career:Born in Hendon, London, Lawson was raised in Yorkshire and is a Leeds United fan. He was educated at St Columba's College in St Albans and took a degree in English at University College London, where his lecturers...
:
She threw herself into whatever was in the air, promiscuity and new freedoms, but without realizing that none of it was in her interests. It did take women some years to realize that behaving like a boy—which was the only model available to them, in the equalitarian phase of the revolution, where the orthodoxy was that men and women were interchangeable—it took women quite a while to realize that, actually, they were going against their natures. And my sister, inasmuch as she had a fully formed character and personality, was just harming herself.
He said she was seeking protection from men, "but it went the other way, she was often beaten up, abused and she simply used herself up." She lived in the United States for a time—going to rock concerts with the Hell's Angels, taking drugs, wild. Amis said she was unrecognizable when she returned to England, a child adrift in an adult world. "The life she led was awful," he said. "Uncertain from moment to moment. She didn’t really like sex, so would get drunk, got drunk all the time, and got beaten up ... It was a miracle she made it to 46." Hilly came to dread her phone calls. "I was always waiting for the next awful crash, when she would lie and get into trouble and do stupid things, picking people up from pubs. How she didn't get murdered, I don't know." There was even talk at one point of putting her in the army as a way of finding her some discipline.
British journalist Julia Molony has taken issue with Amis's attribution of Sally's problems to the sexual revolution, blaming instead a dysfunctional early family life. She writes that Kingsley was the classic, elusive father figure, able to relate to women only through sex. He told Philip Larkin, "The only reason I like girls is I want to f*** them," though he added that it was a result of his "neurotic upbringing" and that he was trying to get over it.
Marriage
Three years after leaving school, in 1974, Sally took a job in a wine bar in Edgware Road, London, managed by Nigel Service and his brother, sons of a Naval commander. Service said she was extroverted and funny, putting on voices to mimic people, and that the customers adored her. He fell in love with her and she responded—19 years older than her, he made her feel safe. They were married at Hampstead Register Office in 1976, with Kingsley, Philip, and Martin in attendance. Service rented a flat for the couple in Hampstead, but her alcoholism got worse. He said the way it took hold of her was terrible to watch. According to her mother, Sally could drink a bottle of vodka in a morning, and if short of money would drink Special Brew, an extra-strong beer often associated with vagrants, out of a cup as though it was tea.Motherhood
Sally split from Nigel after six months and moved into a church hostel, descending into ever heavier bouts of drinking. She met another alcoholic there, an Irishman named Martin O'Vessay, and became pregnant with a daughter. "I didn't want to be pregnant," Sally said of her encounter with O'Vessay, "but sometimes you feel lonely and you want a cuddle and want to feel warm. But he left me the day after."Kingsley was present for the birth on Christmas Eve 1978, after an 18-hour labour. Sally said he was drunk, and that he insulted the Indian doctor who was preparing her for a Caesarean section
Caesarean section
A Caesarean section, is a surgical procedure in which one or more incisions are made through a mother's abdomen and uterus to deliver one or more babies, or, rarely, to remove a dead fetus...
, saying he objected to an Indian performing surgery on his daughter. The doctor ignored him. "Once Dad saw the baby, it was 'How sweet! Bye'," said Sally. "But he had stayed 24 hours. Not many dads would do that for you." She called the baby Heidi but, unable to cope, placed her in foster care after three months. "I just couldn't cope without someone behind me," she said. "You seem to lose your marbles."
Heidi was adopted in the summer of 1979 by David Housego, an architect, and his wife, Helen, a teacher, who named her Catherine. They had been trying for a baby for years—one year after adopting Catherine, Helen found she was pregnant with another daughter, Louise. The Housegos told Catherine on Christmas Eve 1996, her 18th birthday, who her biological mother was. Sally had not added herself to the Adoption Contact Register, so Catherine was unable to reach her easily, and anyway believed she had plenty of time to find her.
Ill health and her father's death
Sally converted to Roman Catholicism at one point, but the drinking continued—her mother says that when Sally went to Westminster CathedralWestminster Cathedral
Westminster Cathedral in London is the mother church of the Catholic community in England and Wales and the Metropolitan Church and Cathedral of the Archbishop of Westminster...
for the conversion ceremony, she was carrying a can of Special Brew in her handbag. She had a stroke at the age of 40 in 1994, which left her with a limp, and from then until her death she lived on disability benefit of ₤73 ($116) a week in a tiny, spotless council flat in Kentish Town
Kentish Town
Kentish Town is an area of north west London, England in the London Borough of Camden.-History:The most widely accepted explanation of the name of Kentish Town is that it derived from 'Ken-ditch' meaning the 'bed of a waterway'...
, London. Amis writes that the flat was so small, he was able to hang up after one ring when he called her, because it wasn't possible for the phone to be out of arm's reach.
She was reportedly devastated by her father's death in 1995. He too had descended into alcoholism after the break-up of his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard, who left him in 1980. He ended his days living with his first wife, Hilly, and her husband, Alastair Boyd, who moved into his home as paid housekeepers, an arrangement suggested by Philip and Martin; he needed the help and they needed the money. Sally started looking after him too, doing his shopping and becoming his slave, according to her mother. He was taken to hospital with a suspected stroke in August 1995, and again in October after he fell and crushed some vertebrae, ending up in the St Pancras Hospital
St Pancras Hospital
St Pancras Hospital is a public hospital in the St Pancras/Somers Town area of London, near Camden Town. The hospital is controlled by the Camden Primary Care Trust and specialises in geriatric and psychiatric medicine....
. Sally spent hours by his bedside. She had been sitting with him for ten hours when he died on 22 October, while Philip and Martin smoked outside, after which Martin writes she stood, "electrified, as if italicized—as if so many urgent tasks awaited her that she couldn't for the life of her think where to begin. Kingsley had said he was worried she would lose her raison d'etre when he died. She fell into a long depression, erecting a shrine of memorabilia to him in her flat, including signed copies of his books and photographs, with his ashes on an urn on the mantelpiece.
Her own death
She became seriously ill herself five years later, in November 2000, struck by an unspecified infection, and was taken to the Royal Free HospitalRoyal Free Hospital
The Royal Free Hospital is a major teaching hospital in Hampstead, London, England and part of the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust....
in Hampstead
Hampstead
Hampstead is an area of London, England, north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland...
. She was already unconscious in the intensive care unit when Martin arrived, and died four days later. Her mother said her liver and kidneys had failed, and that her death was a relief in a way. Martin wrote in Koba the Dread:
I was apprised of this death, not by any change in my sister's demeanor, but by the twining coils of the monitor screen. She, or the respirator she was attached to, continued to breathe, to pant ardently: a corpse with a heaving chest. Then they disconnected her, and she could be approached and kissed without horror. And I asked her a question I had asked many times before, but would now have no cause to ask again: "Oh, Sally, what have you done?" Many times, as a child, I silently promised to protect her. And I didn't do that, did I? No one could have protected her, perhaps. But those promises, never uttered, are still inside me and are still a part of me.
He wrote to the editor of The Scotsman to correct an earlier story that implied she had been penniless and alone when she died; she had, in fact, left a considerable legacy, and had remained in touch with the family. A service was held at St Dominic's Priory Church
St Dominic's Priory Church
St Dominic's Priory Church between Hampstead and Camden Town, London NW5, is one of the largest Roman Catholic churches in London.-Location:...
in Kentish Town, at which Amis recited the poem Larkin had written for her. Amis said he had a breakdown after her death, though it took him a while to see it for what it was. ""It was the pity of it," he said. "A certain amount of guilt, certainly. I didn't do as much for her as my brother did, and nothing like as much for her as my mother did. And nothing like as much as Kingsley did. He was always off to admissions wards and sometimes I'd go with him. But I couldn't bear it."
When Sally's daughter, Catherine Housego, by then a 22-year-old nursery school teacher, heard that Sally had died, she attended the funeral without making herself known to anyone. She wrote a letter to "The Amis Family" through the funeral director, and was later introduced to them all. Amis has described her as perfect, the "same weight of presence" as Sally, "a certain smile, a certain glance." She is also one of the last 30 or 40 people in the English-speaking world who doesn't say "between you and I"—proof, he writes, of both her nature and nurture.
Appearances in Martin Amis's writing
Amis dedicated Time's Arrow (1991) to Sally, and has written about her in three of his books: Experience (2000), Koba the Dread (2003), both non-fiction, and in The Pregnant Widow (2010), a novel.James Diedrick writes that, a year before the publication of Koba—an examination of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's legacy—Amis had suggested the book would be about Sally, the story of 20 million tragedies through the portrait of one. In the end, only a few paragraphs are about her, but Paul Berman
Paul Berman
Paul Berman is an American writer. His articles have been published in numerous periodicals, such as: The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review and Slate...
suggests that Koba is, indeed, about the deaths of Sally and Kingsley—that Amis deals with his grief elliptically by studying Stalin instead of his own loss.
In The Pregnant Widow, Sally appears as the promiscuous and damaged Violet, the younger sister of the novel's protagonist, Keith Nearing, always drinking, always in hopeless relationships. Discussing the novel, Mark Lawson asked Amis during a BBC Radio 4 interview about the moral issues of writing about family. Amis replied that there is a process in writing fiction where you have to earn certain things:
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Often when I read, I think 'that isn't earned' ... things are discussed and described without enough propriety, and I know what that is, and it's suffering. It's sitting in your room feeling very miserable, remembering and re-experiencing these painful things, and doing enough suffering—although it's not a question of will, it's just a question of receiving this deep unease—until you've earned the book.
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