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and,

We wrote to each other whenever we couldn’t meet. I’d read all three of his novels and his poetry, but I knew that he hadn’t read anything of mine, and eventually I gave him a
piece I’d written for
Encounter
magazine about my grandfathers. ‘That’s a dear little piece,’ he said, when he’d read it. I didn’t dare ask him to read
one of my novels.

That winter of 1962 we fell seriously in love but, beyond the island we created and on which we intermittently and perilously lived, our situations were very different. When I met him,
Kingsley’s marriage was in turmoil with mutual recriminations and infidelity. But he had three children and wanted – expected – to hold it together because of them. Knowing this,
I didn’t ask questions about his relationship with Hilly, and he once wrote to me saying he was grateful for this. My situation, on the other hand, was different. I had no guilt to contend
with, having tried and failed to
make anything of my marriage. Jim turned up at intervals in Blomfield Road from his flat in Bristol, which meant I never dared to have Kingsley
there. Except for a few trusted friends, it seemed essential to keep things secret. The only thing I knew was that, sometime after Easter, Kingsley was going to Majorca with his family.

Now I need to backtrack a year or two to write about Nicola. As soon as she left school, she said she wanted to go to a drama school, not to act but to learn to be a stage
manager. Michael MacOwan, whom I knew, was teaching at LAMDA, and there they taught stage management. But Nic was a year too young to go there, and I wanted her to learn French, to make her own
clothes, and to cook. I felt that whatever she did in her life these skills would come in handy. Pete found a French family who lived in the country with a large number of children, none of whom
could speak English, and she spent three months with them. She’d not wanted to go, but she came back with passable French saying it was the best holiday she’d ever had. I found her a
cooking school in Kensington, and classes for clothes-making that sounded sufficiently professional and she learned there to make her own toiles.

During the terms that she did this she lived with me for the first time since I’d left her father. Colin was also living with me, and they became great friends. She often went as his
helper on hi-fi installations. I’d hoped that this arrangement would bring us closer, but it didn’t. She was breezy and indifferent, and I was nervous and unnaturally conciliatory.

I began to realize how much I’d failed her, and that by my neglect she’d come to distrust and resent me. I couldn’t blame her in the least: she’d had a hard time as a
child. Pete, admirable though he was in many ways, wasn’t cut out to be a parent, and it had been her stepmother, Phil, who’d provided stability. Love had been lost between us. I
resolved then that I’d try to make amends, but I didn’t realize – perhaps mercifully – how very long that would take. She
was also going through her
teenage years when mothers aren’t right about anything. I was glad that there was so much affection between her and Colin, but I sometimes felt ganged-up against – excluded from their
jokes and interests. I was too ashamed of myself as a mother to talk to anyone about it.

Several things, large and small, highlighted this unhappy condition. Nic went on a holiday to Scotland with Colin, and when they returned she was clearly very unhappy, and spent most of the time
in her room. When I asked Colin what was the matter – I suspected that she’d fallen unhappily in love – he was evasive and only said she didn’t want to talk to me about it.
Later when she was at LAMDA, she wanted to invite friends to supper but would I please be out? Of course I would – I could see the point of that. I made a supper of cold roast leg of lamb,
baked potatoes and salads. When she got home she said none of her friends would touch the lamb as they were all vegetarian, so I rushed out and bought two dozen eggs for them to have omelettes. Nic
did very well at LAMDA, and on leaving the school immediately got a job as assistant stage manager for the opening of the Chichester theatre.

It was while she was staying with me that she’d met Kip Asquith. I remember I got them seats for a matinée, and when they came back they both said it had been marvellous, but
neither of them was able tell me anything about it. After that they kept in touch and saw each other when possible. Kip had decided that he wanted to see the world and he joined the Merchant Navy
and spent at least a year on oil tankers. But he’d inherited a farm in Gloucestershire, and when he came home he decided to go to agricultural college at Cirencester so he could run it.

In early 1963 Nic and Kip announced that they wanted to get married. She was nineteen, the same age I’d been when I’d married her father. I felt anxious about her age and lack of
experience generally, as did Pete and Phil. Kip was also very young, but he knew what he wanted to do and was able to do it. They’d been going out for nearly five years. Nic had always loved
the country
and would have hated to live in a city, so there were no valid objections, really.

They were married on 12 May 1963 at Stanway, in Gloucester, where Guy Benson, the artist, and his wife, Violet, lived. I was invited to stay for the wedding and for lunch beforehand. Nic seemed
excited, but more unapproachable than ever. She turned more to her new mother-in-law than she did to me, and after lunch when she went up to dress I wasn’t allowed to help her. I remember
that night writing a sad letter to Kingsley about it. But the wedding went off well, although there was a rather swollen line of parents since both the bride and groom had double sets. It was an
unpretentious country wedding with a party in the barn afterwards, and Nic and Kip left for their honeymoon in Venice. I remember little about it, as it was one of those occasions occluded by
sadness for me.

In the spring of 1963, Kingsley went with Hilly to a science-fiction conference in Trieste in Italy. Relations between them weren’t good: by then she’d found some
of my letters to Kingsley and had promptly sent them to a lawyer. So Kingsley decided he and I were to spend a fortnight in Spain before he went to Majorca. In the meantime, I’d agreed to go
to Cap d’Antibes to stay with the Behrens’ for a week, and to visit Lorna St Aubyn in her house in Provence.

My relationship with Michael had petered into a kind of wary friendship, and from time to time I was invited to dinner with them or to stay at Culham near Abingdon. It was on this holiday that
Felicity rather bravely asked me whether I thought it would have been better if I’d married Michael. I was able to say, quite truthfully, that I didn’t think so. I knew he’d moved
on, that there had been other people after me, but I could also see much affection between them, and indeed this increased until his death many years later. I took a train along the coast to
Marseille where Lorna met me. I’d been going to spend two or three nights with her, but as a
train strike was starting the next day this proved impossible. If I wanted to
get back to England, I had to leave by the night train.

Kingsley and I spent the night of 20 July before our journey in a friend’s flat in South Kensington. We were both encumbered by a ridiculous amount of luggage, clothes, books and our
typewriters – we intended working. The next morning there were no taxis, and we were reduced to lugging it all, in relays, to the Underground, where eventually we found a cab. We were both
extremely anxious – that we’d be seen, that we’d miss the train, that something, somehow would go wrong. But we were also so buoyed up by love and excitement that our travel
Angst
– his far worse than mine, as I was to learn later – was contained and even transformed into a deliciously exciting adventure.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, when we were safely seated in the boat train for Dover.

‘Barcelona. Then we’ll find somewhere quiet by the sea.’ Kingsley wouldn’t fly anywhere. He’d once as a boy had a five-shilling trip in an aeroplane at a seaside
resort and that was it – for the rest of his life.

After the ferry, and two more trains, we reached Barcelona in the evening. It was stiflingly hot. We found a hotel and I remember drinking so much Vichy Catalan that the next day I felt ill.
Kingsley said we must go to the tourist office to find somewhere to go, so we did. Uncharacteristically Kingsley was in charge of the expedition – something that was never to happen
again.

He settled on Sitges where he’d been before. ‘It’ll be full of package tours,’ he said. ‘We’ll be completely lost in the crowd.’ We went to Sitges on a
very modern little train, so ferociously air-conditioned that we emerged shaking with cold. We’d been told to go to the tourist agency when we arrived, where a Mrs Brandt would find us a
flat. So, accompanied still by our seven pieces of unwieldy luggage – Kingsley had begun to say, ‘What have you
got
in there?’ – we went, and the very efficient and
nice lady allotted us a flat, on the first floor of a small block in a quiet street. It was a
studio flat: one large room with a double bed, a table and two chairs, a balcony, a
kitchenette and a small bathroom.

Kingsley spent the first two days on the beach where, after a token bathe – he never liked it, really – he read my novel,
The Sea Change
. He’d asked me to bring it and I
felt both frightened and glad. He said nothing at all during the two days and I hadn’t the nerve to ask him how he was getting on. The second evening, he shut the book and said,
‘That’s a very good novel indeed. I am
so
relieved. I was afraid you wouldn’t be any good. It’s really
good
, Min.’

We fell quickly into a routine that suited us both. In the mornings we wrote sitting opposite each other at the table, our typewriters almost touching in the small space. Then we went to the
beach where I bathed and Kingsley had a dip, then read. After lunch at one of the many, but identical, restaurants where we got near-English food, with a few concessions to Spain, like
gazpacho
or tiny fried fish, we went back to the studio for a siesta. More writing, then drinks. Kingsley quickly amassed an incredible collection of them, including frightful liqueurs such
as
crème de bananes
or Parfait Amour, which tasted like old ladies doused in violet-scented talc. We went out to dinner at another restaurant, and then on to play clock golf by
floodlight, which we both enormously enjoyed. I’d never felt so enclosed by affection.

I’d been waking frequently in the night with terrifying dreams. Kingsley always woke and consoled me, and they were becoming fewer. I was marvellously happy and amazed to be so. I think
now that we’d both been slightly nervous of each other, he because he thought I was posh and might be, as he put it, queenly, I because I didn’t hold his political opinions and thought
he would despise me for that. But people in early love are generally hell-bent on finding the best in each other. I loved being with someone who made me laugh so much and who was, as I’ve
said before, so stalwart and steady in his honesty about his taste, or lack of it. One day, thinking he might prefer it, I made him a tomato soup. I spent hours on it,
wanting
it to be perfect. ‘Bit authentic for me, darling,’ he said, and after that we reverted to the
gazpacho
.

One morning we decided to write a few pages of each other’s novel in progress. This meant reading enough of each work to know what was going on, and then a careful briefing as to what each
of us wanted to happen. In both cases they were party scenes: his from
One Fat Englishman
and mine from
After Julius
. Our very different writing behaviour was reversed. Normally
I’d sit groaning and biting my nails, staring into space, and Kingsley would think for a moment, and then, suddenly charged up, would tap away at a steady rate, sometimes laughing aloud at
his characters. So now while I was laughing and typing away, he was groaning and staring into space. The results, however, were pretty good for both of us, and the only person who spotted the
changeover in each novel was my brother, Colin.

One afternoon, our peace was disturbed. We were in bed and the doorbell rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ I said. ‘It’ll be our laundry.’ I wrapped myself in a sheet and
started to open the door. A huge boot was put into the crack and an Australian voice said, ‘Is that Elizabeth Jane Howard?’ The possessor of the boot was very strong, and I knew I
couldn’t hold the door against him. ‘Have you got Kingsley Amis with you?’

Kingsley had got up by now and was dressing. ‘If you go downstairs and wait, we’ll see you in the garden.’

The man, an Australian, turned out to be a stringer for the
Daily Express
. Our names had been passed to him by, presumably, either the hotel or the tourist agency in Barcelona. After some
argument, the man whined, ‘I don’t
like
doing this job,’ and Kingsley said, ‘But you
are
doing it, aren’t you?’ He said he wanted to get his
photographer for a picture and Kingsley agreed. The moment he’d gone, we went to Mrs Brandt, explained we hadn’t given her our real names and that we had to move at once, within the
hour. ‘I’ll find you somewhere else, and register you as Mr and Mrs Friend.’ We rushed back and packed. Mrs Brandt sent a cab and we were
installed in a
ground-floor studio at the other end of town. By now I’d acquired a white kitten we called Victor, after Victor Pritchett. Victor had to be put into a carrier-bag, which he intensely
disliked. Kingsley called his friend, George Gale at the
Express
, to ask him to try to suppress the story, and George did his best. But the facts were published, and we knew that our
unofficial elopement was common knowledge.

We got back to England, and Kingsley got the news that Hilly had gone to Majorca with the children. As Jim was still unpredictably in and out of my flat, we rented one in a mansion block in
Basil Street for the enormous sum of fifteen pounds a week. Divorce was in the air.