To avoid wartime bombing she was sent to Dr Williams’ School for Young Ladies in North Wales but was expelled after running away.

[5] After leaving school she worked as a trainee kennel maid, a stable hand and assisted at wartime day nurseries.

After seeking an (illegal) surgical procedure, and upon the advice of several doctors about the risk to Hilly's health, they chose to keep the baby.

[19][20] In 1956 she “announced she was in love with the married journalist Henry Fairlie”[21] but “Kingsley saw him off with a blistering letter.”[22] In autumn 1958 the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, for a year, where Amis had been invited to take up the position of Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at the university.

[24] The role did not last long and in Easter 1962 the couple travelled to Majorca and found a house near local resident Robert Graves, whose writing Amis “much admired”.

Soon after this meeting, while on holiday in Yugoslavia and “overwhelmed with misery at the latest evidence of his infidelity”, she wrote “1 FAT ENGLISHMAN [the title of his current book].

[27] Soon after, Amis left for a holiday with Howard, with a plan to return to the family in time to relocate to Majorca for the start of the school year.

[32] It was in Wivenhoe that she began a relationship with David Roy Shackleton Bailey, known as “Shack”, a fellow and bursar at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

They moved with Sally to Ann Arbor where Hilly opened a fish and chip shop called “Lucky Jim’s”.

While in Seville, Hilly found a job as a matron at an international school for a year, after which she and Boyd returned to Ronda.

On their return, the couple ran art courses, managed a bar and took in paying guests at Casa de Mondragon, the house where Boyd had lived with his previous wife for twenty years.

Money was tight; at one point “Hilly and a friend set up a hot-dog stand on the motorway to make a little extra.”[36][37] In 1980 Howard left Amis, and his long-standing phobia of being alone became a problem.

[41] In Martin Amis's memoirs he “reminds his mother that she rescued Kingsley, bought him “back to life and love” and that Amis could never have written his last six novels, his memoirs and last poems, without her.”[42] Zachary Leader, Kingsley’s biographer, wrote that after Howard left Amis, he “became clearer (or at least more public) about Hilly’s importance to him: leaving her, he claimed, was the single biggest mistake of his life.”[43] In 1998 Hilly and Boyd moved permanently to Ronda.

Zachary Leader identified that Amis’ characters Rhiannon Weaver (The Old Devils, 1986) and Jenny Standish (Difficulties with Girls, 1988) took inspiration from Hilly.

[46] Gavin Ewart’s 1991 poem Relicts, as It Were, cites Hilly (née Bardwell) and Monica Jones (Philip Larkin's partner) as witnesses to the normal lives of poets.