Amy Winehouse and Blake are killing each other,says her mother-in-law

After quitting rehab after just five days, Amy and Blake were photographed dazed and bloodied in London's Soho

The Civils first met Amy one Saturday evening last summer, when Blake brought her home to meet them.

They'd dated two years earlier, but had broken up when Blake went back to his girlfriend, Chloe, who worked for a magazine.

Amy last week with bandages covering her arm, blood-spattered shoes and a gashed knee

According to Georgette, Amy sent Blake an avalanche of text messages the whole time they were apart, convincing him of her love for him - so much so that he dumped Chloe.

Cynics have suggested that Blake, with no obvious income of his own, took up with Amy again just as she was becoming a major star, not to mention a rich one.

A bright grammar school boy with ambitions to become a journalist, he had dropped out of sixth form college and headed for the bright lights of London with a friend and started work in a hairdressing salon.

"Looking at him now, all dishevelled and unkempt, it's hard to believe that back then he wouldn't leave the house without showering, doing his hair and putting on aftershave," says Georgette ruefully.

Unknown to her, Blake - who did hairstyling on fashion shoots and also worked as a film runner - was being drawn increasingly into the drugs culture.

Indeed, some reports suggest he became a drug dealer, selling cocaine to young women on the London party circuit to finance his own habit.

One source, who claimed Blake had introduced Amy to hard drugs, told a newspaper: "He had all these girlie disciples under his spell and Amy was one of them.

"She was just another bird he could sleep with."

But Georgette refuses to accept this version of events, which absolves Amy of any responsibility for her own actions or her seeming determination, pre-dating Blake, to follow a path of self-mutilation.

"It was four years ago when we first suspected Blake was taking drugs.

"When he came home he was sniffing constantly, and when we visited him in London, he kept disappearing to the toilets in restaurants with his friends," says Georgette.

"We were horrified at the thought, and confronted him at once, and he didn't deny it.

"He told me: 'It's normal, mum, everyone takes a bit of cocaine.'

"I couldn't believe what I was hearing from my own son, but he was quite nonchalant about it.

"And the evidence of what he was saying was staring us in the face. He was more verbally aggressive, edgy and tense."