I Once Met... Simon Raven

It seems only yesterday that Simon and I were in Wheeler’s in Jermyn Street and Simon said he’d like cold lobster. ‘Simon,’ I said, ‘you only want to eat lobster cold when it’s straight out of the sea.’ I was paying. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I’ll have it Thermidor.’

Simon would have been ninety on 28th December, if he hadn’t died in 2001. At that time, he was Brother Raven, a popular almsman at the Charterhouse, the London almshouse for over-sixties in need of financial and social support.

Simon’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was written after he had resigned his commission (we met in the same regiment) the previous year, to avoid embarrassment to the regiment and himself over his lack of funds.

Novels followed annually until he embarked on his great work – his roman-fleuve, Alms for Oblivion – ten novels covering the English uppermiddle-class scene since the war.

He lived at Deal where Anthony Blond, his publisher, sent him £20 a week to keep his pen flowing, away from the fleshpots.

He did of course come to London and one morning – it must have been in 1959 – we met by chance in Barclays Bank in Piccadilly (now the Wolseley restaurant). I was cashing a cheque for £5 (now around £150) and Simon for £100 (around £3,000, a bonus from Anthony).

‘Meet you at the Connaught at 7.30,’ he said.

We ate and drank deliciously, walked to Les Ambassadeurs in Hamilton Place, drank cognac and played roulette. At about midnight, Simon put his last counter on red and the £100 was gone. He could be very generous. He once said to me, he would like his epitaph to be ‘generous with his bottle and his body’.

Was he the devil? Not really. Steeped in the classics – a scholar of Charterhouse and King’s, Cambridge – his mores were set by the ancient gods. What was good enough for them, he said, was good enough for me. He liked women and men – though he said men were

Simon Raven in 1984 easier as, on the whole, they only wanted money. Women wanted commitment. In the regiment, the officers were divided over him. Many savoured his erudition and wit. Others disapproved of his liberated attitudes. As a convivial companion and conversationalist, he was without equal. In The Sabre Squadron one of the characters is asked what he is doing in the army. ‘I like closed institutions,’ he says. ‘They demand conformity but in return they offer security and privilege. They impose a routine which makes the days pass smoothly. Best of all, they leave one in no doubt as to one’s place.’ Simon loved institutions. And he loved a joke. The key to life lay in ‘pursuing the delicate and proper ordering of pleasure’. He found more pleasure in storytelling than probably anything else: burgundy, foie gras, cognac, even sex. He was a superb storyteller.