This is the SOE Memorial on the south side of the Thames outside Lambeth Palace. It was unveiled in 2009 and the bust is of Violette Szabo. Last Sunday I attended a ceremony at which representatives from Norway, Serbia and our own armed services laid wreaths around the memorial. A contingent of cadets from the Air Training Corps were in attendance. They were a sloppy bunch – a proper shambles, as an RSM in the Brigade might put it. It gladdened my heart as there is no need for precision drill in the ATC and indeed one of my favourite authors joined the ATC as a schoolboy just because it was a soft option.
Simon Raven was at Charterhouse with James Prior, William Rees-Mogg and Peter May. They all appear thinly disguised in Alms for Oblivion, a series of ten novels published between 1964 and 1976 and still in print. They are his finest achievement. Raven was louche, dissipated, lazy, promiscuous, drunk, with a talent for losing money on horses. This equipped him admirably to write about the English upper classes, which he did stylishly often drawing on his Classics education at King’s College, Cambridge; though, typically, he left before sitting his Finals. This is the cover for the first in the series.
Although he was expelled from Charterhouse, they ultimately had a change of heart and he ended his days living at the London Charterhouse near Smithfield where he died in 2001, aged 73.
Simon Raven wrote this epitaph for himself: “He shared his bottle – and, when still young and appetising, his bed.” I wrote this obituary.
A man of letters ahead of his betters.
His pellucid style sometimes tinged with bile
So much more droll than that old fool Powell.
Impecunious, morally dubious,
But how frightfully sad to lose such an adorable cad.
“Cast a cold eye”, if you remember your Yeats,
Now he too is among the greats.
Just a stone remains on which is graven
Simon Arthur Noël Raven.