I thought Harold had a point and there was no doubt that Tom's satires, from Riotous Assembly on, had a venom, even a cruelty, which all really fine satire has. But Tom was adamant that he had done the right thing. Later, after many years' friendship, Harold suddenly and inexplicably turned on me, making it clear that he thought I was the devil incarnate. Even close friends could give no explanation and Harold refused all requests that we meet. I was left wondering if Tom might not have been right.

There was no doubt that Tom's father, the Revd George Coverdale Sharpe, a Unitarian minister, was the key. Almost Tom's last act was to push a copy of one of his sermons into my hands, saying, "See if this doesn't knock you off your chair." It did too. It was written in 1922 and boldly said that everything Englishmen had believed about the Great War was wrong. It had been a disaster and a disgrace, millions had died for no good reason, and the peace had been wickedly unfair to Germany. It is one of the best-argued and most finely written pieces of English prose that I have ever read: there was no doubt that the Revd George Sharpe had an exceptional talent. Tom never talked much of his mother. They had a very confrontational relationship and when she was dying she summoned him only in order to say, "This is what you wanted, isn't it?" Tom was a solitary child. He had a half-brother, a London bobby 22 years older than himself, whom he regarded with a distant geniality. But that was it.

The Revd George Sharpe was thrilled to see what he took for a German renaissance: the young, bronzed and healthy members of the Hitler Youth marching at Nuremberg. They would right the terrible wrongs of Versailles. He took the young Tom to Nuremberg and he was entranced. Years later, when Tom was a famous writer, he was invited to address a Jewish women's group and began his talk with the memorable line, "You have probably not often been addressed by someone whose chief ambition, at age 15, was to be an SS officer." Tom's dad was the Ealing and Acton member of The Link (a pro-Nazi organisation) and also a member of the Nordic League. A loyal Nazi, he said he hated Jews "in the sense that I hate all corruption". When the war began the family was on the run from the Special Branch, moving house time after time, always haunted by the fear that the minister would be consigned to the Isle of Man along with other Mosleyites. Tom's father died in 1944, just too soon to see the film of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Belsen which utterly devastated Tom; he realised that everything he had been brought up to believe had been wrong and that Nazism was pure evil. This hard lesson in deception and reality underlaid much of what he later wrote. Tom went to school at Lancing and thence to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he got a memorable Third in archaeology and social anthropology by arguing in his Finals paper that it would have been better if the subject had never existed. He then enlisted in the Royal Marines, who were both the opposite and yet in other ways the equivalent of the SS.

Tom arrived in South Africa in 1951 and, hating apartheid, immediately threw his lot in with the Liberals. The ANC leader, Albert Luthuli, was not then a Nobel Peace Prize laureate but a much maligned and marginal opposition leader, in need of any help that he could get. Tom would regularly ferry him up and down from PMB to Durban on the back of his motorbike. Tom had a certain genius as a photographer and there were many pictures of Luthuli thus ensconced. Indeed, Tom once showed me enough of his photographic collection for me to realise that it is one of the great historical artefacts of the 20th century. Its pictures of postwar Britain and, particularly of 1950s South Africa, were far superior to anything else I have seen. Tom also fancied himself as a playwright and his anti-apartheid plays drew an increasingly irate response from the authorities, climaxing with his expulsion from the country in 1961. Tom told me that the man deployed to see he was securely dispatched on a Union Castle boat to England was Konstabel Els. Tom liked the one-syllable name and decided he could use it. Konstabel Els became the main protagonist of the bestselling Riotous Assembly (set in Pimburg = PMB) which, like its follow-up, Indecent Exposure, was banned in South Africa.