I first heard of Tom's name through the South African exile network in the early 1960s. There was, I was told, this funny man who had roundly announced that he would write a bestseller and had sat down and done so in three weeks. It was true. Even non-South Africans found they laughed aloud at Riotous Assembly. Other vulgar and hilarious works poured out and Tom became that rare figure, a rich author. Once he came and stayed a weekend with me in Oxford and I took him into high table in Magdalen. At that time we had a famously bibulous president who, memorably, once got up from high table with DTs and broke into the college chapel, disrupting a service. Absent a proper president, a great deal of the college depended on the highly traditional head porter, Mr Strutt. Tom drank all this in with huge appetite and thanked me "for helping me in more ways than you can know". Not long afterwards, Porterhouse Blue appeared and became a successful TV series. Though supposedly about a Cambridge college, a number of my Magdalen colleagues muttered to me that it was all strongly reminiscent of Magdalen. I held my tongue. Tom became a great satirist in the tradition of Swift and Hogarth. His work is undeniably vulgar, as theirs often was, and he had no regard for it. "My entertainments," he would say, "are all a lot of nonsense. Surely we have better things to discuss?"

When I returned to South Africa I got used to Tom's somewhat inebriated phone calls. He was endlessly sympathetic when I lost my left leg in 2009 and kept telling me I must come to Spain, whose medical services were first rate, and he would help me. In the end my wife Irina and I went, staying with Tom while I was kitted out with a computerised prosthesis which enables me to walk without crutches. Crucial to this was Tom's doctor and great friend, Montsie Verdaguer, who was seldom absent from his household and who had made complex arrangements for our visit with the Catalonian medical establishment. It was weird. Tom, we realised, had not only sold hundreds of thousands of books in England but millions more in Germany, Spain and Catalonia. Everywhere he was a household name. Tom put us up for two weeks, insisted on paying some of the doctors' bills, and even, despite infirmities of his own, came to some of the prosthesis-fitting sessions himself. In between, he sat at his desk smoking large cigars and drinking malt whisky (both medicinal, he said) and regaled us in Churchillian style. He had become a sort of emblematic Englishman while at the same time he despised and sent up that kind of person. We laughed and drank, discussed Waugh and Wodehouse. He wandered around the house singing "Die Stem", an act of conscious self-satire. "Ons vir jou, Suid-Afrika," he would happily hum and, grinning, would demand, "What's wrong with that?"

Tom was far too complex a person for any obituary to do him justice. His widow Nancy, who bore him two daughters, tells me that in his last days he developed a consuming passion to revisit the Cambridge he had loved. This triggered my memory of a phone call in late April this year in which he averred an absolute determination to revisit South Africa. I said, how wonderful, we'll make you welcome, but even then I wondered about the wishes of a dying man to see again the places he has loved. I feel I owe him my mobility, a hundred wickedly funny telephone conversations and thousands of laughs. Tom's picture hangs in our kitchen and we cried the day he died.