Simon Called Peter

An enthusiastic, committed but naïve priest, Peter Graham, leaves his fiancée, Hilda, to serve as chaplain in France during World War I.

He is rapidly made aware of the British tommies' total indifference to what he has to offer and is appalled at the decline in morality of the officers revealed by their disrespect and attitude towards the local French women, most of who consequently lead lives of easy virtue.

The chaplain's faith is almost destroyed, and while in this disillusioned state of mind he falls in love with a South African nurse, a free and generous spirit, whose total lack of conventionality bewitches him.

The novel was hugely successful at the time of publication not only for the honest eyewitness account of service life during that holocaust (the author was a chaplain during that time and fell in love with a nurse) but also for the later scenes of a very frank sexual nature when the lovers spend a weekend together on leave, although these are tame now to a modern audience.

Julie, the heroine, is a wonderful creation, the epitome of what it must have been to 'live now for tomorrow we may die', and it is her total selflessness that determines the fate of the affair. The author paid the price for his commercial success, earning contempt from leading members of the church, little critical acclaim for his work and a self-imposed exile a few years after publication, but the book still maintains interest because of the element of autobiography. It has that undeniable ring of truth.