Tom Carew was a war hero and an unconventional father with heaps of charm. When he began to lose his memory, his daughter set out to write this fascinating memoir
Tom Carew was 24 when he parachuted into Nazi-occupied France under the cover of night. He was part of the secret Operation Jedburgh, the motto of which was “Surprise, Kill, Vanish”. His role was to liaise with the local resistance, and even in daredevil company he was notably enterprising and brave, later escaping from the German army through a sewer and taking refuge with some nuns. He won the Croix de Guerre, but this was nothing to his exploits a few months later in Burma, where he organised a series of ambushes by guerrilla groups that caused significant damage to Japanese forces. Celebrated as “Lawrence of Burma” and “the Mad Irishman”, Carew was the youngest officer ever to be awarded a Distinguished Service Order.
As a schoolgirl Keggie Carew, by her own admission the “least compliant” of Tom’s four children, was proud to tell her teachers that her dad had been a spy. He was a joyful, maverick presence in her youth, the kind of mischievous father who would encourage her to skip lessons to go riding, and then write a note saying: “I am sorry Keggie was not at school yesterday, she had a bad hangover.” The author of Dadland admits she lived for decades “under the gravitational pull of his influence”; it was hero-worship, more or less. But the existence of a hated stepmother with a “slicing Margaret Thatcher voice” led to an attenuated relationship between father and daughter – until the day in 2003 when the snobbish stepmother died, and “Dad’s door was wide open once again”.
The following year Keggie, then in her 40s, went with Tom to a reunion of Jedburgh teams, attended by silver-haired veterans all the more appealing because they were so “unruly” and resistant to authority. In Tom’s attic were trunks of family diaries, letters, photos and cuttings – it was time her father’s story was told. But what really triggered the writing of this unusual book was Keggie’s discovery that Tom had begun to suffer small strokes. It was the onset of dementia; he could no longer always recall his address or the names of his children. “As Dad was losing his past … I was trying to retrieve it,” Keggie writes. She felt urgently the “need to make some sense of it all … It is an exorcism. And a ghost hunt. Rebuild him. Rebuild me.”
Dadland uncovers Tom’s adventures in war, but these long, detailed passages of history-writing are framed by Keggie’s memories of family life, both glorious and painful, and by more recent tales of her father’s erratic behaviour. Many of these anecdotes – he executes, in his mid-80s, a perfect parachute roll having fallen down a flight of stairs; he pees all over the garden; he writes himself notes trying to outwit his memory lapses – transmit the comedy and sadness of caring for someone with dementia. Looking in the mirror, Tom is perplexed by his own beard: “I didn’t put this on,” he says. “Dad is driving me crazy,” Keggie writes. “I get up. He gets up. I go outside. He is following me … He is a mobile baby who needs constant attention.” On another occasion: “He looms around in the garden. Stands lost in the middle of the kitchen. My old parachuting guerrilla agent father, with his once quick-as-a-flash brain … cries when he has to go home.” Tom died in 2009.
This chiaroscuro of dad-as-hero and dad-in-decline patterns a book which is as much about love and family as allies v axis. Yet the author has fully submerged herself in the dramatic wartime events in which her father played a part. It’s hard not to be drawn to the activities of the Special Operations Executive – as a small library of books testifies – and all the attendant accounts of cool-headed derring-do and making do. When dropped in the jungle in the Arakan, as the Daily Telegraph obituary of Tom reported, he took with him little more than a kilo of opium for currency, and a manual of Burmese that “contained useful translations for words such as ‘laudanum’ and ‘chambermaid’ and listed, among the principal exports of the country, edible birds’ nests and sea slugs.”
Keggie writes with relish about the BBC transmitting personal messages to SEO operatives in France using such coded phrases as “Odille porte un pyjama jaune” or “Le giraffe est dans le lac”. She imagines her father in his tough-guy element: “Adrenalin, heightened awareness, and a sense of freedom. His heartbeat and life force all bountiful.” And again: “What camaraderie they must have felt, these rugged Robin-Hooders, dirt blending in with their suntans, torn shirts, torn neckerchiefs, nicotine-stained fingers … They are eager, dirty and alive.” She writes that it’s “uncomfortable for a daughter” to “report her father so brave”, but I’m not so sure.
Everything Tom did seems to have had a touch of insouciant glamour. Recalled to London from France, he parks his beautiful brand new convertible Citroën outside a Parisian shop, “runs his finger over the chrome” then walks in and, “in his inimitable Dad-way, tosses the stunned shopkeeper the keys”. With his “Jed” comrades in London, he eats clam bisque and bouillabaisse at fashionable Madame Prunier’s before, 24 hours later, jumping through a hole in an American Liberator and falling through an “inky French sky”.
In the paddy fields and mangrove swamps of Burma, Tom, dressed in a sarong with a knife on his hip, played a vital role working with Aung San, commander of the Burma Defence Army and father of Aung San Suu Kyi. So not only was he on one occasion “plucked off the Irrawaddy by a flying boat, like James Bond”, he even managed to be an Orwell-style anti-imperialist and to further the cause of “Burma for the Burmese”. A smitten Keggie pays tribute to the risk-taking, “no-shit” Jeds and comments: “I am ashamed of what we haven’t done with our freedom and their victories … With our central heating and our power steering and our fast food and our leaf-blowers and our shopping malls.”
Tom’s first marriage, to a childhood sweetheart, dissolved after the war. He met Keggie’s mother, Jane Suckling, his second wife, when he was still a soldier and spy, stationed in Trieste; she was a high-born intelligence agent, who specialised in code and cypher, and they had years of happiness. Dadland casts a brief sidelong glance at Tom’s friendship with Patricia Highsmith and the time he took Prince Philip sailing. But the qualities that made him such a brilliant leader of irregular soldiers during conflict left him poorly suited to calmer days. He was bored stiff by the peacetime army. Though his wife and family were content with sun and sailing in Gibraltar, Tom, who was tasked merely with organising ceremonies and balls, decided to give up the uniform and return to Britain. It was the start of everything going wrong.
“I just cannot help wondering why, when we were young … with everything he had going for him, charisma, resourcefulness, ingenuity, energy, optimism, experience, did he make such an absolute almighty cock of it?’ It’s a question Keggie can’t help asking, despite her lifelong adoration. Almost in spite of itself, Dadland becomes a study in her father’s selfishness – Tom as someone who despised boredom, who was more committed to unconventionality than to making family life work. He throws himself into one impractical venture after another (boat-building, treasure diving): “Dad’s glory days are over,” Keggie writes. “No call for guerrilla agents in Fareham in 1962 … Mum gets thinner, tenser, tireder, angrier.”
He invites his father to move in with his family, without squaring it with Jane. When they are badly in debt, he buys a more expensive house that Jane doesn’t like, again without consulting her. In some ways, it’s a very upper middle-class state of penury; the children get sent to fee-paying schools with money borrowed from wealthier relations. But Jane eventually becomes a nightmare mother to her children. She throws bricks through windows, has a breakdown and ends up in a psychiatric hospital. It is only decades later, long after Tom has married again, that Keggie repairs her relationship with her mum, who retains a rather indistinct outline in this father-centred version of events.
But then it’s a book about a singular man. Even near the end of his life, Tom managed to charm and astonish. He escapes from his care home and is found half a mile down the road stopping the traffic; he befriends the most attractive woman in the place.
Having spent years buried in the research material that fills her study, Keggie admits in Dadland that the whole project “has become a drug, an Alice in Wonderland project, each letter, each diary entry leads to something else. I am a large girl in a tiny room, my head squashing against the ceiling.” Even though everything in it has interest, her book should have been shorter. But it’s full of tenderness, and her writing is nimble and handles emotion well. After her mum’s death, she finds one of her hankies in a drawer and smells “that inexpressible particular thing, that molecule mix”. She has also clearly enjoyed crafting some of her exotic descriptions: “an amphitheatre of plum-dark cumulus stacking up in the sky … Trees dissolve into clouds as great ropes of water lash through the canopy.”
We are given snippets of Keggie’s youth – her first trip to Europe as an au pair, her running away to Ireland with the son of the chief imam of the Regent’s Park mosque. But she reveals little of her married life or her career as a conceptual artist in New Zealand, the US and Barcelona, and only briefly mentions her pop-up shop in the East End of London, which she opened in reaction to “the monotony of the high street” and which sold such items as a knitted security camera. Yet we know, despite this restraint, that Tom has shaped her whole life. “I’ve been in thrall to Dad too many years,” she writes. “It’s been hard to grow out of the need to impress. Be more fearless. Be wilder. Be braver. Be different. Think differently. Surprise! I knew Dad was out of the ordinary and I wanted to be too.” With the publication of this original, moving book, she has succeeded.
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