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WORK TITLE: Dadland
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1957
WEBSITE:
CITY: Salisbury, Wiltshire, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/keggie-carew/1078544/ * http://www.npr.org/2017/03/08/519234059/author-unravels-her-spy-dads-life-one-secret-mission-at-a-time * https://www.ft.com/content/45fd003a-d2ae-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0 * https://www.ft.com/content/2de6da98-4da2-11e6-8172-e39ecd3b86fc * http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-3688760/Mum-s-breakdown-blew-family-apart-Keggie-Carew-complicated-relationship-mother-finally-peace.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1957, in Gibraltar; daughter of Tom (a special operations officer) and Jane (a coding expert) Carew; married; husband’s name Jonathan.
EDUCATION:Attended Goldsmiths University, London.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and artist. JAGO (alternative art space), England, owner and operator, 1995—; theworldthewayiwantit (shop), London, England, owner and operator, 2010—.
AWARDS:Costa Biography Award, 2017, for Dadland.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Keggie Carew writes about her amazing (and dysfunctional) parents in the memoir Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory, published in the United States under the shortened title Dadland. The volume tells the story of the tumultuous relationship between her father, a British special services operative during World War II, and her mother, a member of the British upper class who trained as a coding expert in the same era. “While writing Dadland, about my charismatic, rule-breaking, brilliant yet unorthodox guerrilla agent father Tom Carew, and the whole experience of living with him,” the author stated in an article in the Daily Mail. “I found that the parts about my mother were by far the hardest to tackle. I had to steel myself each time I came to those sections. … It was almost impossible to write about Mum: not only did it catapult me back into the terrible years, I knew I would be dragging my brothers and sister back there too. And rawer still was the consuming sadness I felt … about what she’d had to go through.”
Tom Carew lived a life, for a period in the 1940s and 1950s, reminiscent of the adventures of James Bond. “During World War II,” explained a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “he had been a member of the Jedburghs, an elite international corps that parachuted into France to aid the resistance fighters and into Burma to hold back the Japanese.” “They were a very elite unit of the Special Operations Executive, which was a very secret thing that was dreamt up between—well, actually it was the first collaboration between the American and the British secret services,” Carew explained in an All Things Considered interview with Ari Shapiro. “And these were guys that they trained up to drop behind enemy lines in very small teams of three—they were American, British and French. And they had a radio operator in two offices and they would be dropped behind the lines and they would raise resistance to be … a thorn in the enemy’s side.” “Dad’s decision to leave the army and return to postwar Britain with two young children, no job, no money, no viable profession, nor anywhere to live” brought the idyllic years following the war to a close, Carew stated in the Daily Mail. “But peacetime army life bored Dad stiff. While perfectly suited to his wartime role of raising guerrilla resistance behind enemy lines, in civvy street he was virtually unemployable. Untameable, maverick, accustomed to being his own boss, Dad threw himself into one disastrous venture after another.” “Carew’s funny, fascinating and unflinching tribute to her father,” stated Melissa Harrison in the Financial Times, “is a portrait of a complex man: not just a war hero but a flawed husband; not just a Jedburgh but her incorrigible and much-missed dad.”
At the same time, however, Tom Carew’s relationship with his wife Jane deteriorated. “The deep sadness I feel, if I think about it too much, is all about that tremendous hope and love disappearing. And so much loneliness,” Carew said in the Daily Mail. “Mum had a window of happiness after the war when she was working and independent, and when she met Dad. Their first few years couldn’t have been happier. But what followed her breakdown was only misery, because she had lost everything, including her relationship with Dad. All that remained was bitterness and blame, and going over and over it, again and again.” “I was paralysed with grief when Mum died in 2001,” Carew commented in the Daily Mail. “After she died, Dad wrote us a letter that remained unsent, which I found in his bureau after he died in 2009. It is an outpouring of the story of their break-up.” “Carew’s evocative blend of biography and memoir maintains a warmly clear-eyed tone,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “while taking the full measure of dysfunctional and disappointed lives.”
Carew began work on her memoir after discovering a collection of sources in her father’s home after he died. “Boxes in her father’s house contained newspaper clippings dating back to the war, diaries and buried letters detailing his life,” said Hannah Furness in the London Telegraph. “Further research took Carew to the National Archives, Imperial War Museum and British Library, with she found videos and audio files starring her father, including one memorable film which saw him swaggering out of the Burmese jungle aged 24.” “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,” said Paul Laity in the Guardian. “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.'” “He seems a character out of fiction,” opined Kathy Sexton, writing in Booklist, “and Keggie tells his story and its revelations beautifully.” “We know, despite this restraint, that Tom has shaped her whole life,” Laity concluded. “‘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.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2016, Kathy Sexton, review of Dadland, p. 12.
Daily Mail, July 16, 2016, Keggie Carew, “‘Mum’s Breakdown Blew Our Family Apart’: Keggie Carew on Her Complicated Relationship with Her Mother and How They Finally Found Peace.”
Financial Times, July 22, 2016, Melissa Harrison, review of Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory.
Guardian, July 30, 2016, Paul Laity, review of Dadland.
Irish Times, July 30, 2016, Molly McCloskey, review of Dadland.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2016, review of Dadland.
Publishers Weekly, October 31, 2016, review of Dadland, p. 61.
Scotsman, July 16, 2016, Allan Massie, review of Dadland.
Telegraph (London, England), January 3, 2017, Hannah Furness, “Daughter Who Turned Detective to Piece Together History of Father with Dementia Wins Costa Book Prize.”
ONLINE
All Things Considered Online, http://www.npr.org/ (March 8, 2017), Ari Shapiro, “Author Unravels Her Spy Dad’s Life, One Secret Mission at a Time.”
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (July 26, 2017), “Q&A with Author Keggie Carew.”
Keggie Carew Home Page, http://www.keggiecarew.co.uk (July 26, 2017), author profile.
Penguin, https://www.penguin.co.uk/ (July 26, 2017), author profile.*
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Q&A with author Keggie Carew
‘What is the best piece of advice a parent gave to me? Always take the most difficult option because why would you have included it otherwise?’
Small Talk - Books
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JANUARY 6, 2017
Keggie Carew was born in Gibraltar in 1957 and brought up in the UK. She has lived in Barcelona, West Cork, Texas, Auckland and London, where she studied at Goldsmiths and ran an alternative art space. In 2004, with sudden access to her father’s attic, she discovered the trunks of material that inspired her memoir Dadland. She lives with her husband in rural Wiltshire.
Who is your perfect reader?
Me. Really. I write for me, the stuff I would wish to know, that would make me think, that would make me feel I wasn’t alone.
What books are currently on your bedside table?
No Way but Gentlenesse by Richard [brother of Barry] Hines — I’ve just finished it and it was wonderful. Also Winter by Christopher Nicholson, East West Street by Philippe Sands and The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel.
What book changed your life?
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje showed me what you can do with words and images. It freed me up.
When did you know you were going to be a writer?
I have always felt I can be myself on paper, as I get to be accurate. But it took a long time and lots of hard work before I felt able to send anything out.
Where do you write best?
In my shed, which is a ramshackle Tardis full of spiders. I have a view down the valley, which is sometimes distracting, especially when the sparrowhawk comes to sit in the ash tree.
What are you scared of?
What we are doing to destroy our beautiful planet, and that people who could do something about it don’t care.
When were you happiest?
Living on a cliff looking out to the wild Atlantic in West Cork in the 1980s.
When do you feel most free?
Swimming in a clear river with my husband and dogs.
What is the best piece of advice a parent gave you?
Dad said to me: if you have a choice, always take the most difficult option, because that must be what you want to do, or why would you have included it otherwise?
If you could own any painting, what would it be?
“The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” by Paul Delaroche. Oh, that white neck. Oh, that clean straw. Just about to become crimson.
‘Dadland’, winner of the 2016 Costa Biography Award, is published by Chatto & Windus
Biography
Keggie Carew has lived in London, West Cork, Barcelona, Texas and New Zealand. Before writing, her career was in contemporary art. She lives near Salisbury.
Author Unravels Her Spy Dad's Life, One Secret Mission At A Time
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Keggie Carew — seen here with her father, Tom Carew — says, "It was never mundane with dad, even with dementia."
Courtesy of Grove Atlantic
Keggie Carew's father, Tom Carew, was once known as "Lawrence of Burma" and "the Mad Irishman," and in her new book, Dadland, we find out why:
Carew's father was part of the Jedburghs, an elite British unit established during World War II. Carew had heard stories about her father's war years, but she was never sure how much to believe until she went to a Jedburgh reunion with him. There, she learned that they were trained in everything from setting mines and neutralizing booby traps to silent killing and night parachuting.
Carew's book combines espionage and war stories with reflections on parent-child relationships. But writing it wasn't so straightforward: Carew started her project just as her father was losing his memory to dementia.
Dadland
Dadland
by Keggie Carew
Hardcover, 415 pages purchase
"It was a parallel journey," she says. "As my dad was losing his memory, I had set the task of retrieving it. But it was as his life was sort of going out of the station [and] I was chasing the train in the other direction."
Interview Highlights
On how much she knew about her dad's past when she was growing up
I knew he was called "Lawrence of Burma" and "The Mad Irishman" because we had these newspaper reports from India from 1945 and, you know, I used to take them to school and show people. And I knew he parachuted out of planes into the jungle, and I knew he was a spy in Burma. But when I really found out, the truth was so much more outrageous and he was in a so much more, kind of, crucial part of history. When the Burmese guerrillas were trying to get their independence ... from the Japanese and he was working with Aung San Suu Kyi's father, who was later assassinated. Oh, it was so brilliant. It was much better than I thought.
On the Jedburghs
They were a very elite unit of the Special Operations Executive, which was a very secret thing that was dreamt up between — well, actually it was the first collaboration between the American and the British secret services. And these were guys that they trained up to drop behind enemy lines in very small teams of three — they were American, British and French. And they had a radio operator in two offices and they would be dropped behind the lines and they would raise resistance to be as much a thorn in the enemy's side as they could possibly do. You know, blow up bridges and sabotage, you know, the Germans first in France and then later on the Japanese in Burma. ...
They were really valuable because they were so trained. They just couldn't, you know, put themselves in very dangerous situations because they needed to be there to blow up the next train and sort everybody out. I think their motto was "Surprise, kill and vanish." And their survival was very, very important, on the top of the list. So they had an incredibly good survival rate.
On seeing her elderly dad's Jedburgh training kick in at the theater
So we take him to The Lion King and we get up to the top of the steps, and on the top step, dad trips and he starts rolling, falling all the way down the stairs. Bump, bump, bump, bump, all the way down to the bottom. Everybody in the theater foyer just stares and freezes because, you know, there's an 85-year-old man tumbling down the stairs. And we all freeze and then he gets to the bottom and then he sits up, dusts himself down, completely unscathed, unbruised, perfectly fine. And there's a loud, loud sigh of relief.
Rebuilding A Father's Life — But Tearing Down His Myths — In 'Dadland'
BOOK REVIEWS
Rebuilding A Father's Life — But Tearing Down His Myths — In 'Dadland'
I mean what we have just witnessed was him going straight into a parachute role. His [Jedburgh] training just clocked in straight away. And he was relaxed, got his arms in and was completely fine. Nobody could believe it in the theater. They were all amazed. And of course he enjoyed that.
On the experience of writing a book about her dad's past
It was extraordinary. One minute I would be with ... nine men that had been mined on a road in Tipperary in Ireland, and the next minute I'd be in the Burmese jungle, and the next minute I'd be in France, the next minute I'd be with my dad in the garden. I'd be walking around the corner and I hear him say to the neighbor, "I don't remember you, but I do remember your teeth. They're rather distinctive." ... It was never mundane with dad, even with dementia. There was really never a dull moment.
On whether the book would have been different if she had written it before her dad's dementia
I think it would have been a very, very different experience. First of all, in a way I had more freedom because he wasn't there to ask. I had a lot of the very, very colorful anecdotes that I carried about with me since a child — and those were the stories that he told where he'd outwitted some general or done something smart. But the actual nuts and bolts of it, and also the really astonishing stuff, was buried in secret files that weren't actually available until the last 15 years. They were all stamped with "secret" and hidden away and you couldn't actually access them. So I think it would have been a very different book.
Digital producer Nicole Cohen, producer Art Silverman and editor Melissa Gray contributed to this piece.
'Mum's breakdown blew our family apart': Keggie Carew on her complicated relationship with her mother and how they finally found peace
By Keggie Carew
PUBLISHED: 20:02 EDT, 16 July 2016 | UPDATED: 23:46 EDT, 16 July 2016
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Keggie Carew describes the devastating consequences of her mother’s decision to marry an impecunious maverick
Keggie's mother Jane photographed by Baron in 1953 +8
Keggie's mother Jane photographed by Baron in 1953
Keggie today
Keggie today
My mother, Jane Suckling, had her portrait taken by the famous society photographer Baron, just before her wedding in 1953 [see above]. Baron was the portrait photographer of choice for the young Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth, and by the mid-50s he had snapped a host of beauties including Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh…and Mum.
The Baron. There is something illicit about that name. Dark. A height from which one can only fall. The photograph marks the end of an era for Mum, and the big divide. Class: even the word has a slow hiss to it. She was born into privilege at the last gasp of the Raj, but by marrying my father, a divorced, nonconformist former Special Operations Executive officer, she slipped out of one class and down, impecuniously, into an isolated no-man’s land where there was absolutely nothing and no one to hold on to.
The Baron portrait was certainly a big deal in our house when we were growing up, one of the very few pictures framed and hung, four pairs of kiddy eyes goggling at our beautiful mother in wonder; what planet did she come from? The photograph, paid for by her mother, was like an expensive bottle of champagne that would smash extravagantly into a thousand pieces on the hull of the marriage vessel. The portrait could only ever disappoint. And so it did, as one letdown came hard upon the heels of another.
While writing Dadland, about my charismatic, rule-breaking, brilliant yet unorthodox guerrilla agent father Tom Carew, and the whole experience of living with him, I found that the parts about my mother were by far the hardest to tackle. I had to steel myself each time I came to those sections. Any excuse to avoid the subject: wash the windows, clean the fridge. It was inordinately painful. How to shine the light of my adult understanding on to my teenage experience of Mum. How to tell the truth fairly, yet squarely. It was almost impossible to write about Mum: not only did it catapult me back into the terrible years, I knew I would be dragging my brothers and sister back there too. And rawer still was the consuming sadness I felt – now that I understood – about what she’d had to go through all her life; although she, made of far stronger, stiffer stuff, would have hated any moping sentimentality.
Yet her story was inextricably tied to my father, to us as a family, and to me. Her breakdown blew us all apart, and was, I would discover, in no small measure a result of Dad’s inability to conform, his madcap schemes, his self-belief, his sieve-like fingers with not only his money, but everyone else’s. But I had boarded the metaphorical train so I just had to see where it took me.
Keggie¿s mother Jane on a horse in Quetta, 1927 +8
Keggie’s mother Jane on a horse in Quetta, 1927
Mum was born in 1925 in Quetta, then India, now Pakistan. Her father was a colonel in the Indian Army (with polo ponies and servants), and her extended family came from lines of admirals, sirs and ladies with grand houses that, on her mother’s side, could be traced back (with a much-made-of detour via Lord Nelson) to William, Duke of Cumberland, George II’s son.
On the outside it might have appeared as all advantage, but the strange, dislocated parenting of Raj families – a severe nanny, being shipped from India to boarding school (where she often remained during the holidays), followed by a finishing school for young ladies to study, aaargh…housewifery! – did not provide her with secure foundations. Her upbringing was cold, stiff and very lonely. When her father, whom she adored, was killed in a light aeroplane crash outside Delhi in 1941, her mother returned from India distraught, and it was Mum, barely 16 years old, who was sent out there, on a ship, on her own, in the middle of the war, to collect his things.
Keggie's mother at her wedding to Tom in 1953 +8
Keggie's mother at her wedding to Tom in 1953
Mum’s escape from that world came in 1943. The moment she turned 18 she joined the FANYs [First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, by this time also involved in intelligence], was trained in code and cypher, and posted to Meerut in India; the youngest in the first group of codists sent out there. Five weeks by boat to Colombo in Ceylon, then another sea crossing and five days by train. Her work was to code and decode messages for French agents being dropped behind enemy lines in Indo-China. She had a crossword-puzzle mind and loved being a codist: for the first time she had friends, fun, excitement and an independent life. I love the photograph of her, days after her arrival, on a wide wave-slapped beach like a film star, a cigarette clamped between her lipsticked lips: watch out boys, she’s gonna eat you for breakfast.
After the war, Mum remained working on the ‘secret side of things’ in the Foreign Office and was posted to the Free Territory of Trieste. It was here she met Dad in 1953, a charismatic, decorated and divorced officer in command of the Trieste Security Office. I have her small pocket diary of that year: apart from ‘office duty’ and ‘lot of work’, it is full of dinners, dancing, cocktails, skiing, sailing and sightseeing drives to Treviso, Verona or Venice.
Keggie as a child with her siblings and mother in Cornwall, 1963 +8
Keggie as a child with her siblings and mother in Cornwall, 1963
31 Jan: ‘Drove along Dolomites. Lunch Levico and stayed Merano.’ On 22 March she scribbles: ‘Curry lunch. Joined by Tom C.’ On 31 March: ‘Di suggests I go out with Tom!’ By May, ‘Tom’ is cropping up regularly – dinner, coffee, taking her out sailing. 20 May: ‘Drove to Prosecco with Tom.’ And beside his name: X, a large cross… Hm.
After a whirlwind romance they married in October 1953, but were parted for the first few months of their marriage as Dad was caught up with riots in Trieste (where spouses were not allowed to remain). He was eventually given a cushy post in sunny Gibraltar, where Mum flew out to join him. They had everything ahead of them, love, sun, work, accommodation, position, security. What could possibly go wrong?
For one: Dad’s decision to leave the army and return to postwar Britain with two young children, no job, no money, no viable profession, nor anywhere to live. But peacetime army life bored Dad stiff. While perfectly suited to his wartime role of raising guerrilla resistance behind enemy lines, in civvy street he was virtually unemployable. Untameable, maverick, accustomed to being his own boss, Dad threw himself into one disastrous venture after another (boat building, treasure diving); he borrowed money to bail himself out, then had to borrow more from Peter to pay back Paul. Two more babies. No salaried job. More crazy schemes.
Jane on the beach in Ceylon, 1943 +8
Jane on the beach in Ceylon, 1943
In the early years, Mum and Dad tried to keep things together, and my brothers, sister and I were oblivious to anything seriously amiss. We went camping and had picnics, and Mum read stories to us at night. The photograph of Mum with her four children on a Cornish beach is heartbreaking for me – we look so happy and close. But the sand is flowing through my fingers. And it would just be a matter of time…
It is not difficult to track the path of Mum’s mental decline. No more the kudos of being married to the dashing colonel; now with four young children in a terraced house in Fareham, Hampshire, and Dad’s father, Granddad, living with us, quickly and surely Mum’s dreams dissolved into the bitter reality of a cold, grey Britain: relentless housework (no gadgets to make life easier), constant money worries and Green Shield stamps.
Jane in the 1990s +8
Jane in the 1990s
Everything conspired against them. And Mum’s ‘class’ totally isolated her. She did not fit in anywhere. Her work friends had long dispersed. Her family, from whom she was so happy to escape, could only look down on her, or so she felt. One bad ‘Dad decision’ followed another, resulting in debts, drudgery, disappointment and dashed dreams; then add fury and frustration too. To fight it, Mum found a temper and a very sharp tongue, and got trapped in the anger loop.
Mum’s breakdown began with increasingly frequent flare-ups that became more and more violent, until they became totally unhinged. Flying coffee cups were soon upgraded to flying tables and chairs. There were a lot of broken windows, smashed stair spindles and imprints of all sorts of objects in the walls in our house.
But it was the ranting torrents of invective that we all found hardest to bear. Mum had a habit of ambushing you somewhere you couldn’t escape – our beds, usually. I don’t know how many hours I lay rigid under cold sheets with Mum standing over me, raging through the litany of crimes everyone had committed against her. The outbursts, which invariably went on into the small hours – often curtailed only by a visit from the doctor or the police or both – were followed by a tormented silence, inexorably building up to the next storm.
By this time, no one wanted to listen. Words became meaningless. We blocked our ears. Everyone avoided her. Her marriage was in tatters. Her children hated her. In an unfinished letter to her younger brother (to whom Dad owed money), Mum says she is seeking help, but has had ‘a terrible time fighting off this breakdown’ because the psychiatrist keeps cancelling her appointment, and then isn’t available to see her for weeks. Mum was drawn and haggard and thin. As a person she had virtually disappeared. And there was absolutely nowhere for her to go. Two things in her handbag kept her going – cigarettes and valium.
Only now do I know the stress she was under. Money was not something Dad had the knack for: borrowings of £21,000, another loan of £22,000, debts equivalent to more than a quarter of a million pounds today. Threatening letters arrived in their droves from creditors, solicitors and irate family members on both sides who wanted their cash back. And Mum was there to open them because Dad was living in his van in London, trying to make a go of a little business he’d bought – a letter-writing service for people who were looking for jobs (funny, that) overseas.
Jane with Keggie in Ireland, 1983 +8
Jane with Keggie in Ireland, 1983
Wealth surrounded them. Dad’s half-brother was a tax exile; Mum’s younger brother had inherited the farm; her elder brother, the Elizabethan manor. But being a girl, and well primed, Mum knew not to expect anything. Even her small trust fund – which she was not allowed to touch, and which gave her a modest annual income that was consumed by Dad’s debts and interest at seven per cent – was, humiliatingly for her, managed by her younger brother. She bitterly resented that her financial matters required his countersignature. There is a mountain of horrid letters from this time going back and forth. His reply to one of her beseeching entreaties begins, ‘Frankly, your letter is not worth commenting on…’
It is impossible to apportion blame. I have tried. Birthrights and wrongs. Dad’s fallible generosity, his short-sightedness; Mum’s short fuse; four ugly duckling teenagers using the place like a hotel, answering back and blithely contributing to the emptying of the family purse. As far as we were concerned we just wanted Mum to go away and stop shouting. And we wanted Dad to come home. We were going, simultaneously, through an accelerated and arrested development, where we had to grow up pretty fast, yet missed out on a few firm footings. In my diary I wrote that I wanted Mum to be run over by a bus, and she read it. I can’t imagine what that must have felt like. One more brutal kick when you are down.
The site of the psychiatric hospital where Jane was admitted (which closed in 1996)
The site of the psychiatric hospital where Jane was admitted (which closed in 1996)
Poor Granddad became the target. He represented the moment when things began to go wrong, when Mum and Dad moved back to England and he moved in with them – at Dad’s spontaneous invitation, without asking Mum.
And when we moved again, buying a house in Wickham, Hampshire, that we could not afford, and which needed more borrowed money to build Granddad a little annexe, Mum tormented him, I am afraid to say, criminally so. She turned his gas off, so the pilot light would go out, then turned it on again. Put the hose on full blast through his letter box. Tore up his post. Pulled out his TV aerial. Threw bricks through his window. Dug up the rose bush in case he got any pleasure from it. She was 48 years old. In those days it was straight from The Curse to The Change: no HRT, no CBT. And so it went, until Mum ended up in Knowle Mental Hospital, only a few miles up the road, where my sister and I would cycle to visit her.
The deep sadness I feel, if I think about it too much, is all about that tremendous hope and love disappearing. And so much loneliness. Mum had a window of happiness after the war when she was working and independent, and when she met Dad. Their first few years couldn’t have been happier. But what followed her breakdown was only misery, because she had lost everything, including her relationship with Dad.
All that remained was bitterness and blame, and going over and over it, again and again. She wore people out. The injustice of everything. Even now I find it excruciating when someone talks at me. I would have given anything for her to meet someone and have a second chance. But nobody could ever compare to Dad, despite his failings; so there was never going to be a chance of that.
My relationship with Mum through my 20s and 30s was strained, but dutiful. The truth was, Mum was a burden – a psychological burden, an emotional burden, a burden of guilt and sadness. And then, when I was in my late 30s, she just let her bitterness go. It was a miracle I thought I would never see. The lovely, funny side of Mum came back and she gave her four children her best self.
I remember in Skibbereen, in Ireland, her sitting on a stool in one of the smallest bars in town, while a renowned local musician sang ‘Carrickfergus’ a cappella to her – how beaming she was. We walked the South Downs together; she made picnics and got a bit sloshed on white wine; her naughty, warped sense of humour came back. And no sooner, it seemed to me, had she turned it all around, and we were going positively ahead into the future, not relentlessly backwards into the past, than she got breast cancer.
Keggie with her father Tom +8
Keggie with her father Tom
I was living in Ireland with my husband, Jonathan, at the time. It seemed too cruel. I went to stay with Mum at her home in Sussex for a few months to drive her to the daily sessions of radiotherapy. I worried how we might fare, living together, but it turned out to be the most healing thing. We made friends. I witnessed how phenomenally brave and strong she was. It was heartbreaking how grateful she was for the company.
But the cancer had gone into her bones and began to slowly chip away at her. Things wouldn’t heal. Mouth ulcers, a boil on her face. The metal pins they put in her leg left her permanently lame and in terrible pain.
On one occasion I arrived at her house an hour earlier than she was expecting. The house was freezing and she was sitting, dishevelled, at her kitchen table wearing a bib because the enormous boil on her face wouldn’t stop weeping. I took one look at her and burst into tears. She was always so elegant and fastidious about her appearance that it seemed a devastating blow. And yet I could see that my tears surprised and somehow comforted her, because they were a confirmation of love. And she had had so few demonstrations of that, she wasn’t used to it.
I was paralysed with grief when Mum died in 2001. She was 76. I was 44. I just could not get beyond the unspeakable sadness of everything, and yet, in the hardest moments, how very brave she’d been. After she died, Dad wrote us a letter that remained unsent, which I found in his bureau after he died in 2009. It is an outpouring of the story of their break-up, which I had never heard him mention before. I thought he had buried it so deeply that it would never surface, not even in his head.
The letter was full of false starts, crossings out, repetitions. He wrote about asking Granddad to live with us without discussing it with Jane; about buying the house in Wickham without discussing it with Jane. He said he undermined the family security by resigning from the army. Dad believed their marriage broke up because the strain on Mum was too much, and that he had diverted the attention of her family away and isolated her, leaving all the work to her and collecting all the attention for himself – which was true but difficult to put right.
Dad was 82 when he wrote that letter. The tear-stained page was signed off: ‘When I am gone, cry for both of us.’
Dadland by Keggie Carew will be published by Chatto & Windus on 28 July, price £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59 until 31 July, go to you-bookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15
Images Juliette Foy, Gill Horn
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Daughter who turned detective to piece together history of father with dementia wins Costa book prize
Keggie Carew, who has won the Costa biography prize
Keggie Carew, who has won the Costa biography prize CREDIT: JAY WILLIAMS
Hannah Furness, arts correspondent
3 JANUARY 2017 • 8:10PM
When her father was 86, Keggie Carew found a note in his pocket reading: "My name is Tom Carew, but I have forgotten yours."
For any daughter, it would cement the creeping fear that a much-loved parent was succumbing to dementia.
For Carew, it was also the start of a ten-year journey to piece together his history before it was too late.
Lt Col Tom Carew, who parachuted into Burma with a 55-year-old guidebook and a kilo of opium
Lt Col Tom Carew, who parachuted into Burma with a 55-year-old guidebook and a kilo of opium
As her father's memory failed him, the first-time author set about scouring personal archives, military museums and her father's own sometimes muddled recollections to uncover a family history, committing the highs and lows to paper in a part detective story, part memoir.
She was last night announced as the winner of the Costa Biography Award, after embarking on a painstaking research project to tell the true story of the life of the man nicknamed Lawrence of Burma for his heroic exploits during the Second World War.
Keggie Carew with her father Tom
Keggie Carew with her father Tom
Her book, Dadland: A Journey Into Unchartered Territory, has been hailed "hilarious and heartbreaking" by judges, who selected it as one of five category winners of the Costas.
Other winners include Brian Conaghan, a former painter and decorator who was finally published after receiving 217 rejection letters, who won the Children’s Book Award for The Bombs That Brought Us Together.
Carew in front of her writing hut at home in Wiltshire
Carew in front of her writing hut at home in Wiltshire
Sebastian Barry took the best novel award for the second time with Days Without End, while Alice Oswald won the poetry prize with Falling Awake and Francis Spufford won the first novel award for his historical fiction Golden Hill.
All five are now in the running for the overall prize, to be announced later this month.
Keggie Carew, left, with her family
Keggie Carew, left, with her family
Carew, who previously worked as a visual artist, said she had experienced a “great sense of relief” after learning she had been recognised by the prize, adding: “It’s a lovely feeling that the book has resonated with other people in such a strong way.”
She added her family history had been the “elephant in the room which stamped its foot” as she had considered what to write, resolving to start researching in earnest after noticing her father had written notes to himself in a bid to “outwit” his dementia.
Dadland is out now
Dadland is out now
Lt Col Carew would be “thrilled” at parts of the book, and would have ignored the more difficult details about his family life, she added, joking: “He was not at all modest. He was be utterly amazed that this has happened.”
His obituary in 2009, published in the Telegraph, described him as a “natural leader with great charm and a horror of the humdrum” who “liked to stir things up”.
He was known to have served in the Second World War as part of a Special Operations Executive unit called "The Jedburghs", dropped into Burma with a 55-year-old guide book and a bag of opium for currency before recruiting a guerilla force to outfox the Japanese.
Brian Conaghan, who won the children's book award with The Bombs That Brought Us Together
Brian Conaghan, who won the children's book award with The Bombs That Brought Us Together
Described variously as the Lawrence of Burma and the “Mad Irishmen” for his efforts, he won the DSO and the Croix de Guerre before retiring from the army in 1958 for a varied and not always successful career in business.
Carew’s research began in earnest after she escorted her father to a Jedburgh reunion in 2006, noticing he was starting to lose his memory.
Asking him to tell her everything he could recall about his “madcap” life, she went on to piece the information together with extensive archives found in his attic, and newly-released official records in which he was mentioned.
Alice Oswald, the poet, who won with Falling Awake
Alice Oswald, the poet, who won with Falling Awake
“You start rubbing the lamp a bit and the genie pops out: things just kept falling in my lap,” she said. “The more I found out, the more amazing it was.”
Boxes in her father’s house contained newspaper clippings dating back to the war, diaries and buried letters detailing his life.
Francis Spufford, who won the first novel award for Golden Hill
Francis Spufford, who won the first novel award for Golden Hill
Further research took Carew to the National Archives, Imperial War Museum and British Library, with she found videos and audio files starring her father, including one memorable film which saw him swaggering out of the Burmese jungle aged 24.
Trunks, cardboard boxes and desk drawers revealed a Christmas card from the head of the CIA, while the release of classified SOE files allowed the author to match Lt Col’s colourful anecdotes with real-life dates, places, code names and operational details on papers stamped Top Secret.
Sebastian Barry, who won the best novel award for Days Without End
Sebastian Barry, who won the best novel award for Days Without End
The book also tells of the Carews complicated family life, including the breakdown of her mother.
“I decided that if I was going to tell a story like this, I wasn’t going to censor anything,” said Carew. “It’s a very extraordinary story but it’s also very universal when it comes to family, dementia and relationships.”
Carew and her fellow category winners will received £5,000 each, with the overall winner of the Costa Prize will be announced in London on January 31.
Keggie Carew was born in Gibraltar and brought up in Hampshire. She has lived in West Cork, Barcelona, Texas, Auckland, and London. Before writing, her career was in contemporary art, exhibiting her work in Ireland, London and New Zealand.
She and her New Zealand husband moved to London in 1995 where she studied English Literature and Art History at Goldsmiths University of London, and ran an alternative art space called JAGO. In 2010 she opened a pop-up shop in East end of London called theworldthewayiwantit, which she described as her "puny arm wrestle against the tide of consumerism" selling an array of unusual handmade objects including moth and dead fly necklaces, owl pellet kits, jam-jar worlds, and knitted security cameras.
In 2004, with sudden access to her father’s attic, she discovered 2 trunks of astonishing material that would seed the genesis of Dadland.
For theworldthewayiwantit pop-up shop archive website
Underhill Wood Nature Reserve
For Underhill Wood Nature Reserve website
Keggie is presently helping her husband, Jonathan, establish an environmental Nature reserve on 16 acres of land, by reinstating a bio diverse habitat for owls, bats, dragonflies, dormice and other wildlife. They live in a small rural cottage in Wiltshire near Salisbury.
Carew, Keggie: DADLAND
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Carew, Keggie DADLAND Atlantic Monthly (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2514-9
As Thomas Carew lost his memory to dementia, his daughter embarked on a search to find a man she hardly knew.
Throughout her childhood, Carew reveals in her captivating debut memoir, her father was a man who could fix
anything and solve any problem. Energetic, ingenious, and charming, he was also unconventional (cheering her
occasional truancy from school, for example) and no stickler for decorum or rules. She knew he had been a spy, but
until she began to assemble the pieces of his life, she had little idea what that meant. In fact, during World War II, he
had been a member of the Jedburghs, an elite international corps that parachuted into France to aid the resistance
fighters and into Burma to hold back the Japanese. "I was one of the first good terrorists," Tom later told an
interviewer. In charge of "ambushes, explosives, and small-arms instructions," he engaged in missions that were
chaotic and frighteningly dangerous. But among Jedburghs and other guerrilla fighters, and when leading his team into
Japanese-occupied Burma, he claimed to feel more alive than he ever would feel again. Burma proved much more
challenging than France. "To start with," writes the author, "it would be impossible for the Jeds to blend in; and even if
they kept themselves hidden, their great big footprints would give them away." Carew recounts the Jedburghs' role in
Burmese political upheaval, smoothly weaving that narrative into her family's unsettled history. Her mother was the
second of Tom's wives, an unstable, unhappy woman who railed against marriage to a man who seemed destined for
financial ruin. Carew's childhood was "curdled with anger...I don't remember anything but discord." After Tom left the
military, he suffered repeated business failures that left his wife and children vulnerable. The couple eventually
divorced, and Tom remarried. Carew is as vicious in her portrayal of this possessive, controlling stepmother as she is
empathetic to her father's loss of his adventuresome past and, more tragically, sense of identity. A tender evocation of
an extraordinary life.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Carew, Keggie: DADLAND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652189&it=r&asid=eef3c83fb60f14e627a1940ae5e58246.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
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Dadland
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Dadland. By Keggie Carew, Mar. 2017.432p. Atlantic Monthly, $24 (97808021251491.940.54.
During WWII, Tom Carew was a Jedburgh: highly skilled military personnel used to coordinate and train guerilla
forces. As a Jed, Tom parachuted behind enemy lines in France and Burma to fight the Germans and the Japanese,
respectively. After escorting her aging father to a Jedburghs' reunion, author Keggie Carew starts to piece together the
history of the man she has admired her whole life. Although much of the book details war exploits, Keggie also shows
the difficulties her father had after the war, trying to live a "normal" life. Snippets of Tom now, in his late eighties,
suffering from dementia, and constantly looking for a job to make him feel useful, are heartbreaking. He seems a
character out of fiction, and Keggie tells his story and its revelations beautifully. The rest of the family loses out to
Dad--Keggie's siblings are rarely mentioned in any detail--but this is Dadland, where Keggie orbits the world of her
father, and that's what you get. Fans of history and memoir will enjoy this moving and compelling book.--Kathy
Sexton
Sexton, Kathy
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "Dadland." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 12. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474716980&it=r&asid=28cce4068bff777dce633fe9a42355bc.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474716980
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Dadland
Publishers Weekly.
263.44 (Oct. 31, 2016): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Dadland
Keggie Carew. Atlantic Monthly, $24 (428p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2514-9
A woman revisits her faltering father's exploits in World War II, and a marriage that felt almost as violent as the war,
in this energetic memoir. Carew's father, Tom, a British special operations officer, won medals for leading French
partisans against the Germans and Burmese guerillas against the Japanese; he later became embroiled in Burmese
nationalist politics, sympathizing with the anti-colonial cause against Britain's fraying imperial claims. Carew's vivid
narrative takes readers briskly through the horrors and excitement of war, portraying Tom as a vigorous, charismatic
soldier fully in his element. His postwar life is less dashing: spottily employed and debt-ridden, he struggled to
provide his family with the trappings of gentility. His first wife, Jane, born into money, grew distraught at her
downward mobility; she filled the house with her furious tirades and took out her rage on her live-in father-in-law by
smashing his belongings, snipping his TV aerial, and throwing bricks through his bedroom window. (The author's
stepmother, a controlling woman reminiscent of Darth Vader, comes off even worse than Jane.) Carew's evocative
blend of biography and memoir maintains a warmly clear-eyed tone while taking the full measure of dysfunctional and
disappointed lives. Even the scenes of Tom succumbing to Alzheimer's have a dotty charm. This is a scintillating
portrait of Britain's Greatest Generation at war and uneasy peace. Photos. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Dadland." Publishers Weekly, 31 Oct. 2016, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470462544&it=r&asid=621aa8ce3d6477e2d719c2bdbf84cfda.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470462544
Dadland by Keggie Carew review – retrieving the life of a remarkable man
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
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Paul Laity
Saturday 30 July 2016 03.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.42 EDT
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.”
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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.
• To order Dadland for £13.93 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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‘Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory’, by Keggie Carew
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JULY 22, 2016 by: Review by Melissa Harrison
“His world is fading,” Keggie Carew writes of her father Tom, ingenious and charming but slowly and inexorably being claimed by dementia. “Each name hazy, each face a blur of memory. Every house he lived in, every girl he loved, slip-sliding away.”
Yet in Tom Carew’s case, what is slipping away is more than girls and houses, for he was a member of the Jedburghs, an elite unit formed within Britain’s clandestine Special Operations Executive during the second world war. Parachuted into France to help organise and supply the resistance, Carew was then posted to Burma, where he worked closely with Aung San, father of Suu Kyi, to oppose the Japanese; there, his exploits made him something of a legendary figure. The declassification of material relating to the Jedburghs helped Carew, who had recently renewed her relationship with her father, to make a record of his unorthodox life, both as a soldier and a parent. The result, Dadland, is part family memoir, part history book, and is compelling and moving from start to finish.
The Jedburghs were selected in part for their nonconformity, something that remains apparent at the riotous yearly reunions Carew attends with Tom. “What SOE was looking for was the unconventional, unsubmissive types, the spirited individualist, men not afraid to stick their neck out, or as the Jeds put it, the troublemakers,” she writes. Her father certainly fitted the bill, and he retained those qualities in his postwar life, including in his role as a father. Unsuited to regular employment and terrible with money, he left a string of failed business ventures in his wake, racking up debts, filling the house with bizarre inventions and putting enormous pressure on Carew’s mother, who eventually had a breakdown.
All of his four children adored him, but his parenting left something to be desired. “He thought nothing of allowing us to duck out of school for a day if there was something better on,” Carew recalls, ruefully relating the time he sent her in after a day’s horse riding with a sick note that read: “I am sorry Keggie was not at school yesterday, she had a bad hangover.”
Carew has done an enormous amount of research into the Jedburghs and their role in both occupied France and Burma, and Dadlandquotes from or reproduces all sorts of declassified documents, telegrams, press cuttings and letters to create a detailed picture of this extraordinary period and of the men and women who were caught up in it.
She brings the wartime sections to life by drawing on a remarkable facility for description: “Trees dissolve into clouds as great ropes of water lash through the canopy,” she writes of the monsoon season in Burma, 1945. “Until it backs off into a loom of fine threads and within half an hour glints of sun will flash like fish through the leaves, and all that remains will be a slow, slow, dripping. Then quiet again.” She hasn’t just uncovered the facts about her father’s war; she’s inhabited it imaginatively with him, for him, and has recorded it vividly as his own grip on memory wavers and fails.
There’s a risk, in a book that aims for a general readership, that the historical sections will weigh the narrative down, but Carew leavens them with flashbacks to her unusual childhood, research into her complex family history and incidents — often comic, sometimes heartbreakingly poignant — from her father’s later life. A deeply self-reliant man, he at first tries to puzzle a way through his memory loss; she finds notes he has written himself that say things such as: “I can and invent in material things as effectively as I ever did and in IDEAS too”, signed “Tom (hopefully with a better MEMORY losing no ‘INVENTIVENESS’.”
Dementia is a challenge to any relationship; more so to those in which issues remain unresolved. Carew’s funny, fascinating and unflinching tribute to her father is a portrait of a complex man: not just a war hero but a flawed husband; not just a Jedburgh but her incorrigible and much-missed dad.
Melissa Harrison is author of ‘At Hawthorn Time’ (Bloomsbury)
Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory, by Keggie Carew, Chatto, RRP£16.99, 432 pages
Dadland review: Riddle of a dad who made an ‘almighty cock of it’
Keggie Carew’s quest to solve the puzzle of her Dublin-born father’s event-filled life includes war and peace – and a fascinating mother
Keggie Carew: Does an impressive job of sorting through mountains of records, recordings, official archives and family diaries and letters to create a coherent and sometimes compelling narrative of her father’s wars. Photograph: Juliette Foyhr
Keggie Carew: Does an impressive job of sorting through mountains of records, recordings, official archives and family diaries and letters to create a coherent and sometimes compelling narrative of her father’s wars. Photograph: Juliette Foyhr
Previous ImageNext ImageMolly McCloskey
Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 01:35
First published:
Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 01:35
What is it about the lives of others? Narrated after the fact, they can seem so offhandedly heroic – even, and perhaps most strikingly, when they are veering off course.
Thomas Carew was born in Dublin in 1919. “An Irish stew in a Carew line of grain merchants, sailors and fishermen, up and down on their luck,” writes his daughter, Keggie Carew. The family fled to England when Tom was two years old, after the Big House where his father was a farm manager had been torched.
Educated at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Carew joined the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, in 1943, as a Jedburgh. The SOE had been set up by Churchill to wage irregular warfare, and the Jedburghs were parachute teams comprised primarily of men from the SOE, the American Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), and the Free French. Operating covertly, they led and aided resistance inside the occupied territories.
After France, Carew went to Burma, where the British were attempting to wrest back control of the country by helping the Burmese oust the Japanese. Carew, who sided instinctively with the colonised, believed strongly in an independent Burma. Long after the war, he described himself as “one of the first good terrorists”.
Dadland see-saws between the distant past and Carew’s last years – he died in 2009, deep into dementia. The author does an impressive job of sorting through mountains of records, recordings, official archives and family diaries and letters to create a coherent and sometimes compelling narrative of her father’s wars.
“They move at night, learn the sky; sleep in a shepherd’s shelter, a haystack, a convent, a barn, a tent in the trees made of parachute silk . . . They are eager, dirty, and alive. This was where it started. What Dad called being his own man. How would anything measure up to this?”
How, indeed. There were intelligence postings in Finland and Trieste (where he was pally with Patricia Highsmith), then four cushy years in Gibraltar training cadets. But a man who thrilled to guerilla warfare was bored in the peacetime military, and in 1958 Carew retired as a lieutenant-colonel, returning for good to “grey, jobless, post-war Britain”.
Father puzzle
Paradoxically, this is where the book really takes flight, after a first half somewhat hemmed in by its blow-by-blow accounts of military exploits. Keggie Carew now turns to the puzzle of why a man of charisma, ingenuity and optimism – a man who had displayed significant courage and smarts under the most difficult of circumstances – should have made, afterwards, such an “almighty cock of it”.
This is a fascinating question, about the people we can or cannot become, and how circumstances thwart or liberate us, and the author explores it in nervy, elliptical, affecting prose.
By the time he retired from the military, Carew was on his second marriage, to Keggie’s mother, Jane (who, to my mind, steals the show here). In Fareham, underemployed and with four children to feed, the couple was plagued by money troubles. The pressure of debt, Jane’s anger at her increasing isolation, and the tension between herself and her live-in father-in-law were catalysts for her rage, which infected the household. There was much smashing of furniture among family members, sometimes over each other’s heads.
Jane eventually had a breakdown and ended up in nearby Knowle Mental Hospital: “Hers was an existence in limbo, barred windows, empty sky. Mum must surely have wondered how far from Trieste and Gibraltar could she impossibly have come, from their cottage on the Rock . . . and their aviary, and their corn-on-the-cob barbecues . . . From there, to this.”
Jane cuts an interesting figure. Born in Pakistan, descended from the illegitimate issue of William, Duke of Cumberland, she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry at 18, trained in codes and cyphers, and in 1943 was posted to India. Later there was the long, nightmarish home life and illness; at some point, her involvement in intelligence activities seems to have recommenced.
Upon Jane’s death, her children found among her things several clippings about Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan mujahideen commander who was killed by al-Qaeda in 2001 – evidence, Keggie concludes, of “the MI6 work she never discussed”.
At Knowle, Jane began slipping her medication under her tongue, weaning herself off; miraculously, she pulled herself together. But the marriage was over. In 1976, Carew married again, to a woman Keggie refers to throughout as “Stepmother” and with whom she had a terrible relationship.
Rebellious, and wishing to impress her once-adventurous father, Keggie eschewed university and wandered the US and South America for two years. (Her father insisted she take with her a letter from then-CIA director William Colby, a former fellow Jedburgh, which saved her bacon one night in Kentucky. ) Eventually she returned to England. Time passed. Her father finally, bizarrely, made a go of it with Percy Coutts, which taught people how to secure interviews and jobs. Keggie settled down, became an artist, married.
Then, one Christmas, a family gathering was held at Tom and Stepmother’s house, to which Jane was invited. The reader doesn’t know much about how Jane has spent the ensuing years, and it’s astonishing meeting her again. Thirty years of bitterness have evaporated. When Stepmother behaves ungraciously and Jane hardly blinks, Keggie marvels that after everything that has happened, and even through the cancer that is already raging through her, Jane conducts herself with dignity and grace.
“But these are her years, the very few that she has left and she is filling them with good things for us to remember her by.” Jane died in 2001 and Stepmother two years later, leaving Keggie, finally, with unhindered access to her father.
Carew’s was an unlikely life. A man who was most himself in the Burmese jungles, bearded and wearing a sarong, but who spent decades with a woman apparently appalled by the unwashed guerilla in him. A man who had trouble landing a job but founded a successful career consultancy business. The subject of a moving memoir-cum-biography, written by a daughter who came to know him as he was forgetting his own name.
Nothing here is easily resolved, and Dadland chafes against its own subject in rich ways. Maybe what matters is best summed up by Jane, to whom I’ll give the last word. Also found among her things after she’d died was a note she’d written, attached to a clipping about her former husband: “For old times’ sake otherwise even the good years will not count for anything.”
Molly McCloskey is the author of Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother. Her new novel, Straying, will be published by Penguin Ireland next year
Book review: Dadland by Keggie Carew Keggie Carew. Picture: Juliette Foy ALLAN MASSIE 12:00Saturday 16 July 2016 Share this article 0 HAVE YOUR SAY Between a young man’s inspiring war record and his last years struggling with dementia, Keggie Carew pieces together the complex, fascinating life of her father Tom, flaws and all Dadland by Keggie Carew | Chatto & Windus, 417pp, £18.99 As a young man, Tom Carew was recruited by the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and served in the crack unit known as the Jedburghs. He was parachuted into France to work with the Resistance, and in the last year of the war commanded Burmese guerrillas fighting the Japanese. He ended the war a 25 year-old Lt-Colonel with a DSO and the Croix de Guerre. When we first meet him in this memoir, he is in his late 80s living with the author, his youngest daughter, and suffering from dementia. He likes to be given little jobs, which he performs efficiently, but he can’t remember his name, who other people are, or how old he is. He asks the same questions time and again, and then forgets the answers. The book is in part a work of reconstruction, unravelling Tom’s life, partly a family history. The history is turbulent, awkward, often unhappy. Tom Carew had had more than a good war – he had had a magnificent one – but like many others he had a bad peace, unable for years to find the right sort of work, moving from one failure – for example a boat-building enterprise – to another, until, surprisingly in his fifties he bought a small company and made a success of training managers and executives made redundant in the bad years of the 1970s. Years of failure had equipped him with the experience that enabled him to show other failures how to succeed. He married three times. The author and her brothers and sister belong to his second marriage, their mother a member of a rich landowning family who regard Tom, born a poor Irishman, with an uneasy mixture of admiration for his war record, disdain on account of his origins, and disapproval of his apparent fecklessness. The marriage becomes severely strained, partly because of the constant financial anxiety, partly because of Tom’s insistence that his elderly father lives with them. The author’s mother, Jane, comes to hate her father-in-law, exists in a state of apparently constant indignation and anger, and eventually suffers a breakdown so severe that she has to be sent to a mental hospital. She eventually recovers to become serene – and the person she was meant to be – in old age. By this time, however, Tom has married again, a woman the author calls only “Stepmother”. She detests her. There is perpetual friction, as she is convinced that Stepmother is determined to keep Tom in chains and prevent him, as far as possible, from being with his now grown-up children. The author’s indignation and resentment are understandable, but she never quite admits that Tom may have acquiesced willingly, rather than weakly, in the situation, at least inasmuch as it made for an easier life. Delving into the story of Tom’s war, the author learns too late just how remarkable it was; too late because by the time she learns this, she can’t fully share her new knowledge with him. This isn’t an uncommon situation of course. Many who were themselves small children during the war, or, like the author, born after it, regret that their fathers preferred not to talk about their experiences or that they didn’t ask the right questions at the right time. The narrative is disjointed, leaping back and forth in time, unavoidably perhaps because the autobiographical element is sometimes uneasily harnessed to the biographical quest. Nevertheless it is continually interesting and often moving. The author has the great virtue of being interested in trying to establish the truth, in reconciling the way she saw things as a child and young woman with what she has learned since and sees the same episodes and relationships now. She is honest about her father – a hero and a very attractive man, but also often a weak one, ready to follow the immediately attractive or easier course. She is honest about her own younger self, admitting to petulance, selfishness, resentment, self-pity. The fruits of her research into her father’s war and espionage contacts are fascinating, but the real success of the book is the understanding the author acquires of the waywardness of experience, and of the complexity of family relationships.
Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-dadland-by-keggie-carew-1-4178583