Dashing spy who forgot his maverick past: The life of a Special Ops commando as told by his daughter

The author is at the 75th birthday party for her father, Tom Carew, the brave, maddening, maverick Dad of Dadland, when a friend of her loathed stepmother turns to her, asks which one (of Tom’s four children) she is and, on hearing Keggie’s name, says: ‘Oh, you’re the jealous one.’

This difficult, virtually nonexistent relationship between adoring daughter and the third wife who dominated the adored one’s life for 30 years, is one thread of this extraordinary, brutally honest memoir.

Its central poignancy is that when at last the hero of the book has time to spend with his daughter and other children again, after the death of the stepmother, Tom, his mind already unravelling, is not Tom any more – ‘the mad Irishman’ has become actually mad.

As he loses his bearings, confused and adrift in a world he no longer recognises, his daughter sets out to reclaim his life, painstakingly putting it back together, piece by piece, from photos, notebooks, library research and interviews, like a familial detective.

And, oh, what a life! Young Tom was a leader of men in the little-known Jedburghs, an elite group of top-secret Special Ops commando spies. In World War II they were parachuted at night into France, behind enemy lines, to lead the raggle-taggle Resistance members hiding in the woods.

In Burma, their mission was to undermine the Japanese alongside the freedom fighters, some of whom (including Aung San, father of Suu Kyi, Burma’s leader) would have formed the first government independent of British rule in 1947, but were assassinated.

Working in units of three men (a commander, executive officer and a radio operator), with amusingly humdrum codenames – Basil, Cedric, Brian – the Jeds’ legend was ‘surprise, kill and vanish’.

Their training was in sabotage and reconnaissance. Their mission was to destroy bridges, roads, trucks and, if need be, to kill.

The Jedburgh sections of the book – the derring-do deeds of a 25-year-old at the height of his powers, thriving in the danger, excitement and fellowship, and full of purpose, instinct and ingenuity (he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, one of the top decorations for gallantry) – are interspersed with snapshots of Tom’s helplessness as he retreats further into dementia.

Even in this forlorn state, he retains something of his enterprising, devil-may-care pragmatism with the note he wears: ‘My name is Tom Carew, but I have forgotten yours.’

As the book progresses, Tom marries his first wife, Edna, and later meets Jane, the author’s mother, a daughter of landed gentry, in Trieste, Italy, in 1953. He is in command of the security office in the Intelligence Corps; she is a codist in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

While there, he becomes a friend of the novelist Patricia Highsmith. His daughter posits that fictional killer Tom Ripley (from Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley) is based in part (the good parts!) on Tom Carew.

Keggie’s parents fall in love, marry, move to Gibraltar (Dad’s new posting) and have a marvellous time sailing, throwing parties and barbecuing corn-on-the-cob they grow themselves.

It is when they return home, with two children and more on the way, Tom having decided to leave the Army, that the trouble starts.

His father moves in with them at the age of 65, after his wife has died, and Jane becomes increasingly resentful.

Tom has big ideas. He buys a boat-building business to make boats that no one buys, borrows money from his wife’s family, fails at everything he sets out to do and plunges ever deeper into debt.

His daughter writes, with pared-back restraint: ‘Money was not something Dad seemed to have a knack for.’

Things get uglier. Jane becomes increasingly angry, venting on everyone but meting out particular vindictiveness to her father-in-law, smashing his window and ripping out the flower bush in front of it to rob him of any pleasure.

Soon, everyone is throwing things at one another. Keggie manages to heave out of the sink a heavy washing bowl full of dishes and hurls it to the floor. Her mother hits her so hard over her head with a side table that she is left with a scar.

Jane ends up in a sanatorium, divorce follows and Dad marries the dreaded stepmother, whereupon (what harsh irony), after so many years of financial hopelessness, he finds great success running a business guiding (in all manner of unorthodox but effective ways) redundant executives back into work.

At this point in the book’s structure, we are darting from the dementia present (‘He stands lost in the middle of the kitchen. My old parachuting guerrilla agent father, with his once quick-as-a-flash brain, with his once punch-as-hard-as-you-can stomach, with his once tickling-the-life-out-of-you hands, cries when he has to go home’) and back into the gory disintegration of the family’s happiness.

One of the great pleasures of the book is the quality of the writing. It is this, like H Is For Hawk, to which it is bound to be compared, that makes it so much more than a daddy’s girl’s literary love letter.

There are times when I found myself less than enamoured of the hero (how could he have failed to contact his children when their mother died?), but such is the skill of his daughter’s conjuring, I am sure that, had I met him, it would have been impossible not to fall under his spell. He dies in his 90th year and finds his way, beautifully, in a surprising felicitous turn – as fittingly improbable as so much of his life – back to his beloved Burma.

MEMOIR – Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory by Keggie Carew.

Daily Mail