THE FAMILY SECRETS THAT FREED ME
It started as a way of reconnecting with the father she was losing to dementia and ended up as an award-winning memoir. Here, author Keggie Carew tells how uncovering her dad’s past helped her to finally find herself
Living with Dad was like playing poker… you never quite knew where you were
My father was 84 when I found a note in his pocket. ‘My name is Tom Carew, but I have forgotten yours,’ it read. I discovered he was showing this note to everyone. Dad had come to stay with me for a few weeks. It was the longest time we had been allowed to spend together in years. But, just as we were getting to know each other again, the dad I knew began to slip away with increasingly worrying memory lapses. ‘Who put this on?’ he wanted to know, pointing to his beard, not recognising himself.
When I was a child, Dad and I were very close. We were the mischief-makers – Dad much worse than me. He was a maverick, rule-breaking, unorthodox, razzle-dazzle father, forever testing and teasing us. At school, I bragged that he’d been a spy in the war, and flaunted yellowing 1945 newspaper cuttings that thrillingly called him Lawrence of Burma for his courageous acts behind enemy lines. We didn’t know a fraction of the full story, of course.
Living with Dad was like being in an eternal game of poker, you never quite knew where you were. I knew he was out of the ordinary, and I wanted to be, too. Dad disliked authority and taught me, by default, to distrust it as well. Rules were there not just to be broken, but to pit yourself against, to outwit. It was an intellectual exercise for him. He had no respect for anything if it clashed with common sense: his, that is. On one occasion, I must have been about 12 or 13, I skipped off school to go riding. He wrote me a sick note for my teacher, and on the bus into school, something – perhaps the sly way he had licked the envelope – made me open it. It read: ‘I am sorry Keggie was not at school yesterday, she had a bad hangover.’ I was furious. I suppose the question is, did he know I would open it?
My happiest memories of childhood were camping expeditions in northern Spain. We drove there in an old Bedford Dormobile. I suffered from chronic car sickness, and having to sit in the back, squashed between my two brothers and sister in the heat, didn’t help. So Dad built a narrow wooden stool over the handbrake and I perched between my parents.
Invariably, after we’d got a few miles under our belt and the sun had come out, when the road had become a winding
He taught me that perfect lives are not interesting – perfect people even less so
[continued from previous page] ribbon ahead of us, Dad would wedge his knees under the steering wheel, spread both hands wide apart, and begin to clap – great joyful claps, cracking the air in his open palms. It infected us all. Something had freed itself, and the clapping was its signal. It felt as if we were a band of ragamuffins on the open road under the bright blue sky, and all our problems could trail back into the grey we’d left behind.
Sometimes Dad would let me work the gears. He would put his foot on the clutch and shout, ‘Second!’ or ‘Third!’ and I would oblige. On a downhill stretch, we would try to go as fast as we could. ‘Fourth!’ Dad boomed. Once, down a very long hill, the road whizzing beneath the wheels, the plates in the cupboards rattling, the roof-rack tarpaulin flapping, the needle hit 100. Dad turned to me, his face completely deadpan, and shouted, ‘Brake! Brake!’
A brilliant dad does not mean a brilliant husband. There was no call for maverick guerrilla agents in post-war Hampshire, and Dad struggled to conform. By his very nature he was unemployable. He borrowed money to go into boat building, but each boat cost more to build than he could sell it for. Then it was wreck-diving for treasure off Menorca; I remember the marine charts all over the sitting-room floor. Dad was down on his luck, but not on his self-belief or madcap schemes, and slowly, with each failed venture, he ran the family into terrible debt. My mother was the casualty. Four children, no money, threatening letters arriving in droves. She had a breakdown and their marriage did not survive.
I can see now that, as a young adult, I was caught between two stools: having to grow up fast, and a kind of arrested development. But it was the difficult relationship I had with my stepmother that created the physical distance between Dad and me that was so painful for both of us. Her chilled, conservative character confounded me. It was Dad who had encouraged our independent, questioning, not-quite-respectable way of seeing the world. Only, that didn’t knit with what he now required of us. As far as our stepmother was concerned, his children were the wrong type. Four incumbents with long, greasy hair.
It is no coincidence, I am sure, that I kept disappearing, changing jobs and dropping out. At 19, I went to Canada, then travelled slowly south, picking up odd jobs and getting into scrapes, until I ended up in Argentina. I wanted Dad to be proud of me. I wanted to be wilder, braver, more fearless. There were no mobiles to call home then. It never occurred to me he might be worried.
After my stepmother died in 2003, I finally had the freedom to reconnect with Dad. Almost as if nothing had come in between us, we were back into that easy, close bond. It also meant I could rummage around in his attic. This was how I began a new journey: cross-legged in front of two metal trunks, the musty smell of old letters pulling me into a world I had no idea about.
I stacked up photographs, newspaper cuttings from 1945 I hadn’t seen since I was a child; and here, too, were telegrams from Dad to the British Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, looking for me. I knew I had a far bigger story in my lap. I wanted to tell all of it. Not just the guerrilla warfare, but what it was like being in ‘Dadland’.
So Dadland became a parallel journey in opposite directions; while Dad was losing his memory, I set about retrieving it. I was the spy now; collecting, accumulating, researching. Each eye-popping discovery led inexorably to the next. There were periods when it made me feel wretched: an unveiled secret, reading letters from happier times. Other moments I couldn’t believe what I had found. His friendship with the author Patricia Highsmith, or the head of the CIA, or a Christmas card from Jeremy Clarkson. It was poignant, too, when Dad’s dementia progressed to the point where I could no longer share my finds with him. ‘Who’s that?’ Dad would ask, pointing to a youthful picture of himself. Who, indeed.
Writing what would become my first book was a way to recover not only Dad’s story, but mine, too. I needed to make some sense of it all. It was an exorcism and a ghost hunt. Rebuild him, rebuild me.
Dad died in 2009, his 90th year. In the pain of bereavement, my writing halted. But losing him made finishing the book even more imperative. I became obsessive, driven, crazed. I had a clear picture of what I had to do; to weave together the voices, the stories, the discoveries, to capture a technicolour life caught in a land of no memory.
Finally, the research was finished, but publishing my book, Dadland, was a time of high anxiety. I had laid myself open. I think my siblings dreaded reading it. I had raided not only Dad’s life, but theirs; and, of course, he was their dad, too. But their reactions were emotional and amazed, and their support unstinting. Dadland became our catharsis; our space to talk meaningfully about the past.
My anxiety was eased by relief, then gratitude for the endorsements, reviews and praise that followed. Then came the news that I’d won the Costa Book Award for Biography. For an unknown, an outsider, to have that recognition after so much heartache seemed astonishing to me.
The long road from dark attic to collecting an award has been both an incredible and impossible thing. Much like Dad himself. He’d have been amazed by it all, and cock-a-hoop by the attention. But it was he who taught me that perfect lives are not interesting – perfect people even less so.
Today, Dad sits on my shoulder. I still ask him what he would do when I need his advice. Sometimes he tells me, sometimes I just hear him laugh.