Tinker tailor soldier father
The “Dadland” of Keggie Carew’s first book is a vast expanse indeed. Spurred by her enigmatic father’s retreat into dementia, Carew determined to uncover his past, and with it, hers. Tom Carew, known with affection as “the mad Irishman,” was a British special operations officer during World War II. Specifically, he was a Jedburgh, one of 300 officers dropped behind enemy lines to train guerrilla fighters. To understand his military history required archival deepdiving, while plumbing the (relatively) peaceful years involved sifting through diaries and letters, sorting out generations of mismatched marriages (temperament, class), and engaging in capacious acts of empathy and imagination.
Selected in part for their rebellious natures, Jedburghs were rule-breakers whose intensely dangerous work demanded unorthodox thinking. Even among their number, Carew was viewed as fearless, napping en route to white-knuckle missions. After training members of the French resistance, often a whisper from death, he parachuted into Burma to organize local forces against the Japanese.
His daughter imagines it viscerally: “They move quickly and quietly in league with the jungle, through vast curtains of trailing vines, behind deafening insect cacophonies at dusk, with the flickering camouflage of light cascading through the canopy like silver coins. A scout reports the ‘imminent danger of tiger.’ ”
At one point, her father survived by clinging to a rafter of a hut; had the Japanese soldier searching for him looked up instead of helping himself to the rice in a pot, Tom Carew would have been killed and any possibility of Keggie and her siblings extinguished: “The fine splinter of time between existing and not existing.”
Her dad earned the Croix de Guerre. Yet he said he was briefly threatened with court martial for defending Aung San (father of Aung San Suu Kyi), who fought the Japanese but was later accused by the British of treason.
Postwar, the mad Irishman wrestled with debt and burned through marriages — first to the mysterious Margo; then to Keggie’s mother, Jane, who worked in codes and ciphers during the war, and whose rage became clinically toxic. His third wife, a nefarious entity identified only as Stepmother, jealously guarded access, determined to stick a pin in the balloon of any good time.
Carew juxtaposes deep and recent past with ease, nesting the intimate into the political. She ranges from her father’s friendship with William Colby — the CIA head who died in a 1996 canoeing accident that many considered suspicious — to hilariously misguided capers.
Incapable of solving a problem in a conventional manner, Tom Carew drilled a hole through the floor of his car, enabling him to pee through a siphon — onto the road, he thought — until the ferocious stench required investigation. Turns out the car had a double bottom, and he had drilled through only the first.
Keggie, flaunting convention herself, took off for Barcelona at seventeen, then knocked around the U.S. and off the grid into South America, until her frantic father used embassy connections to help find her. It had never occurred to her that he’d worry.
It was Stepmother’s death that finally allowed Keggie to draw closer. As his memory failed, she attended Jedburgh reunions with him, meeting men whose esteem never dimmed. (At the last of these, one elderly fellow died during cocktail hour; later, her father slipped meat still dripping gravy into his pocket to take to his dogs). On visits to her home, he insisted on sleeping in the shed, demanding household “jobs” — which he’d botch — driving Keggie nuts while breaking her heart. “With morbid secrecy I study your old hand with my younger eye, knowing that soon it will be a lifeless one; it rests on the kitchen table, then fiddles with your penknife; your knuckles and finger joints are a collection of small boulders now, almost bursting through the tissue of thin, speckled skin,” she writes. “Your whole body has become geological. Stones and flinty bones. Crags. Hills. Furrows. Fissures . ... I am now the spy.”
Her father laughs hard and weeps often, for his lost past, his lost self — a bereavement we all recognize, or will. Part memoir, part biography, part military history, “Dadland” is also a lovingly unconventional elegy for a generation.