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WOW! This is an incredible memoir and also an incredible history of a larger-than-life Jedburgh.
As Keggie Carew’s eccentric father is failing from dementiain his ninth decade of life, she works to tell his story and found out who is was. Tom Carew is a maverick, who joined the Jedburghs , the first direct collaboration between he British and American intelligence agencies, in 1944 parachuting behind enemy line in France, and the travelling to Burma against the Japanese. After being estranged for a long time, Keggie is brought back into his father’s life when her step-mother dies. In his attic she discoveres trunks of diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, marragie and divorce certificats, and taped interviews. After a quick review, she discovers that she doesn’t even know of a wartime first marraige that ended years before her birth. As his mind is failing, daughter Keggie is working to uncover his past, and helping him navigate the present. Assisting him at a reunion meeting, daughter describes “…He is beside himself with boredom�� She continues…”His pyjamas are poking out of the bottom of his trouser legs.�� Keggie continues “Six in the morning he shouts up the stairs, ‘What’s my job.�� Continuing, “when do I go back?�� he asks apprehensively. “Today, Dad.�� “Today? �� His face is brave but crestfallen. Then his eyes sag, ‘Right.�� He says. Daughter reports . . “It undoes me. In all my life I have never seen him complain. He looms around in the garden. Stands lost in the middle of the kitchen. My old parachuting guerilla agent father, with his once quick-as-a flash brain, with his once punch-hard-as-you-cam stomach, with his once tickling-the-life-out-of-you hands, cries when he has to go home.��. This was a father who entered military service at the age of 17, served as a Jedburgh in Europe, and was transferred to Burma after the war in Europe was over yet the war in the Pacific still raged, and was a LtCol before he resigned from military service, fearing he couldn’t make it in a peacetime army. Keggie reports�� “Dad cries a lot. He collapses into his tears. Tears for the loss of a past that cannot be revisited. Tears for the loss of people he will never see again. And he is experiencing another bereavement, tears for the loss of him.�� When her mother dies of metastatic breast cancer in 2001 at the age of seventy-six, she had reconnected with family for a decade. Shortly before her death, Keggie describes “Mum says sorry. For something that happened in 1974. And I say sorry too. And I am catapulted into ap place I was not prepared for, and my eyes fill with tears; she knows I’m like Dad, I cry easily but she doesn’t, and a look flickers between us and then we look down, because she is made of different stuff and we don’t do this, and it embarrasses me, and it also the edge of a precipice, . .�� As he is failing, he takes a driving test. Keggie reports “The test goes badly, he can’t identify a single sign, he can’t reverse, he doesn’t use his indicator; but he is completely happy with it. Sow he the letter arrives to say his license has been revoked he is shocked and absolutely devastated. He cannot believe it.�� “As we grow older (author and her sister) and Dad grows younger it is only logical he doesn’t recognize us as his children any more. �� After failing with an in-home carer, Tom Carew is transferred to a assisted memory facility that lets him keep his dog, sleeping with him on the bed. No sooner is she home when the phone rings. “Dad has escaped. So she has to drive back again.�� After two weeks, the family is allowed to visit. “Oh hello,�� Dad says, because as far as he can see we are acting like we know him. Not even our dogs, whom he’s always loved, seem to ring any bells this time, but he is happy to play along …�� ”But then there is someone looking for him a voice shouting, “Tom, Tom?�� Dad has got a girlfriend: only the most attractive lady in the place.�� It is virtually impossible to read this book with shedding a tear, especially for a a “baby boomer�� whose father and father-in-law, both World War Two veterans, suffered from dementia in their last years.