美国国家公共电台 NPR Author Unravels Her Spy Dad's Life, One Secret Mission At A Time

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Keggie Carew's father, Tom Carew, was known as Lawrence of Burma and The Mad Irishman. In her new book "Dadland," we find out why. It's a memoir 1 that combines espionage 2 and war stories with reflections on parent-child relationships.

When Keggie Carew began writing this book, her father's war days were long behind him. He was losing his memory to dementia. Carew describes a moment she took him to see a play in London.

KEGGIE CAREW: And on the top step, dad trips. And he starts falling all way down the stairs - bump, bump, bump, bump - all the way down to the bottom. And everybody in the theatre foyer just stares and freezes because, you know, it's 85-year-old man tumbling down the stairs. And we all freeze, and then he sits up, dusts himself down, completely unscathed, unbruised, perfectly 3 fine. And there's a loud sigh of relief. I mean, what we have just witnessed was him going straight into a parachute roll. His Jedburgh training just clocked in straightaway.

SHAPIRO: Jedburgh training - the Jeds, as they were called, were an elite 4 secret unit during the Second World War. Keggie Carew's father was trained to lead partisans 5 in Europe who sabotaged 6 the Germans. While Carew had heard stories about her father's war years, she was never sure how much to believe. Then she went to a Jed reunion with him and learned more about how they trained. Here she reads from the book.

CAREW: (Reading) By the end of the training, there would be nothing about guerilla warfare 7 they wouldn't know - how to blow up a train, a tree, a railway line, a road, a canal, a factory, a power station, a dam, a reservoir, high-tension pylons 8. They had to be able to set a mine, attach a clam 9, lay tire bursters (ph), throw a grenade by instinct, neutralize 10 a booby trap, prepare an ambush 11. There was observation and memory training, intelligence gathering 12, how to conduct surveillance, how to know if you were being followed, reception techniques for receiving airdropped supplies, night parachuting. There were lessons in unarmed combat, silent killing 13 and survival. They would have to be able to swim with a limpet mine and pitch a lump of plastic explosive into a moving train. I look at Dad quizzically. Silent killing? He shrugs 14 his shoulders.

SHAPIRO: I want to start with something that you write at the very end of this book, which is that you compared the experience of writing this to a pair of trains leaving the station going in different directions. Explain what you mean by that.

CAREW: Well, it was a parallel journey. As my dad was losing his memory, I had set the task of retrieving 15 it. But it was like as his life was sort of going out of the station, I was chasing the train in the other direction.

SHAPIRO: And so the book itself juxtaposes the incredible kind of mundane 16 tragedy of someone who's unable to do the most basic things against the extraordinary exploits of people parachuting out of airplanes and surviving in the jungle on no food. I can only imagine what it was like to live that every day as you were writing.

CAREW: Well, yeah. It was extraordinary. One minute, I would be with a log with nine men that was - 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 17. So when you say mundane, it was never mundane with dad even with dementia. It was - there was really never a dull moment.

SHAPIRO: Do you think that if you had done this excavation 18 of your father's history before his dementia began setting in that it would've been a different experience?

CAREW: Yeah. I think it would've 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 19 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 secrets and hidden away, and you couldn't actually access them. So I think it would have been a very different book, and it wouldn't have had that woven quality that it has where your chronology is replaced by memory so that the memory comes and goes and one moves around from the past into the present and back to front.

SHAPIRO: I think every child, probably, to some extent views their parent as a superhero. Was there a moment in adulthood 20 or perhaps even as you were researching this book that it suddenly hit you that these were not just stories, that he actually had done these incredible daring feats 21 during wartime?

CAREW: Well, 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, we - I used to take them to school (laughter) 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 much more outrageous 22. And he was in so much more kind of crucial part of history when the Burmese guerrillas were trying to get their independence, and he was...

SHAPIRO: From the Japanese.

CAREW: ...From the Japanese, and he was working with Aung San Suu Kyi's father who was later assassinated 23. Oh, it was so brilliant. It was much better than I thought. I didn't think I would be writing quite so much about that, but it was so fascinating. I couldn't resist getting really deeply into some of that stuff.

SHAPIRO: What does it mean to you now that he's gone to have this work that you've created that is a tribute to a man who shaped you, created you, influenced you and is no longer with us?

CAREW: Well, it's - in a way, he's been more with us with this book. It's been incredible. It's been a very cathartic 24 thing with my family. Actually, we've talked about, you know, the more difficult sides of our life together since this book's come out. And it also, I think, kind of acts as a sort of universal - resonates universally because it's about lots of things that families experience apart - obviously, not that guerilla warfare, jumping out of planes stuff.

SHAPIRO: No (laughter). My family has never experienced that.

CAREW: No. But then lots of other things - family things - you know, the grief, the loss, the love, you know, the dementia side. And, you know, perfect lives are not very interesting, and ours is certainly not that (laughter). So I felt it was a kind of way to reach out in a way like in a - as an everyman or, you know, the experiences that we all have. And, yeah, that's - that was important to me so that it did resonate in that way.

SHAPIRO: Well, Keggie Carew, thanks so much for your time.

CAREW: Thank you very much. It was lovely speaking to you.

SHAPIRO: Keggie Carew's book is called "Dadland."

(SOUNDBITE OF OLD TIME MUSKETRY SONG, "KEPT CLOSE")