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Chatto & Windus is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Keggie Carew has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Excerpts from Four Quartets © T. S. Eliot, 1943. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
The English Patient © Michael Ondaatje, 1992. Reprinted by permission of Michael Ondaatje.
Tales from the Special Forces Club © Sean Rayment, 2013.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
‘I will never forget’, Claire Sessarego, 2009 © Alison Smith-Squire, for Daily Mail
‘This is Just to Say’ from Collected Poems Volume 1 © William Carlos Williams, 2000. Reprinted by permission of Carcarnet Press Ltd.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author and her father. In some limited cases the names of people and the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others.

For Patrick, Nicky and Tim, who each have their own versions; this is only mine.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Keggie Carew grew up in the gravitational field of an unorthodox father who lived on his wits and dazzling charm. As his memory begins to fail, she embarks on a quest to unravel his story, and soon finds herself in a far more consuming place than she had bargained for.

Tom Carew was a maverick, a left-handed stutterer, a law unto himself. As a member of an elite SOE unit he was parachuted behind enemy lines to raise guerrilla resistance in France, then Burma, in the Second World War. But his wartime exploits are only the start of it…

Dadland is a manhunt. Keggie takes us on a spellbinding journey, in peace and war, into surprising and shady corners of history, her rackety English childhood, the poignant breakdown of her family, the corridors of dementia and beyond. As Keggie pieces Tom – and herself – back together again, she celebrates the technicolour life of an impossible, irresistible, unstoppable man.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Keggie Carew has lived in London, West Cork, Barcelona, Texas and New Zealand. Before writing, her career was in contemporary art. She lives near Salisbury.

Tom Carew was born in Dublin in 1919. He served in the Jedburgh unit of the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War. The Times of India called him ‘Lawrence of Burma’ and ‘the Mad Irishman’. He married three times, and had four children. He died in 2009.

‘Birds prefer trees with dead branches,’ said Caravaggio. ‘They have complete vistas from where they perch. They can take off in any direction.’

PREFACE

It is 1964. I am seven, and barely eye level with the counter of the hardware shop in Fareham High Street. Dad is buying paint. We have been in the shop a while and I’m getting bored. He is joking with the shop assistant. He hasn’t enough cash to pay for everything so he gets his chequebook out. I smile inwardly, because I have just thought up a trick. On tiptoe I look over the counter as Dad signs the cheque, my eyes following his pen as it glides across the bottom right-hand corner. I squint a little, manage to hold my excitement in, then say, ‘But Daddy, that’s not your name.’

Dad looks down at me. The shop assistant looks down at me, then straight at Dad. I look up at them. Oh, delicious freeze-frame moment for I have got the world to stop. I stretch it out with my round child’s eyes. Power. A tiny taste of it. I have trounced him at his own game, the bluff, the double bluff, which is it? Dad laughs uncomfortably. They are the minutest flickering seconds when he doesn’t know what to do, but they are enough. The shop assistant looks back and forth.

This is obviously quite new for the shop assistant. Who, even as he takes the cheque and rings the till, is not a hundred per cent sure. We leave the shop. I am prancing with victory because behind the bluster I know Dad is tickled pink. Because I had him on the hop – which is normally his mischief. I was not to know it then, but I had taken my first unwitting step into his world. A place where you never quite knew where you were. Where even this ruse of mine about his name turned out to be, in a way, right on the money.

PART 1

DAD IS A SPY AND MUM IS A PAKISTANI

My dad is cutting a hole in a two-litre plastic milk bottle. The hole is opposite the handle so he can pee into it and hold it at the same time. It’s his favourite invention. For now. He’s making one for me and won’t be persuaded otherwise. He has them all over the house in case he gets caught short. Still very practical, then. Going through his pockets for a penknife I find a note. It says, My name is Tom Carew, but I have forgotten yours. He has been giving this note to everyone.

I’m showing Dad a picture of Mum. I often do this when he comes to stay. The photograph of Mum sits on the windowsill in a silver frame next to a photograph of him. A posthumous needle at my stepmother.

‘Incredible …’ His voice trails off; he is holding the photograph, ‘Is that my wife?’

‘Yes. She was,’ I tell him. ‘Your first wife.’ Actually she was his second but we won’t go back that far. Nor do we mention the third.

The photograph is a black-and-white picture he took in 1953, just after they were married and went to live in Gibraltar, where he was stationed, and where my elder brother, Patrick, and I were born. Mum, her salty loose curls, smiling, a ripple of sea behind.

‘GO ON!’ he chides. He’s enjoying himself. Centre of attention again. ‘How old am I there?’

Dad loves it here. Which has its problems. He doesn’t want to go home. He won’t sleep in a room but stays in a shed in the garden with his two dogs who sleep with him, and who are allowed to do anything they want. Jonathan calls the little one Psycho Dog. It guards things. When Dad tries to get into bed it sits bang in the centre of his pillow then growls and spits if you try to move him off. In the morning I invariably find Dad at the bottom of the bed, no bedclothes, foetally curled, trying to keep warm, with the dogs stretched out slap in the middle. Yet he won’t have it any other way. Dad is an easy guest, and, at the same time, a very high-maintenance one. He thinks we are always in the garden in the sun. Having drinks. Picking veg. Talking about him. He feels useful here. And all he wants is jobs. Seven a.m.: ‘Give me a job.’ From dawn till dusk every day: ‘What’s my next job?’ They are getting harder to find. Something he’ll succeed at, something that doesn’t bore him, something that will give him a sense of achievement at the end. If possible, something where he can invent a better way of doing it – with a piece of string, a bungy-clip, or No More Nails, which he applies with his hands straight from the nozzle and then wipes all over my fleece, which he is wearing because, just before he came, he unpacked all his clothes and brought three Mars bars and two rolls of kitchen towel instead. Any job with his penknife is popular, such as cleaning lichen off the garden chairs. That lasts an hour. But penknife jobs are high risk, however much he likes them, because he gets carried away: scrape, scrape, cut, cut, gouge, gouge. Washing seed trays is safe, if dull, but he can put them all over the lawn to dry, and this, pleasurably, looks like a lot of work. There should be A Book of Jobs for the demented, for I am running low. Mentally, Dad is shot; physically, he’s indestructible. Nothing tires him. He can touch his toes. Pain doesn’t affect him. He has never had anaesthetic at the dentist, and still does his own first aid. Apart from yesterday, when he came back from trimming the hedge and was compelled to ask for a plaster. I reeled back in horror at the saucer-sized wound in the palm of his hand where a length of old Sellotape had worn away revealing a shiny scarlet swathe of no-skin.

‘You can’t use secateurs with a wound like that! Why didn’t you tell me?’

Dad has lost the word for an orange (the soft ‘o’), and for me, but not fastidious or scrumptious, and other slightly old-fashioned words. While I don’t seem to have a gender, I do have an ‘industry’ – which he wants to join (run, more like). His business and my business could work together.

‘Not business. You know. Your thing. Your … your industry. Your … I could be in production for you.’

It was taken in 1963. I know this because of the snowman – the infamous freeze of ’63. I point to the tall man in the brick-red canvas sailing smock, smoking a pipe.

‘Yes,’ I point. ‘There’s Mum with Nicky, there’s Patrick in the middle, and that’s me.’

‘You’ve only lost your memory, but you’ve got everything else. Look at you. You can still touch your toes. You’re not an old crock!’

‘I’m happy to have my mind totally on those dogs. And I don’t mind you either!’

At school I told my teachers Dad was a spy, and Mum (who was born in Quetta) was a Pakistani. They didn’t believe me on either count. So, next day I took in the yellowing 1945 newspaper cuttings from the Statesman, and the Times of India, and the Daily Sketch. They referred to Dad, thrillingly, as ‘Lawrence of Burma’, or ‘Colonel X’.

Times of India
‘Lawrence of Burma’
Irishman’s Exploits As Secret Service Agent

From Bryan Reynolds, the Times of India War Correspondent CALCUTTA, May 17

Known among his colleagues as ‘the mad Irishman’, a 25-year-old professional soldier who was formerly a gunner, today has the reputation of being ‘the Lawrence of Burma’. A Secret Service agent who has organised guerrilla bands of natives to harass Jap lines of communications and send intelligence reports to British military commanders, his name cannot yet be revealed, but a partial story of the work he and other British officers have done can now be told.

The Irishman, who is now a lieut-colonel, hails from Dublin. He joined the army when he was 17. His wife was formerly an ATS ack-ack gunner stationed with a battery in Hyde Park, London. He married her after he returned from the French–Swiss border where he had helped to organise the Maquis. After a honeymoon of three short days he was flown to Burma and dropped into Arakan by parachute. His Colonel and Commanding officer of this Secret Service intelligence outfit is a tall stout-built Scotsman with a profound knowledge of Burma … ‘The mad Irishman,’ said the Colonel to me, ‘admits himself that he has never been any further east than Regent Street, London. When he was told he would have to jump into the jungle in Burma he just gave us one of his blarney Irish smiles and said: “So I am to jump into the dense mixed what?”’

The article goes on to describe the nature of these missions – how agents risked their lives organising the native Burmese into guerrilla bands to sabotage the enemy. How some were caught and tortured or beheaded by the Japanese, but most outwitted them. It said the guerrilla forces ‘killed as many as 1,500 Japs’.

As Dad slowly leaves us, I try to haul him back – from the bottom of cardboard boxes and forgotten trunks; from letters buried in desks; from books I previously had not known about; from photographs I am unfamiliar with; from diaries never meant for my eyes. I am the manic charity-shop rummager rifling through old clothes. I don’t know why I have taken on this task; as it is, I’ve been under the gravitational pull of his influence far too long. Except that suddenly I need to make some sense of it all. It’s not just Dad I want to stick back together again. This is an exorcism. And a ghost hunt. Rebuild him. Rebuild me.

Aside from the newspaper cuttings I paraded at school, and the few anecdotes Dad told, I knew little about the real story of his secret war. He rarely talked about it, and we, his children, at the centre of our own universes, rarely asked. When I came to think about it, I knew embarrassingly little about his life, before us, at all. Born in Dublin in 1919, brought up in Cambridge; he met Mum in Trieste; my brother, Patrick, and I were born in Gibraltar (1955, 1957); we came back to England; they bought a house in Fareham in Hampshire in 1958, where my sister Nicky and younger brother Tim were born (1959, 1961); that was about it. Dad always rooted himself in the present, and since he’d remarried in 1976, any reminiscences pre-Stepmother, in the omnipresence of her earshot, were in one way or another shut down. Unless she took them over … for I came to learn Dad’s past was under ownership and there were laws of trespass – of which I had better be mindful. In discombobulated half-sentences and (to my ear) ostentatious tone, Stepmother commandeered the telling of Dad’s story of being in the ‘You know, you know, SOE! Secret Operations Executives.’ It would have been wise to judge my words carefully, but tact was never my best game and I would correct her: ‘SPECIAL, SOE was for Special Operations Executive.’ For I knew that much; and that SOE was set up during the Second World War by Churchill to conduct irregular warfare; its mission to orchestrate and aid resistance against the enemy from inside France and the other occupied territories. Special Operations Executive, with an emphasis, as insiders liked to put it, on the O. Clever little teenage shit. It was also known as Churchill’s Secret Army; the Baker Street Irregulars (the HQ was in Baker Street); and sometimes the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Stepmother’s shoulder pads might puff up a millimetre or two, but solely to re-oxygenate those magnificent lungs. ‘You know your father was, was, a secret agent, and er, doing all sorts of things, parachuting and what-have-you, and er, er …’ There was a correlation: the less information, the more commanding the voice. ‘He, you know, got the Croix de Guerre!’ she’d brag loudly. While Dad would only laugh.

I also knew that Dad was a Jedburgh, which I accepted without understanding what it actually meant. I could hear the bray of Stepmother’s voice, ‘Jedbraaaaagh …’ An instinct for self-preservation guided me: better not to ask. I might have intercepted Dad on his own, but for some reason I did not. Conversations of this kind had a peculiar way of doubling back to Stepmother, leading to competition, one-upmanship, jealousy: not Dad’s of course, but hers, and mine.

Stepmother never failed to let us know when they had been to an SOE reception at the Club (Special Forces Club), or a memorial service at Westminster Abbey, or the American Embassy, or the French Embassy, or a Jedburgh reunion at Peterborough Cathedral, or ‘a marquee luncheon [yes, she said, luncheon] courtesy of the Countess Fitzwilliam’. After a Jedburgh reunion in France Stepmother remembered the Countess of Paris ‘and what-have-you’, while Dad, on the back of their itinerary, had scrawled: It’s a pantomime. Neither would she pass over the opportunity to lavishly recount the occasions of meeting the charming daughter or son of a fellow Jedburgh accompanying their parent to these functions, secure in the knowledge that, with her as gatekeeper, no such invitation would be afforded to us. We knew better than to ask; the rules were unspoken and understood. Not by Dad, blithely oblivious of any eye-daggers shot in our direction if we ever got ahead of ourselves. For years I believed he knew exactly what the score was, but I was wrong. The strictures laid down by our stepmother would never have been believed by Dad because they were simply inconceivable to him. Things that did not exist in his own make-up found little space in his imagination. He could be curiously naive for such a worldly man. Sadly I was not so guileless. For me – in Stepmother Territory – as the least compliant yet possibly least robust of Dad’s children, the safest distance from the subject was well away. Until in the autumn of 2003, long before I, or my siblings, (or anyone) would have dared anticipate, Stepmother died and Dad’s door was wide open once again.

Dad needed help. At eighty-four he was shattered by grief and utter exhaustion and (unknown to us) had begun to suffer tiny strokes in his brain. However hard he tried to hide his memory gaps we began to notice – not that he was forgetting things, he had always forgotten things. It was the type of things he was forgetting: our names; his address. And less easy for me to accept, his comprehension of everyday stuff was sliding too: how his bedside light switched on; where the voices on the radio were coming from; why he had to wait for the kettle to boil. We put it down to stress and bereavement until finally my sister took him to the doctor who sent him for a scan.

I keenly and selfishly felt the irony of the timing: the first time in thirty years I was able to spontaneously pick up the phone, without the mental preparation, without Stepmother hurdles to navigate, without the anxious dread, was the moment Dad began to disappear. Small clusters of brain cells dying. Minute infarcts. Obstruction of the blood supply to the cerebral tissue. Oxygen not getting as far as it should. Everything floating in suspension, but just out of reach: his past, his life, his world. Him. Dad was bewildered, frustrated and confused. We showed him photographs to try to jog his memory, but nothing coherent seemed to click. ‘What?’ ‘Who?’ ‘Where?’ I felt like a stranger gaping in. And I was fuming with Stepmother. I had glumly accepted my lot, but here was a last unexpected chance to spend the slimmest slice of time with him out of the Restriction Zone, and it was too late. I spat futilely down the phone to my sister, ‘She sucked every last drop out of him, and now when he needs help for once, she’s not even bloody here!’ As far as I could see she couldn’t have organised it better if she’d tried.

One minor satisfaction was that with Stepmother gone I could at least rummage around in the attic. Which was how I began this journey: casual, unwary, cross-legged in front of two metal trunks, the musty smell of old letters pulling me into a world I had no idea about. The first foray produced an exciting haul. I stacked up letters, photographs, all Granddad’s pocket diaries: Letts, Collins, Farmer and Stockbreeder, The Universal, every year since 1923; there were two cassette tapes in their plastic boxes labelled in Dad’s handwriting: Tom talking to Dr Robert Taylor on Burma, 1978; two A4 bound manuscripts; and the 1945 Indian newspaper cuttings I hadn’t seen since I was a child.

I took a bundle downstairs to show Dad. ‘Look at this! “Colonel X, an Irish agent who can’t be named …”’

The first manuscript was a slim spiral-bound document with the Special Forces insignia (a wing either side of the initials SF in a red circle) on the cover: The Jedburghs: A Short History, by Arthur Brown. The second manuscript was fatter and glued to a cloth spine with Japanese calligraphy across its pale lemon cover. Dad had written across the top: JEDS – Tom Carew, see yellow tabs. Inside, its title: A Postscript to Arthur Brown’s The Jedburghs: A Short History, compiled by Glyn Loosmore. I let the pages fan into my hand. Dad’s handwriting in different-coloured pens, annotated up and down the margins in blocks and leaning towers, skimming in and out of paragraphs, exclamation and question marks sandwiched between the text.

Dad was thrilled by my finds; with fat felt-tip coloured markers he labelled a cardboard box for me to carry home: KEGGIE IS THE CUSTODIAN OF TOM’S WAR – STORAGE JOB.

Two months later, in early February 2004, a smart embossed invitation arrived in the post for Dad to attend ‘The 60th Jedburgh Anniversary’: a weekend-long reunion to be held in Peterborough. My sister wanted to know, Would I go with him?

It is 11 June. High summer. Hot sun, blue sky. I am on the train from Salisbury to London to meet Dad and take him on to Peterborough. I have bagged a table and made a stack of everything I’ve brought about the Jedburghs in front of me. Some letters, maps, photocopied pages from books, and the two A4 manuscripts – each, it turns out, the devoted labour of a Jed (as they like to be called). I am chiding myself for leaving it until now to begin my reading in earnest. The Postscript follows the Jedburgh story beyond France into the Far East, which explains the Japanese calligraphy – a haiku by the seventeenth-century poet, Basho: ‘Summer grasses, all that is left of the dreams of soldiers.’ These two manuscripts are to become my introduction to what the Jedburghs were about.

Ten minutes into my journey I become increasingly aware of the attention of a distinguished-looking man sitting diagonally opposite me. His eyes flicker back and forth from map to upside-down page. I can tell he knows something. He clears his throat and introduces himself. He is Michael Tillotson, military obituarist to The Times, and he is intrigued by my reading matter. Astonishing how quickly, once you’ve begun to rub the lamp a little, how odd coincidences, which so often feel propitious, begin to occur. I explain I’m on my way to meet my father to go to the sixtieth anniversary of a special unit of SOE. What special unit? my travelling companion wants to know. The Jedburghs, I tell him. He sits up a little straighter. Yes, he knows about the Jeds. I explain I am trying to read up as much as I can, for I know very little. We talk about wartime resistance in France and later in Burma, and the coming reunion; I bite my lip with instant regret as a boast slips out when I mention Dad’s Distinguished Service Order, one of the highest decorations for gallantry. He smiles politely, he would like to write the reunion up in The Times he tells me; he gives me his card and I promise to send him some information.

Statesman of India, Friday 18 May 1945
‘Lawrence of Arabia’ methods in Railway Demolition

By Stuart Gelder

British officers and men with Burma volunteers have parachuted among and behind Japanese positions during the past few months to assist guerrilla resistance, gather intelligence and do demolition work. Some of them came straight from France, where they had been fighting with the Maquis … Within a week or two of landing in India some of them, knowing the geography of the country only from books and not a word of the language, were falling through the moonlight into jungle clearings with radio sets, light arms and as much ammunition as they could carry … They blew up railway lines, organised scouts to report Japanese movements and were able to signal useful information about targets to the RAF … One of the most daring of these officers is a young Irish lieutenant colonel who parachuted into Arakan in December.

The sixtieth reunion is in Peterborough because of its proximity to Milton Hall, the requisitioned stately home where the Jedburghs were trained in 1944. We are staying at the Bull. Everyone is milling in a scrum of greetings in the hotel foyer. ‘Hello, Tom!’ ‘Hello!’ Dad pats a shoulder. He can’t remember anybody’s name. The direction of flow is jostling towards the bar where, luckily, as well as a drink, we are handed name tags. There are twenty-two out of the original 300 Jedburghs here, including the American and French Jeds who have come to England especially for the occasion, accompanied by wives, daughters and sons; there are widows too, and the children of Jeds killed in action or no longer with us. I look about me. A bobbing sea of whitecaps, an eyepatch, a shiny pate, a black beret, pressed shirts, ties, blazers, name tags pinned to lapels; sprightly eighty-five-year-olds, a stoop here and there, but hardly a paunch in the room. They have been meeting up like this only in the last fifteen years. I shake hands, introducing myself. Ron Brierley; Dick Rubinstein; John Sharp – Dad’s radio operator in Burma – and his wife, Ivy. From the outside we might seem like a Darby & Joan Club, charity volunteers or an Antiques Roadshow do. No outward sign that I am in a room of firebrands, mettlesome kittle cattle, mischief-makers and mavericks.

Roll back sixty years. The men were in their early twenties and Britain had been at war with Germany for four years. France was shot through with the creeping poison of Nazi occupation and ravaged psychologically, geographically, economically. The climate was one of fear and betrayal. There were pockets of underground resistance known as ‘the Maquis’ – a Corsican word used to describe the scrubby underbrush and mountain thickets claimed by outlaws, adopted by the partisans, or maquisards, who had taken to the hills. But the Maquis were lacking in arms, supplies, manpower and expertise, and by 1944 many had been caught and shot. The Gestapo meted out appalling reprisals to their families and any person who might have supported them. Thousands were deported to labour camps; hangings and public executions by firing squad were rife in partisan areas, and in extreme cases whole villages were burned to the ground. Not surprising, then, were the increasing instances of collaboration with the enemy, or at least, compliance; the choice most made was to save their skin. Since 1942, SOE’s F Section had been inserting French-speaking agents into France to lay down the foundations for a resistance and build up sabotage circuits, but the work was extremely high risk and many had been detected, their networks infiltrated or disbanded. By 1944, the Allies had all sorts of misgivings about what kind of help might be relied upon from inside France. There were reports of poor security, infighting and power struggles between local Maquis leaders, besides all the other problems that went with leading a clandestine life in the forest. Most French men of fighting age had been transported to German labour camps under the Service du Travail Obligatoire,^fn1 which meant in 1944 the majority of Maquis recruits were hot-headed boys of sixteen or middle-aged men, untrained, undisciplined and inexperienced, driven by anger, revenge, or simply the need to escape being sent to Germany. So it is easy to see where the confidence deficit came from. Come the invasion the Allies would need a viable resistance that was disciplined and co-ordinated. Which was where the Jedburghs came in. Their job would be to turn these resistance cells into an armed guerrilla network able to sabotage the Germans, and rise – when required – to support the Allied invasion. Discreet, highly trained, guerrilla warfare experts.

The story goes that when the director of SOE was trying to think of a code name for his new special unit, the train he was travelling on paused at the Scottish Borders town of Jedburgh (a place associated with bandit raids on English settlements in the sixteenth century and for what was known as Jedburgh Justice: execution first, trial afterwards). Others hold the name was merely a blind finger landing on a page of meaningless words. Either way, Jedburghs they became.

Three hundred volunteers recruited from the armed forces of Britain, America and France (the French contingent coming from regiments stationed in NW Africa when Germany invaded France). Three men to a team; one hundred teams. In each team: two officers and a radio operator. One officer would be British or American, the other had to be French.^fn2 The teams would be parachuted into enemy-occupied territory at night where there was known to be resistance activity or potential – they would attach themselves to the local Maquis, establish direct short-wave wireless communication with London, arrange arms drops, train the partisans; then plan and carry out tactical operations. No more random acts of sabotage that only irritated the Germans, but specific targeting: blowing key transport lines; cutting enemy communications, laying ambushes. First of all, to stop Hitler getting reinforcements to Normandy after D-Day once the Allies had landed; and then, do everything possible, right across France, to thwart their retreat.

The Jedburghs were the first direct collaboration between the American and British Secret Services: British SOE and American OSS (Office of Strategic Services – precursor of the CIA), combining as SFHQ (Special Forces Headquarters) which would come under General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s jurisdiction in the combined British and American force: SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force). It wasn’t quite as cosy as far as the French were concerned. Personal relations between Charles de Gaulle, the querulous French leader in exile, and his principal allies, Churchill and Roosevelt, were frosty and suspicious, still smarting from the swift and shocking French capitulation of 1940. While there were diplomatic consultations with the French, French channels had the reputation of being notoriously lax on security, so as far as specific details of the planned invasion were concerned, de Gaulle was excluded.

Dad and I have both drained our glasses of wine. A man consulting a sheaf of papers is telling us what time the coaches are coming, what time supper is, going through the itinerary. It’s a humbling experience meeting this handful of surviving Jeds. They’re a lawless rackety bunch, and I am beginning, quite quickly, to get an idea of what the SOE recruiters were looking for. Even now, in their eighties, they mutter irreverently and heckle during the welcome speeches. Someone shouts something from the back, and they all shout in unison, ‘Some shit!’ A roar of laughter. I am bewildered. Ten minutes later it happens again. Someone shouts, ‘Forty-eight!’ Then half the room responds: ‘Forty-nine! Fifty!’ And everyone bellows, ‘SOME SHIT!’ They dissolve into laughter. This, I discover, is the Jedburgh tradition reserved for any speaker who dares to go on too long. It came from one of the American trainees who, when ordered to do fifty push-ups, counted the last few out loud: ‘Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty!’ then jumped to attention with a very audible, ‘Some shit!’ The British Jeds parodied it and it quickly caught on as a tactic to sabotage boring lectures from visiting officials, and now pops up at the merest provocation – as a Jed hallmark.

^fn1 The 1942 scheme, introduced by Germany, triggered the inception of many Maquis bands who fled to the hills to escape the labour camps.

^fn2 Or the nationality of the enemy-occupied country where the team would operate – eight teams were dropped in Holland.

Milton Hall. The Jedburgh nursery. Our first outing by coach is a visit to the house, long since back in private ownership. Seat of the Fitzwilliams when the first stone was laid in 1594. It’s a massive pile set in a 600-acre park with thirty acres of gardens and a large ornamental lake with an island, all looking very idyllic, surrounded by sheep. Hard to imagine the wartime scene sixty years ago: the accommodation huts, the rows of khaki-coloured tents, the obstacle courses, the demolition pits and firing ranges, every type of German and French vehicle lined up to practise on; the truck ruts scribbled across the great lawns.

Milton Hall, it transpires, is the house where Margaret Thatcher received the phone call in 1982 telling her Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands; it is also the house that kindled the imagination of Daphne du Maurier when she visited as a child – her impressions of Milton sowed the first seeds of inspiration for Manderley, the setting for Rebecca. I learnt of Milton Hall’s connection to Rebecca whilst watching a repeat of a 1971 BBC documentary on du Maurier presented by young Oxford posh-boy, Wilfred De’ath. Candy-striped laundered shirt, big fat tie, clever bordering on cocky; De’ath also turns out to be not what he seems. Feted as a bright new TV presenter, he chucked it all in and spent a decade swanning from fancy hotel to fancy hotel to the nick, without ever paying a bill. The type of neck required to enable this brand of swindling would, I can’t help thinking, be second nature to a good Jed, and reminds me of the deportment Dad deployed when he lived in London in his van and required the use of the Ritz’s bathrooms. Chest out, head up, striding in, greeting everyone, as if he owned the place.

Disgorged from the coach at the back of the house we are shown about. We visit the walled vegetable garden where you can still see the bullet holes from the Jeds’ shooting practice pockmarking the old brick. Harry Verlander, a Jed wireless operator, remembers there were thirty rounds of ammunition available for practice every day. He says it was not unusual for shots to be taken at any promising target. Some of the livestock escaped, but the clock and weathervane were not so lucky. In one room of the house a display of Jedburgh memorabilia has been set up: Sten guns, pistols, American carbines, knives, maps, parachute jumpsuits, grenades, fuses, detonators, black-and-white photographs of blown-up bridges and trains, and a rather heavy-looking wireless transmitter built into a suitcase. It’s a B2 short-wave radio set, the kind used at the time by most SOE agents in the field. It was too cumbersome for the Jeds and needed a power source – which made the chance of detection higher, so a modified version called the Jed Set was developed which could be carried in a canvas backpack and operated in the open, powered by a hand-crank generator. The Jed Set was their most vital equipment, it had a 600-mile range, and weighed thirty pounds, including a spare battery.

We meet Tommy MacPherson of team Quinine, and his radio operator, Arthur Brown – author of The Jedburghs manuscript. Guest of honour is Daphne Park, the Jedburghs’ cypher instructor, now Baroness Park of Monmouth. Daphne became an unlikely legend as a Cold War spy, famous (among the initiated) for burning top-secret documents and hiding the ashes in her knickers.

Daphne was recruited into the secret side of things after her over-elaborate answer on cyphers failed her an examination in encryption for the FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry). Her paper found its way into the hands of the head of coding at the Special Operations unit, who recognised a unique brilliance and employed her straight away. Daphne taught coding in the dairy barn at Milton Hall until she called a senior officer ‘incompetent’ and was sacked for insubordination. After the war she became a controller for MI6. She is a warm but formidable presence and it doesn’t surprise me to learn she lists ‘Difficult places’ as a recreation in Who’s Who. In the Belgian Congo coup of 1960 she smuggled Prime Minister Lumumba’s private secretary to safety in the boot of her 2CV. An excellent cover, she assures us, because nobody took a 2CV seriously; the secretary was to become head of intelligence in the new government and one of Daphne’s most useful sources. The cypher system Daphne taught the Jedburghs is called the One-Time Pad – mathematically unbreakable and still used today. Each radio operator was given a unique pad of randomly generated cypher tables – each sheet could be used only once to encrypt a message then had to be destroyed; to decipher the message an identical twin pad was kept at the receiving station.

The radio operators not only had to be proficient at high Morse speeds (at least twenty-five words per minute instead of the usual army speed of ten to twelve), but know their radio sets inside out and the intricacies of running repairs under very primitive conditions. In case anything happened to the radio operator everyone had to be competent in cyphers; if the pad was lost, each agent had a special poem that only he and his home station knew. Dad said he forgot his poem the moment he got on the plane.

We walk about, they joke and reminisce. The Jeds began their day at 6.00 a.m. and finished at 9.00 p.m., if there weren’t night exercises. By the end of the training there would be nothing about guerrilla warfare 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; they had to be able to set a mine, attach a clam, lay tyre-bursters, throw a grenade by instinct, neutralise a booby trap, prepare an ambush. There was observation and memory training; intelligence-gathering; how to conduct surveillance; how to know if you were being followed; reception techniques for receiving air-dropped supplies; night parachuting; there were lessons in unarmed combat, silent killing 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.

Someone mentions their self-defence instructor, William Fairbairn, schooled in the oriental arts having spent thirty years as a policeman in Shanghai. He taught them joint manipulation, pressure points, nerve centres, and how to dispatch a sentry silently. After a few sessions with Fairbairn they knew exactly how to use their fists, elbows and knees to inflict serious damage to the body’s delicate areas; they learnt chin-jabs, headbutts, fingertip jabs; how to kick; how to escape from wrist holds, throat holds (one hand/two hands), body holds (front/rear), and what they called ‘Come with me’ holds (being held by the collar with one arm forced up the back). Fairbairn’s usual advice was to follow each manoeuvre with a good kick in the groin.¹

Never fail to carry the sentry out of the way when killed or captured. Impress on students the necessity for speed, silence and practised co-operation. Point out the circumstances under which it would be foolish to attack a sentry at all. Practise all of the above in the dark. Aim at tying up and gagging a sentry in under 2.5 mins.²

Not surprising they enjoyed themselves. Knife fighting at speed – where to aim, which arteries to cut; how to shoot a .45 calibre pistol instinctively – going straight into a semi-crouch firing two shots in rapid succession, something they were told to practise continually as they walked around the camp. That must have been a sight: 300 men randomly dropping to their knees like cowboys quick-drawing their guns. Drills in reloading, over and over, until they could change a magazine at lightning speed – something they would have to be able to do blindfolded as if they were fighting from a cellar, or a ditch, or on a dark night. Never freeze. Do something. Shoot in short bursts. Make sure you can see your target.

It’s a laugh being at Milton Hall with this unruly lot. We’ve eaten all the sandwiches and someone has gone to the kitchen to beg some more. Not chosen for their manners, they managed to get rid of their first commanding officer within a week for trying to pull them together by foot-drill and shouting ‘Par-ade … shun!’ Their parting gift was to demonstrate their new demolition skills by booby-trapping his lavatory which exploded when he pulled the chain. His replacement, Colonel Musgrave, was more accommodating; an ex-big-game hunter who taught them how to cook hedgehogs, rats and mice, and survival techniques far grislier than Ray Mears’s. Musgrave’s lecture notes for living off the land advise that animals provide more wholesome and digestible food when eaten raw; that horses killed in action or dead dogs should still be warm to ensure their freshness; and that all birds are edible, although coots are tough and unpalatable. Musgrave was determined that all food prejudice should be banished and the right frame of mind created from the outset. Raw snails were just as tasty as oysters, and cleaner feeders because they live on wholesome foliage; while dogs and cats provided substantial amounts of excellent protein and could be captured by friendly advances. ‘All objections to wholesome food are hysteria,’ Musgrave banged home. ‘Be sure to include the livers!’³

By early February 1944, 300 volunteers who had no idea what they were volunteering for converged from various preliminary training centres on ME65, the code name for Milton Hall. Fifty American officers, fifty British, a hundred French and a hundred sergeant wireless operators (forty British, forty American, twenty French); all thrown in together. There were university lecturers, taxi drivers, Foreign Legionnaires, American college football giants; there was a stunt man, a poacher, a policeman. What they all had in common was getting through the intensive selection process: a gamut of physical and psychological aptitude tests; followed by perplexing interviews with confounding non-military questions; followed by intelligence tests, word-association tests, even the Rorschach inkblot was used for personality assessments. Each man was put through exercises designed to test his ability to think fast, improvise, invent, adapt, and to check his tolerance for frustration: a task set with faulty equipment, for example, or a hindering assistant. All proceedings were scrutinised by Military Testing officers with clipboards taking notes, measuring even a moment of hesitation. The point, of course, was to see how each person might react in stressful or dangerous situations in enemy territory. Would he go to ground and hide, or would he get on with it? For once, many of the high-flyers accustomed to whistling past the finishing line got stuck, while those used to being disciplined for some minor offence or passed over, found themselves going on to the next stage. What SOE was looking for was the unconventional, unsubmissive types, the spirited individualist, men not afraid to stick their neck out or, as the Jeds put it, the troublemakers. But it was a complicated list of requirements because they would also need self-discipline, confidence, nerve, courage, self-reliance, diplomacy; to be perceptive, persuasive, assertive, imaginative. Someone who could work in a team but survive completely on his own in hostile territory – if he had to.

Everyone here has a different story of their recruitment. Aubrey Trofimov (‘Trof’), remembers being locked in a cellar with instructions to try to get out. He loosened some bricks, climbed along a duct, escaped through a grate, then sneaked up on a guard and frogmarched him to the commanding officer’s desk where he announced, ‘I’m here and could technically shoot you.’ Dick Rubinstein remembers them being divided into groups of eight and after some exercises having to rank in order of merit the men he would be prepared to take into enemy-occupied territory – what the Americans called a ‘fuck your buddy test’. One of the American Jeds answered each word-association question with the same answer: Girls, Girls, Girls.⁴ The Americans livened things up at Milton Hall, yet the British rejected a third of the officers preselected by the American Secret Service and sent them home.

When war broke out in 1939 Dad had been in the last class of officer cadets at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. He passed out bottom, or so he claims.

‘I had more punishments built up by half-term than they had punishing parades to attend, and was only commissioned because of the circumstances. I didn’t cause any trouble,’ Dad tries to explain, ‘I just questioned everything. I wanted to know why. When I was given an order to polish boots, I asked why? “TO SEE IF YOU CAN DO IT!”’ he roars, then begins to laugh. ‘So I polished one. Oh, they could get a lot of distaste into the word, “CAREW!”’

By 1943 Dad was an anti-aircraft gunner in Gibraltar, bored stiff with only the odd Vichy plane to fire at, when he picked up on a request from the War Office on the noticeboard wanting volunteers to operate in small units overseas. ‘In the back of my mind, I knew one day a colonel was going to tell me to do something and I was going to tell him to get lost and end up court-martialled. Far better if I’m going to get killed, I get killed because I’ve made a balls of it, not because some idiot colonel made a hash of it.’ So Dad applied with his friend, Alistair. The account of his selection is in the Imperial War Museum sound archives: