Dadland

KEGGIE CAREW

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2016 by Keggie Carew

Maps copyright © 2016 by Laurence Carew

Excerpts from ‘The Dry Salvages’ from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot © 1941 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje © 1992 by Michael Ondaatje. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from ‘This Is Just to Say’ by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939 © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2017

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Chatto & Windus,

an imprint of Random House

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2514-9

eISBN 978-0-8021-9038-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

For Patrick, Nicky and Tim,

who each have their own versions; this is only mine.

CONTENTS

Map of Basil Area

Map of Burma

Family Tree

Preface

PART 1 Dad is a Spy and Mum is a Pakistani

PART 2 Surprise, Kill and Vanish

PART 3 Your Father is a Bastard

PART 4 The Dense Mixed What?

PART 5 The Talented Mr Ripley

PART 6 The Last Tango

PART 7 Ground Control

PART 8 To Major Tom

PART 9 But, Daddy, That’s Not Your Name

Afterwords

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

BASIL OPERATIONAL AREA 1944

BURMA 1944–5

FAMILY TREE

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

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

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.

‘You rotter!’ Dad says in his foghorn voice. ‘You sod!’

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

1

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.

‘What relationship with that woman?’ Dad asks.

‘Your wife,’ I tell him. ‘My mother. Jane.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Incredible!’

‘Yes.’

‘I can see it now.’ His voice is a little wistful.

‘Good.’

‘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.

‘Incredible,’ he says. ‘Is it really? What’s her name?’

‘Jane,’ I say.

‘I’ve drifted,’ he says. ‘Haven’t I?’

‘Yes, Dad,’ I laugh, ‘you certainly have.’

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.

‘What’s her name?’ he asks again.

‘Jane.’

‘She’s very attractive,’ he says.

‘Yes, she is.’

A glint ignites both eyes, ‘So how can that be your mother?’

Touché. He’s in a good mood. But what he far prefers is photos of himself.

‘You’re an egomaniac, Dad.’

‘A what?’

‘E-­go-­ma-­ni-­ac,’ I enunciate slowly.

Jonathan, my husband, looks askance. Tries to clip me with his eye.

‘Hego-­nami-­hat?’ Dad says.

I deal out a photograph of him in dashing army uniform.

‘Who’s that?’ he asks.

‘Who do you think?’

‘Is that me?’

‘Yup.’

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

‘Twenty. Twenty-­one.’

‘No! How old am I now?’

‘Ninety-­seven,’ I lie.

‘I’m not.’

‘You are.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘I can’t be.’

‘Eighty-­seven then.’

‘Eighty-­seven?’

‘I promise.’

He looks at me as if I’ve gone mad.

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?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

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.

‘But I don’t have a business, Dad.’

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

He is looking at me hopefully.

But all I can give him is a sigh.

I place another photograph in his hand.

‘Who’s that?’ he asks.

‘Who do you think?’

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.

‘You,’ I say.

‘No!’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘What, the man with the pipe?’

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

‘No!’ Then his voice goes nostalgic. ‘You were sweet once.’

In five minutes he will have forgotten and we can do it all again.

‘How old am I?’ he asks.

‘You’re eighty-­seven, Dad.’

He looks downcast.

‘I never thought I’d go bonkers,’ he says.

‘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!’

‘Lucky to have no memory,’ he says.

I look at him quizzically.

‘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’.

‘Did you ever kill anyone, Dad?’ I recall asking as a child.

‘Um. Well,’ he hesitated.

I could see him thinking about it, which was a little chilling.

‘No, I don’t think I personally killed anyone,’ he said.

Maybe he thought I meant with his bare hands . . .

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.

2

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 the cathedral town of Peterborough in Cambridgeshire. My sister wanted to know, Would I go with him?

Yes, I certainly would.

3

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,* 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.** 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.

Someone is tapping a glass with a spoon.

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.

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

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

4

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