Carew Keggie - Dadland

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, 19091939 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

BASIL OPERATIONAL AREA 1944

BURMA 19445

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 Im getting bored. He is joking with the shop assistant. He hasnt 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, thats 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 childs 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 doesnt 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. Its his favourite invention. For now. Hes making one for me and wont 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.

Im 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 wont go back that far. Nor do we mention the third.

Incredible, he says. Is it really? Whats her name?

Jane, I say.

Ive drifted, he says. Havent 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.

Whats her name? he asks again.

Jane.

Shes very attractive, he says.

Yes, she is.

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

Touch. Hes in a good mood. But what he far prefers is photos of himself.

Youre an egomaniac, Dad.

A what?

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