Dadland: an Irish stew of family, war, memory and loss

My father, Tom Carew, was born, scandalously out of wedlock, in Ireland in 1919, to Maud Emily St Clair O’Brien Hobson, a well-to-do 36-year-old Irish widow, and Arthur Carew, the not-so-well-to-do 26-year-old man in charge of the horses at Ballyseedy Castle in Kerry. An imprudent roll in the hay I can only conclude, for young Arthur had to find new employment. He returned to Cork to manage the farm of another Big House: Warren’s Court, Lissarda, Co Cork; and took the pregnant Maud and her two young sons with him.

It was a terrible fall from grace for my grandmother if the photographs are anything to go by. An unpopular match by anyone’s imagination, the class gap, the wealth gap, not to mention the 10-year age gap.

In 1911 Maud had been married in Limerick Cathedral to a dashing officer in the Royal Munster Fusiliers who was killed in the Great War in 1914 when Maud was pregnant with their second son. The Limerick Chronicle reported their wedding in over 30 column inches: the ivory thread of Maud’s gown, the lover’s knot of Honiton lace, the satin train lined with silver issue draped with orange blossoms and white heather; and the long list of presents: Limerick lace collars, silver bon-bon baskets, Waterford glass, “a case of pine apples” …

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The house Keggie Carew and her boyfriend rented in west Cork in 1981, where Rose Dugdale, the young English rebel debutante, and her IRA boyfriend, Eddie Gallagher, had been arrested in 1974

Maud’s uncle, Frederick, the county sub-sheriff of Limerick, gave her away. An unpopular man I can only suppose from the smattering of dubious deeds I was able to uncover: the evictions “of four more tenants put out of their holdings” (in total 20-30 families) on the Glensharrold Estate (for which he was accompanied by a force of 50 police!) the “seizure of nine cows” for non-payment of rent; the “seizure of plants and flowering shrubs & etc.” from a plant nursery after a Mr Abraham refused to pay what he considered excessive rent. The sale of these items was forced to adjourn for the reason: “Not a single purchaser from either county or city of Limerick attended.” Yes! Memories in Ireland run deep. For Granddad’s sake I am glad he never had to hobnob with Frederick.

1919 was the end of the Great War but the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, and Granddad had a revolver. I found his Permit To Carry Arms In Ireland issued by the RIC dated 30/3/1918 in a metal trunk in Dad’s attic. And he would have needed it, for his position, with little protection, was becoming ever more perilous. Working for the gentry, having been discharged from the Royal Navy (after being blown up in a submarine) there would be no ambiguity about which side Granddad was perceived to be on.

Big Houses were not safe places to be. More and more were being burnt to the ground, and farm labourers were getting hard to find – or count on to cross picket lines; hay was destroyed in the fields; fences were broken; livestock scattered, and empty graves were being dug outside landowners’ doors. Three days after Dad’s first birthday 17 Auxiliaries were killed just up the road in an IRA ambush, and two weeks after that, Crown forces set Cork City on fire. In June 1921 it was Warren’s Court’s turn to become the next Big House pyre, and Granddad and Maud were forced to flee to England. It was my half-uncle, Maud’s eldest son, who remembered all the sheep on the farm slung around the perimeter fence of the house with their throats slit. The inauspicious beginnings of what would be a jam-packed life, if ever there was one.

I began writing Dadland as my father’s past began to slip away into the land of no memory. I knew since I was a child he had been a guerrilla agent in the second World War because we had the Indian newspaper cuttings from 1945 which referred to him as “Lawrence of Burma” and “The Mad Irishman”. They described dangerous operations of being dropped by parachute at night behind enemy lines in Burma to sabotage the Japanese and raise local resistance with “bands of tribesmen”.

And of course in our madcap childhood I had witnessed first-hand his unorthodox approach to pretty much everything. But Dad’s life turned out to be far more astonishing than anything even I had bargained for. Immersed in files stamped SECRET from the National Archives at Kew I was led into other worlds: war room spats between the great and the good … and the less good; behind the scenes in the dying gasps of Empire – where Dad leaned heavily on his Irish roots to give him cachet with his Burmese comrades who wanted their own independence from the British, of course.

One minute I was hovering over a crossroads in Kerry with nine men tied to a mined log, the next I was at a dinner party in Trieste with Patricia Highsmith; the next, in the house of the mysteriously drowned director of the CIA – a plate of uneaten clams on the table. But it was in Ireland that it all began, an Irish stew in a Carew line of grain merchants, sailors and fishermen, up and down on their luck, and where Dad, in his head, kept returning. At 86, and disgusted his driving licence had been revoked, he pinned a note on his front door in thick felt tip capitals: TOM CAREW IS GOING BACK TO IRELAND.

I first came to Ireland in 1981 when I was 23 years old. I had run away with my Egyptian boyfriend who was the only son of the chief imam of the Regent’s Park mosque. We existed frugally, doing odd jobs, painting, gardening. For the first time in my life I had found a place in which I felt at home. It was as if something in me recognised a connection, the air, the rocks, the fuchsia hedgerows, the happy naughty spirit of the people – or that is what I thought.

We rented a house on a cliff in west Cork. Our view looked over High Island, Low Island, Adam and Eve, down the coast beyond the Staggs, to where the Fastnet lighthouse blinked at night across the sea in the distance. It was in fact the house where Rose Dugdale, the young English rebel debutante, and her IRA boyfriend, Eddie Gallagher, had been arrested seven years before after a tip-off – having made the most basic error of thinking the more remote they were, the less noticed. They used the barn to hide a stolen Vermeer, Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, and 18 other priceless works by Goya, Rubens and Gainsborough, which they’d been trying to ransom to raise funds for the IRA. And this, like so many of the threads of Dadland, reconnecting, disconnecting, … histories, memories, lives: Dad’s … and mine.

Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory by Keggie Carew, winner of the Costa Biography Award, is out now in Vintage paperback