Excerpt from Dadland by Keggie Carew, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'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'.

Dadland © 2016 by Keggie Carew. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.