Slouching in the Undergrowth: The Long Life of a Gunner Officer

At the age of 94, Jack Swaab decided to place on record his recollections of a long and richly textured life. The result, Slouching in the Undergrowth, is a perceptive, engaging and sometimes alarmingly frank record of a life well-lived.

The early chapters of the book open a window onto a childhood passed in a very different world of trams, boarding schools and seaside holidays in the twenties and thirties.

Jack was sent down from Oxford, and spent the years before the war living the lush life of an ‘off Fleet Street’ reporter. After a faltering start, his war service was distinguished. (Jack’s diaries from the time have already been published to acclaim as Field of Fire.) Reflecting anew, he looks back on both his own and his comrades’ life-changing experiences. After the war, Jack made a career in the pioneering years of advertising. As a sharp-suited executive, he traveled the world, leading to bizarre adventures and meetings with the rich, the famous and the simply eccentric.

In 1948, Jack married the woman he describes as his ‘unique Canadian’. At the millennium, his wife developed dementia and he became her principal career until her death nine years later, having himself survived malaria, TB, angina and cancer.

By turns witty, unflinching and fascinating, Slouching in the Undergrowth is a marvelous overview of times both familiar and unknown, seen through the lens of an urbane and accomplished raconteur.