Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

122 It is impossible to say exactly when the family curse of alcoholism, long held at bay, firmly took hold. If the rupture with the WACA that he was so reluctant to discuss publicly was one factor, maybe its effects would have been less if he’d found easier, more lucrative work. His evident lack of interest in the proffered job from Sydney in 1954 suggests he was still committed to a future in Perth. But from the time Russell met Jill, whom he later married when she was 20, he had increasingly pessimistic views of Keith’s situation. He admired him enormously and not only because the first time he heard him sing he ‘nearly fell over at the beauty of his voice’. Keith was far from a one-dimensional extrovert: ‘You only had to meet the man to know there was something special about him … he was very quiet, not rowdy, didn’t talk a lot, but whenever he opened his mouth you knew this man has got something to say worth listening to’. Yet he speculated in retrospect that Keith’s mounting financial problems were probably compounded because increasing drinking – almost entirely of beer – hampered his fulfilment of bulldozing contracts. For some years Ruth, while virtually a non-drinker herself, was a willing participant in social activities with friends like the Charlesworths and Edwards, with neighbours in Kalamunda and farming people as far away as Cranbrook, 250 kilometres to the south, where Jill recalled one family holiday. But Jill had no doubt that eventually his drinking drove her parents apart. At the time of the split in 1965 Kelly was only nine or ten and still in primary school. But if that was the major factor that delayed by several years the decision to take her back to Canada, it was in that intervening period that Ruth revealed her talents, working as a secretary for an aviation company and the ‘Tom the Cheap’ grocery chain before establishing her own business, Copytype in West Perth, which drew up tradesmen’s specifications for construction companies. The Carmodys were never divorced. Ruth had another partner in Perth for a time, while Jill and Russell remember a woman friend in Keith’s company in Sydney. 56 By then his journey had taken him back to his Mosman roots and a family circle that cricket had enabled him to escape. And after years of sadly diminished life, his plight would finally prompt Ruth to reveal her continuing emotional commitment to him. 56 The fact that this person was called ‘Josie’ prompted months of authorial speculation that she might be Keith’s wartime girlfriend from Shepherd’s Tavern before helpful information provided by researcher Jane Painter in London confirmed that Josephine Chicherio had married in 1947 and died in 1963. From Kalamunda to Sydney