Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

125 Test cricket. Returning to pay the debt the following week, John found that Keith was missing from the bar: he’d been taken to hospital suffering from cancer. Unaware that he’d been ill, John never saw him again. If this incident suggested abrupt onset of his terminal illness, his relatives in Sydney and Perth, and even Canada, came to believe that it was the diagnosis that was sudden – culpably so. His sister Dot – with whom he’d lived in the pre-war years when his cricket talent was blossoming – took him to hospital several times over a six-month period, only for him to be turned away without treatment or serious investigation. Finally, he was admitted after collapsing in the foyer, his pancreatic cancer far advanced with ‘a huge growth the size of a football,’ according to Russell, who said ‘he was very tough, never complained.’ It would be easy, but not necessarily correct, to conclude that Keith’s drinking caused his cancer. The computer addict’s reference bible, Wikipedia , declares that ‘overall, the association is consistently weak and the majority of studies have found no association’. 58 While conceding that ‘drinking alcohol excessively is a major cause of chronic pancreatitis’, it suggests that this condition, when ‘associated with alcohol consumption, is less frequently a precursor for pancreatic cancer than other types of chronic pancreatitis.’ But it then continues: ‘Some studies suggest a relationship, the risk increasing with increasing amount of alcohol intake … [and] greatest in heavy drinkers’. Its definition of ‘heavy drinking’ as ‘four or more drinks a day’ may seem to give credence to David Lord’s blunt assertion that Keith ‘drank himself to death!’ A safer, more guarded conclusion to draw from the internet’s mixed messages is that the most tragic aspect of his heavy drinking was that it was both a problem shared with many of his blood relatives and a cause of his alienation from the family he’d struggled to maintain in Perth. If he gained any emotional comfort in his final weeks it came mainly from the way Ruth and Kelly in Canada displayed the same mixture of concern and affection as Jill and Russell in Perth. The speed with which the Canadian pair responded to the news of Keith’s plight makes it clear that Ruth hadn’t been so embittered by the long separation to turn daughter against father. Arriving 58 An earlier publication in this Lives in Cricket series, about Maurice Tompkin of Leicestershire, who died suddenly in 1956 of pancreatic cancer, was of a man who rarely, if ever, drank alcohol. From Kalamunda to Sydney