Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

12 no attempt to fly outside. 5 Very different, according to the later recollections of teammate Ken Gulliver, was the young Keith Carmody who, from the time he joined the Mosman club at the age of eleven, was always escaping from the shop to attend cricket practice. Keith was also escaping tense family situations. Even if the Carmody story were not a ‘life in cricket’, there can be no doubt that the game provided his best chance for mobility beyond the confines of a struggling family, even though some of the pressure must have been eased when sister Dorothy married in 1930, Beryl in 1935 and Joyce in 1937. In 2011 Keith’s niece and god-daughter, Sandra – born in 1946 – told of her mother Joyce’s recollections of poverty so extreme that the family often went hungry, waiting for a customer to pay 5 The photograph from an unnamed local newspaper appears in a scrapbook lent to the author by Carmody’s niece, Sandra Burgess: it is too faded and tattered to be reproduced. Escape From Poverty Maternal pride. Keith with his mother, Annie Ada, in the late 1930s.