Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

27 At the end of preliminary training the three friends were mustered as pilots and posted to an Elementary Flying School at Narrandera on the edge of the Murrumbidgee irrigation area in the flat southern interior of New South Wales. After simulated flying instruction on the ‘Link Trainer’ they were soon airborne with instructors, prior to tests that Keith and Norm Craig passed. Bullen failed: his ‘hair-raising’ circling of his sister’s house at a nearby town and a bungled landing overshadowed Keith’s own unofficial escapades – photographing the main street of another neighbouring town, Leeton, once, its oval twice and the whole town ‘from 7,000 and 8,000 feet’. After spending March and April at Narrandera and a short leave in Mosman in early May he was ready for advanced training. Even though Bullen’s blunders had saved him from a potential ‘sticky end’ as a pilot, the three friends remained together when transferred to Melbourne. Billeted at the Showground, they explored the city, Bullen happy to rely on Keith’s presumed extensive knowledge from his Sheffield Shield experiences, not realising his only match in Melbourne had been the Second XI fixture against Victoria in January 1939. A fortnight later they boarded S.S.Argentina , which had just emptied 3,000 American troops onto Station Pier. This was the start of an influx that would make Melbourne, along with Brisbane, the site of international incidents that soured Prime Minister John Curtin’s declaration on 27 December 1941 that ‘Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’ Those traditional links, however, were taking a contingent of some 200 men and one female nurse on the long voyage to Canada, the major venue for the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Because the Argentina was a commandeered passenger ship, usually plying between New York and South America, they travelled in a level of comfort rarely experienced on troopships and greater than the much larger American contingent could have enjoyed – dining in the first-class saloon on such delicacies as shrimp cocktails, with fresh bread rolls supplied daily. A long voyage around the south of New Zealand to avoid Japanese submarines eventually took them through the Panama Canal – marvelling at lakes, locks and lush tropical scenery – and into the Caribbean. Only two incidents interrupted days of lethargy, relaxing on the abundant deck space, and evenings of security blackout, watching for the phosphorescent shimmer of dolphins In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF