Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

28 and flying fish. In defiance of instructions, the Argentina’s captain hove to and launched a lifeboat to rescue a sailor from a torpedoed ship. Soon a German submarine, surfacing astern, showed how the rescue had jeopardised the lives of all on board. Machine- guns manned from the stern by the airmen quickly beat off the U-boat, its supply of torpedoes evidently exhausted. Throughout the action, said Bullen, ‘the rescued sailor was rushing from one end of the boat to the other in panic.’ On their arrival in New York an air-conditioned train took the RAAF men north to Lachine on Montreal Island. An initial settling-in period gave the three friends the chance to ridicule the Canadian commanding officer’s suggestion they weed the greens of his golf club, instead taking a day trip to the Laurentian Mountains 100 kilometres north of Montreal. After two weeks they were transferred to the Royal Canadian Air Force [RCAF] Training Facility at Aylmer, Ontario. Although the ejected Bullen soon moved on to navigation training at Trenton, the three had time for a raucous farewell party, followed by a furtive late return to camp enlivened by searchlight sweeps of the aerodrome and warning shots into the air. Keith’s postcards and photographs reveal his progress and something of his surroundings. ‘I’m going well with this flying game,’ he told sister Joyce in August: ‘Did two solo cross-country navigation trips the last two days.’ A photograph followed, marked 15 September 1942 and signed ‘yours truly flying at 4,000 feet above 2,000 feet cloud’. An undated photograph of 32 fellow- trainees at Aylmer revealed 17 Australians, two Englishmen, four Americans and eight Canadians – and one whose name or nationality, or both, eluded him, perhaps because Keith had also been busy making friends outside the group. Another photo, inscribed ‘all the friends I made at Aylmer’, showed eight men and ten women. A third, dated simply October 1942, and entitled ‘raiding an orchard for apples, Aylmer, Ontario’, probably recorded a farewell prank because soon he was completing his training at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. 12 He received his ‘wings’ as a pilot officer on 23 October 1942 from Billy Bishop, commander of the first Canadian Air Force and the most decorated Canadian in the First World War. Despite another, presumably celebratory, trip to Niagara Falls three days later, and a return visit to Aylmer in November, three months 12 Charlottetown airfield had been built for the RAF, which ran it from June 1941. In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF