Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

29 of further training at Charlottetown followed without preventing Keith from enjoying extensive travel and forging friendships, not all of them temporary. ‘Lovely, isn’t he?’ he mocked on the back of one of several photographs of RAF pilot Morton Bruckshaw, taken in Montreal in December 1942. Several others revealed RAAF colleague Ron Prentice as a regular companion of both Keith and ‘Bruck’. The random array of photographs and postcards reveals nothing of the most important link Keith made in Canada. As Chapters Three and Five will show, there is stronger evidence that he met his future wife, Ruth Mattison Frank, there than that he knew her through friendship with her RAAF first husband, Murray Frank. In early January 1943, on a postcard of the George Washington Bridge, New York, saved from a trip two months earlier, Keith asked Joyce, ‘How is the tennis going? I’m dying for a game of that and cricket.’ But despite this small hint of homesickness, the rest of the photographic evidence of travels in January within Canada, and especially in the United States, sits oddly with Keith’s postcard comment to Joyce, dated 4 February, that he’d finished the specialist training course at Prince Edward Island ‘after a gruelling time’. Even in that missive he conceded: ‘I had some In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF Keith receiving his ‘wings’ from Air Marshal W.A. ‘Billy’ Bishop V.C., of the Canadian Air Force, at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in October 1942.