Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

53 event. Keith was ‘put into a room with Gil and 10 other bods’ – five Canadians, two Englishmen, one Scot and two other Australians, Ken Todd from Weston in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales and J.J.Maguire from Keith’s own suburb, Mosman. But although Gil remained a friend throughout the next 11 months, Keith was even closer to Pearson, who shared a hut with Bruce Keen, a pilot from Randwick in Sydney, and ten others from Canada, Britain, New Zealand and the United States. Enclosing each section of the camp were parallel barbed-wire fences, nearly two metres apart, with barbed-wire coils between them. Any prisoner crossing a waist-high warning wire, ten metres inside this barrier, was liable to be shot from the high guard towers placed at 50-metre intervals. Eight to 12 prisoners in each hut were confined behind shuttered windows between 10 pm and midnight, when lights went out. Guard dogs ran free outside during the night. Yet Keith’s ‘Log’ makes it clear that, while he remained the Germans’ prisoner, the details of his daily life were ordained just as much by the internal discipline of his fellow PoWs. His leadership on the cricket field might soon be unchallenged but he and Docking, along with Todd – captured just two weeks before them – were the three most recent arrivals in a hut in which one Canadian had been a PoW since October 1941, four since 1942 and three for well over a year. His newcomer status meant that for the first six weeks of his incarceration he was a ‘stooge’. By this stage of the war ‘stooging’ wasn’t a form of covert surveillance of German ‘goons’ but housekeeping duties in a partly self-controlled prisoner economy and society. There were also plays, movies, musical recitals, sporting activities and lectures on a wide range of topics – all tolerated and some even arranged by the Germans. Yet neither organised leisure nor enforced drudgery could make Belaria’s inmates indifferent to events beyond the barbed wire. They had no need to rely on the daily bulletins posted by the Germans outside the cookhouses. Quentin Richard Petersen, an American in Stalag Luft III for much the same period as Keith, explained that the latest BBC reports were received on clandestine radios, memorised and circulated verbally around the camp. On 9 July Keith ‘washed fluorescence and blood out of shirt’, following the Germans’ morning roll-call, ‘Apell’, and remarked that it ‘looks as if Warsaw and Paris will fall before the end of this month.’ Six days later he noted that the advancing Soviet Army had captured Minsk (in fact 11 days earlier). Soon he was happy to have drawn Prisoner of War