Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

54 17 August in the sweepstake for the end of the war. The reason he made no further references to ‘Apell’ after 9 July for the rest of 1944 is because it was a regular event not worth mentioning on a daily basis when he had an abundance of other activities to record in his ‘Log’. As early as 5 July he’d recovered sufficiently to play his first game of softball. A day later he wrote his first letters from Belaria to Elsie [Edwards] and Josie [Chicherio]. On the same day, a terse reference to practising softball and studying geometry was the first of a series of entries revealing the strange contradictions of camp life. On 7 July, ‘a home run with bases loaded’ in a softball game sat alongside notes about studying physics and algebra and continuing cooking and sweeping duties. Although his ‘Log’ suggests he may have played more softball – especially if occasional baseball games were to be included in the tally – cricket was his most important interest. He was organiser, selector, coach, and even curator, as well as captain, batsman, occasional bowler and wicketkeeper. He coached umpires and officiated himself in games he wasn’t playing in. Cricket at all levels was also a welcome interruption in the early weeks of tedious ‘stooging’. Writing letters to Australia, but receiving none, he felt cut off from family and friends, making the game especially important in providing a focus for his friendship with Pearson. Bill Bullen wrote of a ‘no-go area’ between an outer electrified barbed wire fence, ten feet high, and a lower interior one surrounding the cricket field: The armed German guards in their elevated ‘Goon Boxes’ overlooked the whole compound and woe betide anyone infringing the no-go area. When a ball was hit into this area a player dressed in a sheet, with a hole for his head draped back and front, was required to obtain the guards’ permission to retrieve it. Either Bullen was drawing on a wider literature about PoW camps, rather than sources specific to Belaria, or Keith and his companions were blasé about the boundaries of their makeshift oval. There are no references to intimidating security in Keith’s ‘Log’ and Bullen quotes none of his Australian contemporaries. But several agreed with the defining memory of Eric Stephenson of Canberra that ‘the oval was crude in the extreme’: I remember fielding and in running to make a catch, watching the ball, I fell into a small crater and missed completely. Keith Prisoner of War