Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

59 clear the ‘umbrella field’ – eventually deployed exclusively by fast bowlers – was not a favoured tactic at Belaria, despite the diagram that appears at the end of the ‘Log’. On the day after the ‘gala’, 8 September, the sports field was ‘closed for good’, ending a period in which, for all the bemoaned lapses in batting, fielding, wicketkeeping and captaincy, cricket had provided relief from the drudgery of ‘stooging’. A ‘talk on sheep farming in Victoria by Flying Officer Armitage’ on 10 September failed to lift his spirits to offset the end of cricket or ease his frustration at the lack of personal mail. By 7 September he’d written four letters to Elsie and five to Josie. The only one he’d received was on 29 August from Kodak House with gloomy news of ‘other Aussies shot down’. No doubt he had mixed feelings on 3 October when an unnamed friend showed him a letter containing news of the RAAF versus Army match on 17 June. His Log doesn’t mention whether this was The Times’ report that the RAAF’s ‘habitual captain, K.Carmody, will be sorely missed’. But Keith now had to find alternatives to a game he sorely missed himself. Numerous table tennis matches, ending with a semi-final loss, in which he ‘played very badly indeed’, gave way to lengthy walks whenever the weather was suitable. On 15 September, the day after he ‘helped celebrate Peter’s 21st birthday’, he walked for one and a half hours around the camp. Three days later a long walk took him to ‘North Camp, Sagan’ to have his troublesome right thumb X-rayed: ‘a very nice walk indeed. Thumb not fractured’. At last, on 7 October, returning from another ‘very nice walk indeed down by the river from 0700 hours to 0900’, he found his first mail had arrived: ‘Josie’s second letter … posted 3/9/44. Have not yet received her first letter.’ Once the drought was broken, the flood followed. Josie’s third letter, with several from other people, including Bette Davis of Mayfair, came three days later. On 17 October eight letter-writers included, in addition to the inevitable Josie, an ‘Auntie’ – perhaps the lady rumoured to have cared for him for a time in his childhood – Keith Johnson from the Mosman Cricket Club and both Sheila Bruckshaw and ‘Mr Bruck’. Letters soon followed from the couple’s son, his RAF friend ‘Bruck’. Six letters received on 5 November included two from Elsie and one from Ruth. The only ‘Ruth’ in his address list was Mrs Murray (Ruth) Frank, so this letter is the first surviving documentary evidence of contact between Keith and his Canadian future wife. But at this stage of Prisoner of War