Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

60 his life it was clear who was his most significant other. While he continued to exchange letters with Elsie in Mosman, and received at least one from his sister Beryl, he referred to only one written to ‘Dad’ in the whole period to 22 January 1945, when he received ‘letter number 22 from Josie.’ Because the content of Keith’s letters, both sent and received, remains unknown, the best indication of their importance to his well-being is provided by his ‘Log’ entry for 2 January 1945: ‘no mail, very brassed off’. This response to what was now an unusual, short-lived interruption to the flow of mail hints at a psychological pain, often hidden but never far from the surface of his PoW ‘Log’. * * * * * * * In addition to so much sport, Keith embraced other available activities, probably with greater enthusiasm than shown by many fellow prisoners. The camp library, wrote American Quentin Petersen, was ‘as sought after for its warmth as its books’, although he did ‘check out An Outline of Organic Chemistry often and get a good start on my chosen [medical] profession there!’ For his part, Keith eventually compiled, in order, a list of 54 books he’d read by the time he left Belaria in late January 1945, starting with Escott North’s The Saga of the Cowboy and ending with Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black . In between were such varied titles as Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage , Dennis Wheatley’s The Black Baroness , cricket books by Pelham Warner, J.M.Kilburn and Neville Cardus, Jerome K.Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and Dr John Drew’s Man, Microbe and Malady. Petersen also recalled that ‘there was a kriegie-built theatre … but I cannot recall ever attending a function there’. Keith’s experience was quite different. After enjoying, soon after his arrival, a dramatised version of the long-running strip cartoon ‘Dixie Dugan’, about a Broadway and later Hollywood chorus girl, he went on to greet at least eight other theatrical presentations with uniform approval. Stage versions of two films, Someone at the Door (1936) and George and Margaret (1940), were respectively ‘quite a good effort’ and ‘an excellent show’. His response to each of two 1936 plays – Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears and A.N.Menzies’ Astonished Ostrich – was ‘a very good show indeed’, the latter notable for ‘good imitation women’. There were also two ‘very good’ band shows, an opportunity to listen to records of classical music and two imported performances from the Music Society of Lower Silesia, the second deemed ‘quite a good effort’. Prisoner of War