Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

61 Keith’s ‘Log’ also reveals an ever-expanding repertoire of cooking, baking and jam making. The ‘onions, lettuce and fresh peas’ of the first recorded meal he prepared must have been grown in the vegetable gardens noted on arrival by Pearson. They didn’t feature in his list of weekly rations for every prisoner: two ounces each of sugar, synthetic jam, fresh meat and sausage, four ounces of margarine, three cups of barley, one loaf of bread, 30 potatoes and ‘unlimited turnip.’ Fortunately, Red Cross parcels arrived with increasing frequency to provide tinned corned beef, meat roll, salmon, condensed milk, cheese, coffee, tea, cocoa, chocolate and extra margarine and sugar to more than double the meagre German allowance. Bartering with Americans, whose parcels were larger than those supplied to the British and Australians by the Swiss Red Cross, sometimes enabled Keith to incorporate into his cuisine sardines, raisins, prunes, extra cheese and, from Canadian sources, butter. Clandestine deals with corruptible ‘goons’ may have produced the pork chops he mentioned occasionally and the steak featured in a meal on 1 November which also clearly included more prisoner-grown produce: ‘onion, tomatoes, mashed potatoes, parsnips, beans, cabbage … a real bash!’ Yet so much of this culinary expertise was developed during ‘stooging duties’ that they were one source of an emotional fatigue that crept into his ‘Log’ entries as the months at Belaria dragged on. On 1 October he ‘started stooging again. What a life!’ Two weeks later, as snow fell, his spirits dropped further. Along with Ken Todd, Keen’s navigator, he ‘stooged all day, preparing all meals’ and by 21 October was openly ‘down in the dumps’. All he managed to write on 2 November was ‘time staggers on’. * * * * * * * Among the most frequently recurring phrases in the Carmody ‘Log’ are variations on ‘the pit’: ‘in (or on) the pit’; ‘a pit day’; ‘another day in the pit’; ‘returned to the pit’. In service slang of the period, ‘the pit’ sometimes referred to ‘latrines’ but could also mean simply ‘bunk or bed space’. References to ‘pit’ on three successive days in mid-November make it clear Keith was using the latter meaning, rather than constantly either using or cleaning lavatories. On 16 November a snowfall meant ‘another day in the pit’. The 17th was simply ‘a pit day’, while on the 18th the arrival of several new prisoners, ‘nearly all Yanks’, meant that one of his room-mates – a definitively British ‘Higgers’ – was moved to ‘another pit’ to accommodate one of them. The crucial word is also commonly used in a metaphor for clinical Prisoner of War