Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

62 depression – ‘a pit of despair’. It would be going too far to suggest Keith suffered to that extreme – even though for the first time in early 1945 ‘depression’ was a word that sometimes appeared in his ‘Log’. But he did increasingly refer to being ‘in the pit’ on days when he had nothing else to report – sport to play or watch, theatres or classes to attend or music to listen to. At one extreme, days spent resting in his bunk may have been devoted to reading, writing letters or conversation with roommates. At the other extreme, they could represent bouts of gloomy introspection. Certainly, as time wore on, he experienced mood swings. In late November, receipt of ‘a nice pair of trousers’ from an undisclosed source combined with ‘Gil’s drawing of me’ to produce a modest high, soon offset by renewed breakfast ‘stooging’. Two weeks later, he greeted the end of his sixth month in captivity with the most heavily emphasised entry in his entire ‘Log’: ‘**UTTER PITS!!**’. Yet the imminence of Christmas lightened his mood again. Following a church service conducted by ‘the Rev Powell, Church of Scotland,’ he received 19 letters, too many for him to continue noting each individual correspondent. A ‘very nice’ German dentist ‘did a good job’ in filling a problem tooth. And on 23 December he was so enthused by the arrival of an ‘excellent’ Australian Red Cross parcel – containing ‘turkey, ham, sausages, candy, dates, gum, tea, honey, jam, cheese, butter, nuts, pipe, tobacco, cigs, face-wash’ – that he stayed up to 4 am, making ‘4 dozen cookies and two cakes’. After church again on the morning of Christmas Eve, he ‘messed around talking to Peter’ until a delayed lock-up at 2 am on Christmas morning. While the Christmas Day church service was ‘a disappointing effort’, dinner was a great success, incorporating many ingredients from the Red Cross parcel, as well ‘as various cookies and sandwiches I had made on Sunday night’. The movie Male Animal , starring Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Leslie, enlivened Boxing Day. But on New Year’s Eve Keith was again lamenting ‘What a Life!!’ In early January 1945, with the ‘water off’ because of frozen pipes he found consolation in the kitchen: virtually all his ‘Log’ entries referred to cooking and baking. For two weeks he recorded a pattern of routine activity that seems banal amid the growing uncertainty about what the climactic stages of the war might bring. On 20 January a rare afternoon ‘Apell’ interrupted another ‘pit day’, as the German guards contemplated imminent defeat. In the preceding week the Soviet Army had advanced through East Prussia and Silesia at a rate of up to 40 kilometres a day. On the 21st, as he received Prisoner of War