Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

66 ‘Peter spilled three-quarters of his slop while the lights were out. Am now sleeping at other end of the pit,’ logged Keith. If his entry for 1 March, ‘ten months to Christmas’, suggests pessimism, the one for the following ‘very windy and cold day’ leaves no doubt. Referring for the first time to enforced abstinence from sex, he had ‘dreamed of a girl named HAMF (ATHOL) – boy she is some piece of work.’ His reference on 3 March to ‘a disgusting schoolgirl exhibition by officers’ is cryptic, but there’s no doubting his mood: ‘Up and washed early as bored with life in general. This life is too much for me.’ The following night he had ‘another distressing dream again’. His ‘Log’ at this time made only passing reference to an event unthinkable in the days at Belaria: arrival in the compound of former world heavyweight boxing champion Max Schmeling, seizing the opportunity to visit Allied PoWs, now that the course of the war had freed him from a reluctant and repugnant role as a hero of the Nazi regime. Keith’s more immediate concern was that Americans were receiving excellent Red Cross food parcels at a time when snow consigned him to ‘another day in the pit’. Even heavier falls, coinciding with the ‘14th air raid in succession on Berlin’, meant he ‘slept wet’ on 5 and 6 March, before all changed, at least for the time being. A huge asterisk alongside his entry for 7 March highlighted the arrival of one Australian Red Cross parcel per man: ‘what rejoicing Prisoner of War Time to spare. Drawing by Gil Docking, probably from early 1945, of Keith during his time as a prisoner of war.