Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

70 Chapter Four The Victory ‘Tests’ and the Long Road Home Bill Bullen summed up what many have seen as the impact of Keith’s eleven months as a PoW and reluctant guest of the Soviet Army: It has been said that Keith’s experiences ditching, 21 hours afloat in a dinghy in the North Sea, his traumatic treatment as a prisoner of war, the subsequent march to Spremberg in blizzard conditions and his confinement by both Germans and Russians had a profound effect on his health and he never regained the vitality that he showed in his earlier years. On his return to Britain Keith is said to have felt ‘a bit round the bend’, earning the nickname ‘Bendy’ that was used in his years in Western Australia, also by the sometime Australian captain, Ian Johnson, and even by Keith Miller in his funeral eulogy. While most implied psychological damage, David Lord, captain of Mosman in the late 1960s, thought the nickname referred to the heavy drinking mentioned, with varying degrees of disapproval, by those who knew him earlier in Perth. It would be surprising if his PoW experiences had no long-term impact. But it would be wrong to jump too quickly to decisive conclusions about its nature. It’s impossible, for instance, to find evidence he immediately turned to alcohol, with damaging effects on his performances in the 1945 English cricket season. In an interview with Mark Rowe, Reg Ellis named the heavy drinkers in the Australian Services team that year as Keith Miller, Lindsay Hassett and Ross Stanford. Certainly, Carmody’s form fell well short of the standards he’d achieved in 1943 and 1944. But soon, in India and a homecoming tour through every Australian state, it fluctuated from brilliant to mediocre but with no evidence of sapped vitality. * * * * * * * In the past 20 years so many writers have referred to the Victory ‘Tests’ of 1945 as ‘overlooked’ or ‘forgotten’ that it’s time to recognise they no longer are, thanks to accounts by Pollard (1988),