Shoeless, and still wearing my football kit, I freed myself and then clambered over him, escaping through the back window. With only the odd cut and bruise, which was miraculous, I stood in the middle of the road and waited. The driver who’d blinded my dad hadn’t stopped; he’d sped away, long gone and unidentifiable. A friend of mine, also on Leeds’ books, was being taken home by his father. I flagged them down, and the police and an ambulance were called. That afternoon my dad had been at the funeral of a golfing buddy. Like everyone else, he’d gone to the wake afterwards. The police routinely brought out the breathalyser, finding him over the limit. I can’t condone my dad’s drink-driving, but the circumstances surrounding the case – the car responsible for it, the driver absconding afterwards without a care for our well-being, the fact that my dad hadn’t been speeding – didn’t seem to interest the police. I, the only other witness, wasn’t even asked to give a statement. I am still livid about that.
The repercussions of the crash rippled out. My dad was mortified that he’d put me in danger, mulling over afterwards how much worse the crash could have been. It left him with a debilitating arm injury. His future in local cricket, and also the enormous pleasure he got from playing golf, were both jeopardised. His right arm and shoulder required an operation, and 16 pins and a plate were put in to support his joints, which brought him considerable pain during his ongoing recovery.
Fraught with worry as the court case loomed and his other problems accumulated, my dad had not only been drinking too much generally – and he accepted as much – but a few weeks earlier he had also swallowed an overdose of painkillers at home: the same painkillers that had been prescribed for his injuries. He described taking them as ‘a cry for help’. My mum had for months urged him to go to a doctor and talk openly about his depression. Either he refused or, after giving in and going to an appointment, he threw up a smokescreen for the doctor’s benefit. He pretended there wasn’t anything wrong with him that wouldn’t soon be shaken off. ‘He and the doctor ended up talking mostly about sport,’ my mum said.
The coroner was patient and sympathetic, aware of my dad’s popularity and the accounts of him as a decent family man. He recorded an open verdict, as certain as he could be that my dad hadn’t meant to die. He was making a further ‘cry for help’, and it had gone wrong in a way that he hadn’t foreseen and didn’t intend because his illness confused him and clouded his judgement. My dad, knowing that we were on our way home, thought we would rescue him, added the coroner. As it turned out, one small innocent delay after another – none of them anyone’s fault – meant we arrived back half-an-hour later than we’d planned.
The coroner’s concise, concluding sentence encapsulated the difficulty for those of us left behind looking for closure and searching for The Why behind his death.
‘I do not know what happened,’ the coroner said. ‘He is the only one who did.’
Though almost 20 years have passed, I’m no closer to an explanation for what happened, which makes it harder to accept. Why my dad decided to end his life, and why he did so that evening, is an unsolvable puzzle. There was no note to read, no definitive clue to discover. There were fragments, just bits and pieces of information, but putting them together to reconstruct his last months never created a coherent whole that made absolute sense and explained everything, especially about what he must have been thinking. No matter how hard I tried, from what I knew as I grew up or discovered subsequently, there were always gaping holes. Questions that can’t be answered. Things that don’t add up. The truth is snagged somewhere in between them, caught in one of those places that’s impossible to reach.
I live with that.
The following day was my mum’s 42nd birthday. Only a few hours before he died my dad had gone to a nearby town and booked a celebratory meal for the two of them. He’d also booked a babysitter to look after Becky and me. That act makes what he did seem even more illogical to us than ever. So did something he said not long before. After a friend of his died, also committing suicide by hanging, he’d asked my mum, disbelievingly: ‘Why on earth would anyone do that?’
I suppose I could track down everyone my dad saw or spoke with towards the end, but I’m sure doing so would produce only more contradictions, more confusion. For on the one hand he’d recently told a journalist friend, during a train journey to London, that he was in fine fettle and eager for 1998 to start. ‘I’m at the top of my form,’ he’d insisted. On the other, he’d told Mike Brearley, who had been his England captain, completely the opposite. ‘He felt awful … things were not good,’ reported Brearley.
So, instead of certainties, there are only theories, and always will be. My mum believes there were ‘small bereavements inside him’, among them the loss of his cricket career, his search for something to replace it – which he never found – and also the death of his father. My dad was an only child. His father raised him all but alone after his mother abandoned the two of them. He was only three years old. My dad never saw his mother again, relying on his aunts to offer the maternal care every child needs. When, shortly before she died, his mother wrote and finally wanted to see him, my dad didn’t want to meet her. He was still playing for Yorkshire then. ‘She’s known where I’ve been for the last thirty years and hasn’t bothered to visit,’ he told my mum. ‘I don’t want to hear from her now. It’s too late.’ My mum tried conciliation, telling him: ‘There are always two sides to a story … perhaps she’ll explain why she left and why she hasn’t been in touch since.’ My dad wasn’t interested. One of the most perplexing letters of condolence we received after my dad’s death came with an Australian postmark. The writer, a complete stranger to us, asked my mum to pass on his sympathies to my dad’s ‘brother’. She wrote back explaining that, as far as she knew, my dad didn’t have a brother. If he did, we still don’t know anything about him.
Apart from the hurt and anger that her unexplained absence left simmering in him, perhaps my dad didn’t want to see his mother again because doing so would have been a betrayal of his father. He was christened Leslie, but everyone called him Des after his own father – apart, of course, from my dad, who referred to him as ‘Pops’. He was a smaller version of my dad with bow legs so pronounced that stopping a pig in a passage would have been difficult for him. He was born on the last day of 1916, the year in which the Battle of the Somme claimed more than a million casualties. Some of the killed, maimed and injured belonged to battalions made up of Bradford Pals, including members of the extended Bairstow family. He was given the middle name Somme because of it. He’d played cricket for Laisterdyke, both before and after the Second World War as a wicketkeeper, served overseas in the army and ended his working life in a chemical factory. He was an old-fashioned sort of gent, usually seen carrying a rolled-up newspaper. As a greeting back to anyone who said hello, he’d tap the top of his forehead with the newspaper, a show of northern politeness.
My dad adored his father. Early in his career he would often dedicate a catch, a stumping or an innings to him, telling reporters: ‘Pops will be proud of that.’ The two of them were good companions and each loved and felt indebted to the other. My dad kept a black-and-white photograph of his father in his wallet and put another much larger and colourised version of it on the wall at home. Every year, paying tribute to his father’s military background, he’d wear his poppy proudly and we would attend the Remembrance Day service at Boroughbridge, the town closest to us.
My dad died almost to the day that his own father had died 16 years before. Was that a coincidence? I don’t know; I never will.
Illness does its early work in secret, so another crucial aspect I don’t know is when his own began. My dad once declared ‘I love life’. For so long he gave every indication of doing that, making it impossible to pinpoint precisely when feeling a little down became melancholy and then tipped into an engulfing depression. My dad had suffered a succession of setbacks. He’d applied for the job as Yorkshire’s Cricket Manager, be
lieving he was the ideal candidate. He didn’t get it. He considered standing for the committee until the prospect of success dimmed for him. He’d been doing occasional commentaries for the BBC, and listeners liked him, but a more permanent role went to someone else. He’d been steadily hunting down promotional work, which was becoming harder to get. He’d been running his own company, winning a contract to merchandise World Cup ties.
Life without cricket was initially harder for my dad than playing the game had ever been. He missed it, and also the adrenalin pump of a performance. He missed the crack and the camaraderie of the dressing room eight years after leaving it too. For two decades he’d got himself set for the glad rush of each new summer, and he sincerely believed he had a few more of them left in him. But, when he was 38, Yorkshire nudged him reluctantly into retirement before he was ready or properly prepared for it. He remained convinced, for at least a season or two afterwards, that he was still good enough for the County Championship team. He was almost waiting for Yorkshire to realise this and recall him, which in the beginning made it more difficult to settle into an alternative career. There is nothing he wouldn’t have done for them. His roots were in Yorkshire cricket. So were his inspirations. And so was his identity, his sense of self.
My dad wore the White Rose on his sleeve, the county’s emblem becoming his own. The county was bone and blood and breath to him. He once stood on top of the huge concrete marker post, emblazoned with that White Rose, which tells the traveller on the M62 where Lancashire ends and Yorkshire begins. He wore his full kit, and brandished a bat with his arms flung wide. This wasn’t a pose. Nor was the beaming expression he wore put on for the sake of a good picture. My dad really did believe that Yorkshire was the epicentre of the world.
The Cricketer once ran a headline that said: ‘Bairstow ready to shed tears for Yorkshire’. Shed tears he did – and plenty of them. I’ve reliably heard that he played every match for Yorkshire – even a friendly – as though it was a Test; and also that every defeat was a grievous wound to him. He once said: ‘I took defeat quite badly. I tried not to show how much I cared to the others. More often than not I went for a long brisk walk on my own. I would march along, getting it out of my system … I was better on my own.’ He also admitted that there were ‘times when I feel down, just like everyone else, and then I need others to pat me on the back, crack a joke or two and take the job that I normally do’.
One of his colleagues, John Hampshire, even wrote in my dad’s benefit brochure that he was prone to ‘fits of depression’ when Yorkshire didn’t perform – or when he didn’t perform for them. ‘When this man is down the whole world knows about it,’ he added. After his death, the assessment was plucked out in isolation, over-analysed and misinterpreted. John, one of the nicest men I knew, was talking about the sad low of losing rather than highlighting the medical definition of clinical depression. For when my dad did have the condition, the evidence of how capably he concealed the fact – telling pretty white lies about it – was contained in the shock his suicide created.
A doctor can ask a patient who has a physical pain ‘where does it hurt?’ The patient will point to a specific spot. With a mental illness, it hurts everywhere. During the past decade in particular, we’ve only just begun to understand such a simple fact and take some long and welcome strides towards a more compassionate understanding of it. We’ve also developed an appreciation about the right and wrong ways of discussing and handling mental illness. The language we use when referring to depression has changed. Mercifully gone is the edge of mockery, condescension and flippancy that used to be commonplace. This change was slow in coming, and more change is still needed, but we’ve grown up and matured as a society, realising nowadays that no shame or stigma should ever be attached to the condition.
People in my dad’s day, especially those associated with a macho sport, were wary at best and petrified at worst about coming forward and confessing to a problem. For a man, it wasn’t manly, a situation that seems ridiculous to us now. You could be perceived as weak or written off as damaged goods. That is why my dad disguised his own depression with a façade in those conversations with his doctors. It was a convincing act in which he pretended to be himself, proving again that mental illness can be invisible to the naked eye when the sufferer never complains and presents a pasted-on smile to the world.
At Yorkshire, he’d been given two nicknames. The first was ‘Stanley’, after the Bradford-born writer Stan Barstow, author of A Kind of Loving, one of those popular kitchen-sink novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. No one quibbled over the missing ‘i’. The second, which he relished, was ‘Bluey’, the slang word Australians use for anyone with red hair. My dad also had eyes that were bright blue, so the name, which John Hampshire gave him, stuck. It fitted him as well as a handmade suit; ‘Bluey Bairstow’ rolled off the tongue. There was something breezy and high-spirited about it that matched his approach to the game as well as to life. ‘After that,’ my dad said, ‘no friend ever called me David again – unless they were telling me off.’
However dreadful he surely felt inside during his bad days, I think my dad strove outwardly to be the Bluey everyone expected – confident, lively and always as full of bonhomie as he could be. The copious newspaper reports of his death, each of the cuttings torn and yellow with age now, show how successfully he maintained the pretence. Fred Trueman found his suicide ‘beyond belief’. Fooled like so many others, Brian Close thought my dad had been his ‘normal self’ when he last saw him only a few months before. Even his former teammate Phil Carrick, whose friendship with my dad almost went back to the time both of them were in short pants, was stupefied. ‘I just can’t take it in,’ he said. Another long-standing friend, Michael Parkinson (now Sir Parky), had latterly detected a certain ‘sadness in him’, but still couldn’t credit what had happened. His reply, when hearing about my dad’s suicide, was to dismiss the bringer of such awful news with the incredulous: ‘Don’t be daft. Not Bluey.’
Few knew my dad was sick, and fewer still knew the extent of that sickness, because he hid it far too well.
Torturing yourself with ‘what if?’ questions is pointless. No matter how long you dwell on them you only ever end up circling back to the spot where you started, absolutely no wiser. But you can’t help asking them anyway. So I wonder whether, if modern attitudes had been prevalent back then, allowing my dad to be more open about his depression – making his cry for help more public – he would still be here with us …
Possibly.
Once a thing is known, it cannot be unknown – especially when you’ve seen it with your own eyes. But in the weeks, months and years that followed my dad’s death, I tried to blot out the memory of how it happened as much as I could. In significant ways, I succeeded. Gone are the raw details of what I witnessed and also what was done and said in the immediate aftermath of it. Perhaps I was just too young to absorb them in the first place. Or perhaps trauma obliterated them, the mind deliberately wiping away in an act of self-protection what was too hurtful to bear. I can’t tell you who among the three of us was first through our front door. I can’t tell you how we got from our house to our neighbours, which is where we apparently went. But what remains – and always will for me, I think – is how I felt, then and for a long while later: vulnerable and afraid, the sense of disorientation and loss overwhelming. I learnt only retrospectively about the five stages of grief, but I experienced each of them to a different degree – especially the first, which is denial. I knew what death was, and I also knew categorically what it meant. Nonetheless there were times, particularly when I first woke up in the morning or returned to the house from somewhere, when I half-expected to find my dad still alive, smiling and sitting in his chair, exactly as I’d known him. Or I was sure I’d hear his car on the drive and his key turn in the lock. I’d see him framed in our wide front door, ready to pick me up in his big arms again for a hug; a hug so muscular it was like being cuddled by a gentle bear.
I’ve seen my dad described as a character, but that phrase – without a supplementary explanation – doesn’t come close to doing him justice. Once seen and heard, he was seldom – if ever – forgotten. He wasn’t tall – only 5 foot 9 – and he became quite stocky. He had sturdy forearms and thick thighs and a bit of a bull chest. Someone once said my dad was built ‘like a muck stack’, and he took that as a compliment. He had the sort of personality that filled up a room when he entered, and then emptied it again after he left. Exuberant wasn’t the half of it. There was a bass-drum resonance about his voice and a throaty roar about his laugh. No one with any gumption about them ever had to ask where he came from either. His accent belonged unmistakably to Yorkshire.
He always seemed so alive to me that at first I struggled to believe that I’d never speak to him again. Or that things wouldn’t go on as before.
We lived in a village called Marton cum Grafton, which was a homely place. My dad had grown up in post-war Bradford, originally south-west of the centre and then north of it. He was a working-class boy during an era when social status was more obviously demarcated, and those on the bottom rung of it were expected to be deferential to the toffs at the top. Being ‘working class’ meant living in a back-to-back house, and social mobility was hard, usually solely dependent on education or the possession of a singular talent, such as sport. The only other escape was to win the football pools.
A Clear Blue Sky Page 3