Even when he was captain of Yorkshire, my dad didn’t earn more than £6,000 from a season of cricket. There were bonuses, though the county committee didn’t have to pay out too many of those at Yorkshire because the team’s inconsistency seldom demanded it. His main perk was a bit of mileage. There were not a glittering array of other ones. You could get a bat deal, but still have to pay, as my dad did early on in his career, for other items of kit, such as your whites or boots, and also the case in which to put them. You got the occasional item of branded ‘leisurewear’, such as sweaters, and the most prominent players attracted car sponsorship, the name of the company spread across the doors. It turned the driver into the much speedier equivalent of the men who once walked the city streets with enormous sandwich boards slung over their shoulders.
After the summer ended, the cricketer also had to find work to fill the blank months of winter. When the chance presented itself, my dad went on a tour or coached abroad. When it didn’t, he launched himself into a variety of things, mostly relying on his personality, which meant sales and promotional work. My dad did once receive a £2,000 gift in an 85-year-old Sussex supporter’s will – Geoffrey Boycott was another Yorkshire recipient – for the ‘special pleasure’ his ‘ever-enthusiastic’ wicketkeeping had given her. The benefit year, awarded on the whim of a club, was still a cricketer’s rainy-day fund, the nest egg or down-payment on a pension pot from which he wouldn’t start to draw for another quarter-century. The downside was that your form could suffer, becoming secondary to the effort of organising and attending events.
My dad made £56,000 from his benefit in 1982, the money gleaned from the familiar grind of dinners and matches, raffles and auctions, and also the sale of a big glossy brochure, a studio photo of him decorating the cover (he is supposedly stumping someone, the bails in mid-air and his grin a foot wider than the Cheshire Cat’s). In recognition of his lengthy service and contribution, Yorkshire also awarded him a testimonial in 1990, a rarity for the county. He earned £73,000 from it. On the face of it, these sums seem high, the equivalent of a minor lottery win now, and enough back then not to worry about penny-pinching afterwards. If you sense that there’s a ‘but’ on the way, putting those figures into perspective, you’d be right.
What my dad got was whittled away, first through his divorce and then through the gradual rebuilding of his life with my mum. We were not poor, but we certainly weren’t fantastically well off either. He’d had to work hard, long hours to support us. After his death it became financially tough for us – bloody tough, actually. We had previously lived on my dad’s earnings. Soon we were living predominantly on my mum’s police pension. My dad’s suicide nullified the insurance policy he’d taken out on himself, so money became desperately tight. If my trousers got a bit grubby, I’d brush them down and tidy them up, and say nothing about it. If my shoes pinched, I wouldn’t admit it either. I’d go on wearing them to make sure my mum didn’t have to buy a new pair for me. If there was a gadget or a fad, something ‘must have’ to guarantee playground kudos or credibility, I’d willingly go without it too. My mum would shop at discount stores to try to find the ‘next best thing’ for us, an item that looked a little like the one everyone else had. She had enough to do, so I was determined not to bother her with trivial things like fashion. Becky was the same. My mum took her to the opticians, not knowing how badly she needed glasses until she put them on and saw, at last, a distant street sign that before had been hazily indistinct. Becky had simply coped, believing there were ‘priorities’ for the family finances ahead of her own well-being.
We were always going to sell our home in Marton cum Grafton. We couldn’t stay there. For one thing, we couldn’t afford it. For another, too many memories crowded around us there, my dad’s absence keenly felt everywhere we went. We nevertheless had to stay in the house for a further 18 months. My mum was just too physically weak to contemplate a move. She didn’t get the all-clear from her cancer until 2002. The prospect of putting one place up for sale, searching for another and then packing our possessions and arranging for their removal would have been too much for her. She was so fatigued because of her treatment that her limbs could feel as heavy as stone. Even dealing with the amount of correspondence after my dad’s death – the letters, the cards, the messages – had been difficult enough.
Once she was fit again, my mum wanted to move somewhere no one knew us; somewhere we could start afresh. She finally chose Dunnington, a village four miles east of York with roots so ancient that the Domesday Book records them. We initially moved into a rented cottage, thanks to the support of Colin Graves, who was then a generous patron of cricket in Yorkshire, his formal attachment to the club still to come. Finally, we moved into a house on the brow of a slight hill. At the bottom of that hill, so close that you could hit a six there, sits a manicured splendour of grass, which is the home of the cricket club. It embodies the best of the local game and the community spirit of the volunteers who run it. On match days the cricket is competitively good, the tea is brewing, the cakes and sandwiches are cut and the big hand roller on the boundary doubles as a convenient seat.
Dunnington is where we gradually put our lives back together again.
My mum saw life then as what she calls ‘a series of slow escalators’, carrying her from one level to another. At each level she had to stop, catch her breath and look around a while before climbing on to the next escalator. The process was then repeated, exactly as before. That’s how she coped not only with my dad’s death, but also with things that had to be done bit by bit as a result of it. For five years she found it difficult to celebrate her birthday. Amid her grief, still grasping for the reason behind his suicide, she also asked herself two questions. The first was: ‘Did he really love me?’ The second was: ‘Did he think we’d be better off without him?’ My mum finally put both of them aside, knowing the past would only go on interfering with our future if she didn’t. ‘You have to get on with things,’ she’d say to us.
My grandpa Colin and my grandma Joan virtually moved in with us for six months as soon as my dad died. My grandpa fulfilled my dad’s duties. No man was more important to me than him. He was a Yorkshireman without a trace of an accent, around 5 foot 11 tall. When I arrived, he’d gone bald on top, his thin grey hair growing only on the sides of his head, and he wore a pair of steel-framed spectacles. I doted on my grandpa, spending hour upon hour in his company and relying on his advice, his enthusiasm, his belief in me. I looked up to him then and I look up to him now. I always will. A good part of me is him.
(© Author’s collection)
During the war, his contribution to Hitler’s downfall was becoming a member of the RAF’s ground crew, an engineer working on planes such as the Lancaster, which gave him a lifelong love of historic aircraft. My grandma bought him commemorative plates depicting them in action. My grandparents were married for more than 60 years after meeting at a dance hall when the big bands and crooners were still at the forefront of popular music; rock ’n’ roll was still waiting to be invented then. My grandma had worked in the corsetry section of Busby’s, which was Bradford’s version of Grace Brothers department store in Are You Being Served? My grandpa became a textile salesman, fascinated with the weft and weave of cloth and canvassing the country to sell it. I’m told he was good at the task; he even sold tartan in Scotland.
(© Author’s collection)
My mum so much wanted to give Becky and me the childhood that her parents had given her. My grandpa was particularly sporty, so he took her to football matches at Park Avenue. She also played cricket with her friends on the Bolton Abbey estate, the grey stone and high window arches of the priory dominating the horizon. She ate more than one knickerbocker glory on the front at Bridlington as my grandpa, who liked sea fishing, bobbed about in a small boat in search of a catch.
I benefited from his fondness for sport too. Mother Shipton was a seer, a kind of female Nostradamus born in the fifteenth century. She suppos
edly foresaw the Great Fire of London, the arrival of the motor car, the ascension and the fall of kings and queens and much else besides. She didn’t, as far as I’m aware, predict that her cave in North Yorkshire would become a tourist attraction just off the A1 or that a nine-hole pitch-and-putt golf course would be constructed not far from it. My grandpa taught me the game there and witnessed the first hole in one I ever got. It’s one of my prized childhood memories. In our back garden he showed me how to tackle at football. Over draughts and chess, he talked to me about the strategy of sport as well. When my mum was ill, he ferried me to and from Leeds United’s training ground at Thorp Arch. I belonged to their academy when, almost reviving the glory, glory era of Don Revie’s ‘Damned United’, the club reached the semi-finals of the Champions League.
My dad wouldn’t have claimed to be C.B. Fry, but he was certainly multi-talented. As well as cricket, he’d represented the county at badminton, table tennis and football, battling up front as someone you’d describe as an ‘old fashioned’ centre-forward. That’s shorthand for being muscular and a bit rough, unafraid of getting an elbow in the face or the centre-half’s studs raked surreptitiously down your calf. In the decade my dad played in you had to be as hard as the rocks on Ilkley Moor. You almost had to be guilty of manslaughter to get yourself sent off too. Not all high tackles – even those around the knees – got you booked. He made more than a dozen appearances for Bradford City at the rump end of the Football League, the former Divisions Three and Four. In one photograph of the Bradford team, taken in the early 1970s, you can tell that Brian Sellers’s influence had waned at Yorkshire because my dad is crouched at the end of the front row, his hair very glam-rock and almost falling on to his shoulders; he’s no longer a ginger billiard ball.
Like my dad, I began up front, before being turned into a full-back at Leeds. I was alongside two players who eventually did what I then aspired to do, which was make it into the Premier League. One of them was Fabian Delph, who not so long ago cost Manchester City £8 million. The other was Danny Rose, owner of more than a dozen England caps since going to Spurs.
Sport was my life. Each day of every week was dominated by it. I was constantly on the move and wanted nothing more than to have a go at everything. Through enormous good fortune, I ended up going to a school that enabled me to do exactly that.
(© Author’s collection)
My dad had been a Freemason, doing a lot of charity work, and the Masonic lodge to which he belonged came to our rescue, initiating a trust fund through the main body of the organisation. It paid for what my mum and my grandparents couldn’t afford, which was private schooling for Becky and me. We went to St Peter’s School in York. It changed our lives. Without our trust fund, the fees would have been well above our means. My mum had to buy part of my uniform from the school’s second-hand shop.
St Peter’s Latin motto is translated as ‘upon ancient roads’, which makes sense only when another piece of information gets added to it. The school was formed in the seventh century, making it the fourth oldest in the world. One of its first headmasters became chancellor to the Emperor Charlemagne. Guy Fawkes was an ‘old boy’. So was another of his co-conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot.
The acres of greenery there seemed to me like some sporting Eden, running on for ever.
I’ve always believed that you should play as many sports as possible. Each sport will develop the others. You learn different skills and disciplines that are transferable. Look at AB de Villiers, who, aged 13, joined the premier South African sporting institute Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool in Pretoria, which found he was the athletic version of the Swiss Army knife. He could do anything. De Villiers will tell you that some of his achievements away from cricket have been mythologised. He’ll simply say that he was ‘decent at golf and useful at rugby and tennis’. But the fact is that he took an ingredient or two from each and dropped them into his cricket.
At St Peter’s, I ‘discovered’ rugby, which became – and remains – a passion of mine. From it I absorbed an important lesson. When you’re in an awkward scrape, you have two choices: fight or flight. I learnt it whenever an opponent, usually taller, wider and more muscular, came at me with the ball in his hands and murder in his eyes. You either tackled him or got clean out the way. The latter strategy ducked any danger of being left flat on your back, the outline of your body pressed into the turf after he’d trampled right across your chest, but it also showed that you shouldn’t be on the pitch in the first place. You had to hold your ground. I’d finish a rugby match sometimes sore and exhausted, but I felt afterwards the satisfaction of being dog-weary because I’d done hard, decent work.
There were many cricketers I admired, among them Sachin Tendulkar, but the sportsman who most impressed me didn’t wear white – unless he was playing for England at Twickenham. I was a fly-half, a Jonny Wilkinson acolyte and wannabe. Wilkinson could kick a ball from anywhere on the ground. He would have tackled a buffalo if it meant preventing a try. He practised almost until he bled. In everything he did and said, Wilkinson demonstrated to me not only the qualities it took to become a professional sportsman, but also what you required to remain one. I can relate to so much of what he experienced and advocated later because of it. Wilkinson only remembers feeling alive when he either held or was kicking a ball. It dominated his childhood. The game became an ‘integral part of me’, he said. I can identify with that. The older he got, the more competitive he became. I can identify with that too. He always had to win, he explained; he didn’t want to be chewing over sorrows afterwards. I feel the same way.
His individual practice sessions, carried out alone, became all about ‘grinding himself to the bone’, he said. He stretched his talent further than anyone thought it would go, improving the component parts of his game. Everything about Wilkinson was focused and structured. It was all about repeat drills, which made him into a kicking machine. He’d kick for two or three hours, always believing that the next attempt at goal would improve his game. If Wilkinson kicked badly, he’d get angry with himself and stay out even longer. Even when a match had finished, everyone else in the process of leaving or already back home, he often went out on the pitch again. There were no compromises and very few days off for him. Nor was he ever afraid to do something different – hence those hands, clasped in front of him as though, like Oliver Twist, he’s about to open them and ask for more.
Even when he was still learning, Wilkinson found himself driven by the fear of not fulfilling his full potential; that, he said, would have been intolerable and unforgivable. He wanted to be a real all-rounder. He wanted to be exciting to watch. He wanted to be the best, which is what he became – improving even after England won the World Cup. What impressed me was the way he thrived on responsibility, never shirking but always determined to lead … and the way he read the game with a tactical nous only the connoisseur possesses … and the way he was so mentally tough … and how he conducted himself with such a quiet, unassuming dignity. Off the field he didn’t grandstand or strut as ‘the big I am’. On it he blamed no one for defeat. ‘You create your bad days. And you create your good days,’ he said, banishing excuses.
I watched his DVD – The Perfect 10 – until my eyes hurt, using his sporting life like an instruction manual for my own. In it there’s a short clip of Wilkinson on an empty pitch. He is converting a kick from fairly close range. It’s early afternoon on a perfect, sunny day. He pops the ball over with a casual ease, as though this is something that comes to him as naturally as breathing. Everything is crisply sure and in perfect sync – the smooth approach, the backlift, the left leg as it cleanly follows through, sending his effort on a spin that is high and true. You look at it and know that Wilkinson could do this a million times more – and from further back – with the same result. What I’m omitting from my description is the most relevant detail of all. He’s just a boy, only ten years old and still to grow and become a champion.
At St Peter’s we reac
hed the quarter-finals of the Daily Mail Cup, the prospect of a Twickenham final ahead. In the last seconds of the match, I was called on to take a kick that would win the tie for us. The angle was tricky – the ball hugged the touchline – and the posts seemed far off. My mum remembers some murmuring on the sidelines about the chance being too hard for me, the pressure too great. With as much Wilkinson-like poise as I could muster, I steadied myself, looking hard at the ball and hard at the target. I took a few paces back and then moved into the kick. The ball left my boot with a clean thud, reached cruising altitude and then sailed smack between the sticks. That day I felt a little like Wilkinson. We lost our semi-final, missing out on Twickenham, but for a while I contemplated a career in rugby until I realised that, physically, I probably wouldn’t be able to compete in it. My uncle Ted, who is a former England under-18 manager, thought I was wrong, arguing that I could bulk myself up and soon develop the right physique.
The chances of making it in professional sport are low, but the disappointments of failure still seem particularly cruel when they occur. I’ve read about teenagers, especially footballers, who have been unable to handle them. A contract was their only target, their sole purpose, and their lives became fractured as soon as a coach spoke the sentence that begins with the words: ‘I’m sorry, son.’ I have heard that sentence. I know how it tears you up. Leeds let me go from their academy. I protested that I hadn’t been given a decent enough run. I said my piece knowing it wouldn’t make a difference. I think, deep down, I knew two other things too. These were:
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