A Clear Blue Sky

by Jonny Bairstow

  Being cut then saved me from being cut later on.

  Cricket was my game.

  I know there are teenagers – again, chiefly footballers – who haven’t been able to cope with the sense of loss and futility that being cast aside brings. They feel let down and used and angry. Their life, stripped of a clear purpose, has gone haywire as a consequence. I was fortunate, not only because I had cricket, but also because I had my mum, who made sure no resentment lingered. I had something else to concentrate on, she said.

  At St Peter’s I decided I wanted to be a professional cricketer more than anything else. I remember, during exam season, that one master saw me going to nets when almost everyone else was going to the library. ‘Young Mr Bairstow off to play cricket again,’ he said, ‘while everyone else is in exam mode for university.’ He said it quizzically, the implication that I was somehow slacking impossible to ignore. I breezed past him anyway, holding my bulging bag, and replied without hesitation: ‘Cricket is my exam – and my university. And cricket is going to be my career.’ I spoke the words so firmly and with such certainty, as though I’d been given a glimpse into the future and knew already what it held for me, that the master offered nothing in response.

  I had startled him into a numbed silence, the way my dad had once startled Brian Close into one.

  The head of cricket at St Peter’s, a post he’d held for more than 30 years, was David Kirby, a former pupil who returned to become a master, as much a part of the school as the stone used to build it. He’d played for Cambridge University in 1959, taking three centuries off the counties, scoring more than 1,000 runs and bowling some beguiling off spin. At the season’s end he was picked for the Gentlemen against the Players at Scarborough in recognition of his promise. He went on to play for Leicestershire, part of the team that beat Yorkshire, then the champions, in 1961. In terms of the Championship, this was a small earthquake. Yorkshire lost by a whopping 149 runs, which was their biggest defeat since the Second World War. David Kirby was experienced and kind, good at sharpening my skills and pushing me along. He was the sort of man you instantly respected both for his knowledge and the way it was shared. I wanted to impress him.

  I was fast-tracked into the school first team at 13 years old. David and fellow master Mike Johnson, also vitally important in moulding my early cricket, later said – very flatteringly – that playing me in my own age group would have turned every match into a ‘farce’ because I could have scored more runs than the entire opposition team. My debut was Sedbergh, a town that’s one of the gateways to the Lake District. The ground there is gorgeous, a painterly view of rolling hills, a sweep of trees and the grey tower of a Saxon church. There’s a chocolate-box pavilion too. It’s perched on a mound, giving a grandstand view of the field.

  Sedbergh, however, does tend to get a lot of rain. It had been bucketing down for days before I got there. So much so that the turf was completely sodden. The groundsman had tried to move the heavy roller from the boundary, but it sank a few inches into the outfield and couldn’t be budged. He ended up cordoning the roller off with tape, which made it look like a police crime scene. Rather like the lime tree at Canterbury, the umpires decided that any shot striking it ought to be signalled as a four.

  I came in at number five and the Sedbergh team looked at me the way a cat looks at a mouse. I was only about 4 foot 10 tall, which was about a foot shorter than anyone else. I was skinny too, and I suppose the pads and the bat in my hand must have appeared a little too big for me.

  The pitch was a pudding, the ball coming off it so lowly and slowly that hardly anyone so far had been able to get a shot to go much further than extra cover. If you missed a delivery, you were likely to be given out ankle before wicket. I played the first few balls defensively until the bowler decided to pitch one up, which was exactly what I wanted him to do. I saw the thing early and clearly, getting in position to smack an on drive for four. The Sedbergh side were dumbfounded, as if something possibly hallucinatory had just happened. They found it hard to believe that the small, weedy lad in front of them had sufficient strength to get the ball off the square. I got a few more off it too, making 40-odd and even pinging one against the roller.

  David Kirby and Mike Johnson will tell you that I was a precocious lad. Like my dad had been, I was a ‘yappy ginger fella’, never afraid of voicing an opinion – or two – even in my first season. The fact that I was junior to anyone else didn’t stop me from having an unquiet word with the captain if I thought the set of the field wasn’t right. Or if I believed a bowler, for example, was bowling too short. Or if I spotted a flaw in an opposition batsman’s technique that we could exploit. It got me into trouble once. We were doing reasonably well against a side when their supposedly most-accomplished batsman came in. There was a shower of rain and I was short enough to shelter from it beside the square-leg umpire. The game continued, and I watched the new batsman for an over or two and then said to the umpire: ‘If this is the best guy they’ve got, I think we’ll polish them off pretty soon.’ No one had told me that the umpire was the batsman’s father. I had to apologise to him afterwards.

  I studied every aspect of the game as devoutly as a science. I know that Mike Johnson, for instance, used to smile to himself whenever I went to ask the groundsman about his preparation of the pitch, questioning him in detail about how it might play and how the recent weather had affected his work. He’d see me from a distance, a serious look on my face and my head craned right back like someone staring up at the top floor of a very tall building. ‘A 13-year-old with the cricket brain of someone 33’ is how he described me.

  I owe so much to the chances St Peter’s gave me. Financial pressure and all the red tape about compliance and health and safety means cricket in state schools has all but petered out. Kit is expensive enough. The upkeep of a row of nets, never mind a grass pitch, is prohibitive. And even those fortunate enough to have an artificial strip can’t always find opponents to face over a short summer term. At St Peter’s I had the benefit of first-rate coaching, first-rate practice facilities and a first-rate pitch. We also had a full fixture list.

  My mum was intrinsic to my success at St Peter’s. She’d be there to watch me, but wouldn’t, as I sadly saw some other parents do, complain or gripe at a decision, batter the masters verbally or back them into an awkward corner with endless questions about why their son wasn’t always bowling or batting up the order or fielding closer in. She once said to Mike Johnson that I’d get more attention as a wicketkeeper if I was more ‘flamboyant’. The observation was so rare that he remembers it. Otherwise she brought her unequivocal support, but left behind any inclination to make a scene about it. Far too often I saw – and I certainly heard – so many parents stomp and rant on a touchline or from a boundary in the delusional belief that it was helping their son. It proved embarrassing – more so for the player, some of whom would shrivel up or lose concentration, the thread of their game gone. When this occurred, the parent became more indignant and more impossible still, and then afterwards would demand from the coach an explanation about why their boy wasn’t at the top of his form. I don’t remember any coach telling them to go and look in the mirror, but that’s undoubtedly where the problem would be found. My mum understood, as I do now, that the frustrated parent, determined to vicariously live sporting success through their offspring, only makes life immeasurably harder for the child. It isn’t just a case of being excessively pushy either. It’s cloyingly needy, as though filling some void in their own past is more important than making sure the child is actually enjoying what he’s doing. My mum made my life as easy as she could.

  The peak of my time at St Peter’s, which was like scaling a schoolboy Everest, came in 2007. In eight innings I made 654 runs, including three centuries, at an average of 218.00. My golden summer coincided with Wisden’s decision to establish a Young Cricketer of the Year Award, which I won. The photograph of me as the inaugural winner, which appeared on page 945 of the fo
llowing season’s Almanack, shows a piled whirl of curly hair, a blissful smile and a blazer, the white piping on the lapels as broad as a kerbstone. I look rather younger than 18.

  When I went to the black-tie Wisden dinner in 2008, collecting an expensive leather-bound copy of the Almanack as my prize, the organisers let my mum and Becky come too. I was grateful for it then and even more so later on. You can’t buy a ticket for this event or somehow bluff your way in on the night. You have to be asked, the grand invitation arriving on stiff white card and always crested with the woodcut of those two top-hatted gents that Eric Ravilious designed as Wisden’s motif back in the 1930s.

  The dinner was held in London at the Inner Temple Hall, one of those imposing spaces with a high ceiling, rich wood-panelling, some heraldic shields and an assortment of oil portraits of men with whiskers and wing collars. It looked a bit like a room in Hogwarts. There was another Yorkshireman there. He’d been named as one of its five Cricketers of the Year, which in our game is akin to getting an Oscar. While I’d been getting runs for St Peter’s, Ryan Sidebottom had been getting wickets for England – sixteen of them against the West Indies and another eight against India. Only a month before the Wisden dinner, he’d taken a hat-trick against New Zealand.

  I’d come across Ryan when I was a nipper. He’s over 6 foot 3 tall, and so I craned my neck upwards towards someone whom I remember looked then much the same way that he looks now – that thick curly hair like a Cavalier’s from the age of Charles I. When I first met him, Ryan was still to win the first Championship of his career, which he did in 2001 as part of a Yorkshire side that included Michael Vaughan and Darren Lehmann. My mum knew him because my dad and his father Arnie played together. The names Bairstow and Sidebottom appeared on the Yorkshire scorecard from 1973 until my dad’s retirement in 1990. Arnie was one of my dad’s best friends on the field and off it. He was an inexhaustible, loyal and reliable bowler who put Yorkshire before himself. My dad said Arnie had ‘a heart the size of a mountain’ and ‘made my job simpler’. Spring is said to arrive only with the call of the first cuckoo. In Yorkshire, the cricket season only arrived when spectators – and a good part of the West Riding – heard my dad shout: ‘Come on Arn,’ urging his mate to get a wicket as he took the new ball.

  I went to the Wisden dinner rather self-consciously, wearing a jacket that was slightly too baggy for me and a bow tie that felt uncomfortable. My mum saw Ryan and she took me over to say hello. He didn’t recognise me or remember our first meeting. We didn’t tell him I’d won the Young Cricketer of the Year Award, and he assumed that someone had invited us as a treat. By then he’d moved to Nottinghamshire from Headingley and seemed set to stay there. But, in 2011, he walked back into our dressing room again. And, though nearly 11 years separates us, we became so close that Ryan – we call him ‘Sid’ – made me godfather to his son, Darley.

  No fiction writer would dare invent such a plot. It would have been too neat, too schmaltzy; and no one, including me, would ever have believed it.

  CHAPTER 4

  KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID

  No one saw me cry over my dad’s death for almost nine years. I hid what I felt, bottling up my emotions so tightly that almost nothing of them leaked out. And then, one August evening on holiday in Cornwall, I let go at last.

  I was a month away from my 17th birthday. I was on a lads’ jolly to Newquay, where we’d gone under the pretext of learning to surf, which made the week more palatable to our parents. We fought the sea, which beat us daily, but we didn’t care because what had really brought us there were the bars and the nightlife. It was bliss: away from home; pretending to be an adult; celebrating the fact that exams were over; brimming with optimism about university – I’d enrolled at Leeds Met – and also hopeful of a long career in cricket to come.

  One night we decided to have a barbecue on the town’s Great Western beach, where the coves offer seclusion and the waves of the bay are like froth. We ran into another group, blokes of around our own age and a bit older who came from Wales. We were sitting on the sand, swapping stories, when someone began asking each of us what our dad did for a living. A few others had already replied before my turn came, all eyes swivelling towards me. I decided to keep my story as simple as possible. There’d be no mention that he’d been a cricketer; that would only have led to another dozen questions. There’d be no mention of how he died either; that could have led anywhere.

  ‘He passed away a while ago,’ I said matter-of-factly, believing the conversation would end there because decorum and decency demanded it. There was a short, slightly uncomfortable silence – nothing I hadn’t experienced before – until the lad who had asked the question began staring intently back at me. His mouth slowly widened into a smirk, and then I heard a low laugh come out of him, as if death was hilarious – and that the one I’d just revealed to him was somehow especially funny. He continued laughing as I sat there, not knowing at first what to say or how to respond. Scarcely able to credit that anyone could be so insensitive, so brutally callous, I got up and marched off, wanting to get as far away as I could from him. I’d gone about 200 yards when I broke down.

  My best and oldest friend is Gareth Drabble. We met as soon as I went to St Olave’s, which is the preparatory school for St Peter’s. He was captain of the cricket team, which is peculiar in retrospect because he prefers rugby and comes to a Test match or a one-day international only when I play in them. We seldom even talk about cricket. Gareth saw me take off and followed closely behind. I headed for a narrow pathway that ran away from the beach. For almost an hour we sat alone on a low stone wall. I shook. I raged. I cried uncontrollably … until, finally, there was nothing left in me. Gareth had heard me deal with the odd remark or question about my dad before. He’d never seen me like this.

  It was like opening a valve; and because everything came out, so everything came back in a flash to me too. My dad’s death. The aftershock of his loss. Our struggle to comprehend it. Our struggle to cope. Even the fact that I’d never behaved in such a way before. There’d been sly comments in the past, the sort of snarky playground stuff that someone, who wants to bruise you without always understanding why, uses to provoke simply because he can and mainly to attract attention to himself. I’d always been able to handle it. This was different. I don’t know why. Perhaps because nothing was said, but only implied, which made things worse. Or perhaps because, after so long, it was finally time for me to let go, releasing what I’d consciously suppressed. The lad on the beach proved to be the catalyst for something that would have eventually happened anyway – at some other stage and in some other spot. It was an experience I had to go through.

  I confided the story to someone recently. At the end of it I said that I felt I’d embarrassed myself that day. ‘No, you didn’t,’ he said, ‘but you should have socked that guy in the mouth.’

  Instead, I came home from Cornwall and put it behind me, determined to follow my dad into Yorkshire cricket, which is what he would have wanted.

  It’s hard to know when the love of something begins absolutely. Because of my dad, and also because cricket and cricketers were almost ever-present as I grew up, I’m sure the game was ingrained in me well before I even realised it. But I think I understood the importance of cricket – and also how important it would become in my life – in an unlikely place, which was far from our home. Bray is in Berkshire. It stands on a bend of the River Thames, and the cricket ground – home to Maidenhead and Bray – is close enough to the water to put a heaving six into it if you have the timing and the muscle.

  Every year Michael Parkinson would invite my dad to play in his cricket festival. Parky has known everyone since the 1970s, when even the A-list of Hollywood’s Golden Age walked down the staircase of a BBC studio and on to his talk show. I wasn’t initially aware of Parky’s own celebrity, so I barely recognised anyone else’s. To me, he was just another of my dad’s friends. The annual cricket matches he organised were a mix of showbiz
and sport. Once, when I was so young that I knew nothing of the birds and the bees, I handed the Countdown co-presenter Carol Vorderman a box, earnestly warning her not to forget to wear it before going out to bat. She accepted my advice politely.

  I recall Bray as a little paradise of blue remembered hills. I felt at home, fitting in like I’d been born there. We would go as a family, packing the car as though off on holiday, which is how it seemed to Becky and me. It was as exciting as Christmas day. The small ground, which is overlooked by a thirteenth-century church, was always dressed up for the occasion. There were white tents and striped deckchairs on the boundary, a flag and some coloured bunting around the pavilion and a brass band. It was a quintessentially English scene in high summer. Any artist, painting what was in front of his eyes, could have captured all the rich characteristics of village cricket. I remember going into the dressing rooms for the first time and sitting between heaps of kit that were scattered everywhere and breathing in the aroma of liniment and linseed oil, old wood and smoke and dust. I couldn’t wait to grow up and be a part of it properly.

  I’ll always be grateful to Parky, who continued to invite the family to Bray even after my dad died. He didn’t mind either when, aged ten, I gave him a bit of a rollicking. I’d been given my chance to play at last. I went into bat at number nine, made a decent enough score and then my partner got out. With the brashness of youth, I let Parky know in no uncertain terms that he’d made a mistake. He ought to have put me higher up the order, I said.

  If Bray was the start, still remembered with a sparkling immediacy, then so much more gets folded around it in my memory. In response to charity matches that offered the chance to get together again with his pals – some retired, others still playing – my dad had a ‘have bat and gloves, will travel’ kind of attitude. At weekends we frequently saw glorious parts of the country, the sort of cricket grounds, similar to Bray’s, that were pretty enough to illustrate calendars. My dad also occasionally coached at Ampleforth College, which sits in a North Yorkshire valley amid woods and lakes. It looks like a stately home. The driveway to the main campus snakes so far from the main road that the journey along it seems never-ending.