Just one more run …
I decide to search for and then post a photograph of the Test on Instagram. I want to mark the occasion, letting everyone know how much it meant and continues to mean. I trawl the internet and find an upright, loosely cropped picture that shows both Ben Stokes and me. The shot is plain, without much movement, let alone drama. You’d think one quick glance would be enough to take in everything it offers. There’s certainly no emotion in it – not even the merest flicker. Stokesy and I are walking together down a flight of stone steps. The low concrete supports of the pavilion are above us. There is a small knot of spectators leaning against a rail, the metal obscured by an advertising banner that you can’t quite read. One of the spectators is already applauding and another is holding up his phone, about to snatch a close-up, side-on portrait of me in which I won’t be smiling. I look rather sombre, like someone who’s been dispatched to deliver bad news, and Stokesy, only a pace behind me, is the same. His head is bowed. His expression, completely blank, gives nothing away. I am carrying my bat, but we’ve both left our helmets and gloves on the outfield, where the sun will dry away the sweat in them.
Without a caption beneath it, I doubt anyone who wasn’t there will look at either the background or our faces and identify the moment without a good deal of thought first. They won’t necessarily register either what Stokesy and I have done or are about to do. You would only know that this is a hot afternoon somewhere because there are heavy, dwarf shadows, so the sun is clearly full and can’t have travelled far from its noonday peak.
The photograph, taken at lunch on the second day at Newlands, reminds me of the morning session just gone – a blistering show of 196 runs in 25 overs – and what’s to come. Not only in a couple of hours, but also for the rest of that South African tour, and then the summer and winter ahead. Hindsight infuses it with a personal significance that wouldn’t otherwise be there. It captures me on the brink of something. I stare at it knowing what happens next. The message I post alongside the photograph is uncomplicated:
‘A year ago today. A morning and a day I’ll never forget!’
(© Julian Finney/Getty Images)
I don’t exaggerate. I will never forget it. I will never forget the delivery from Stiaan van Zyl and the shot I played to it. I will never forget the din of the ovation as the ball scuttled off to the boundary. I will never forget hearing afterwards how, for ten minutes while that final run continued to elude me, my mum and Becky barely moved, barely spoke and barely even breathed in their seats. At the end of the day’s play, they were interviewed on Test Match Special, a collector’s item because neither of them rarely discusses anything publicly, preferring to remain in the background. My mum was asked about how I’d looked skywards for an age after reaching my century, as though searching for a sign in it. She said the gesture was for my grandpa as well as my dad, which would have constituted breaking news to anyone who isn’t a friend or part of our family.
My grandpa’s death is so recent that I find it difficult to talk about him. It hurts too much. I can talk about my dad’s at last only because such a great span of time has passed. I’ve learnt to accept his suicide even though a small part of me is still working out explanations for it – something minor that was missed or overlooked. Perhaps I always will.
In two days’ time it’ll be the anniversary of my dad’s death. Again.
Of course, he’s never far from my thoughts no matter where I am or what I’m doing. A place, a game, an incident somewhere or an unexpected word from someone can trigger a memory, which then triggers another, and suddenly I’m thinking about him, if only for a minute or two. But for this book I’ve been going over the last 20 years in the way you might slowly turn the pages of a family album, finding in it photos, cuttings and mementos that you’d either half-forgotten or didn’t know you had. I’ve been putting the past and my reactions to it in order, I suppose, and I’ve also been giving them some shape. Sorting out the way things were. Dwelling on what I’ve made of them. Working out the life lessons. Wondering whether sharing what I’ve experienced can help or inspire or simply be a small comfort to anyone else. I hope it will be.
I’ve learnt – and this pleases me – that my dad’s cricketing life and my own will always be intertwined, each illuminating the other, even though I will finish far behind the number of appearances he made for Yorkshire and also his length of service at Headingley. I’ve learnt to speak about him in the past tense even though he’s preserved in my memory exactly as he used to be to me: hale and hearty and smiling. I’ve learnt that it’s possible to recover – and prosper – from awful loss even though you go on missing and loving those who have gone. I’ve learnt how adversity and suffering can build character and I know that you can become stronger in some of the broken places because of it – even though I wouldn’t prescribe the experience to anyone.
I was only ever briefly angry with my dad for leaving us.
It happened shortly after his death, when things were at their darkest and the grief in me was raw and at its worst. The feeling came and went again, wiped away because I realised he loved us, and I realised, too, how desperate he must have been to make the choice he did. But I’ve never had to forgive my dad because I’ve never believed there was anything to forgive him for in the first place.
I do, nevertheless, think about what my dad’s death denied us. All the matches, as an honoured guest, that he could have watched me play in. All the birthday parties, all the holidays and all the Christmases he’s missed with my mum and Becky and me. All the family photos in which he doesn’t appear. I learnt, as I grew older, that my dad wondered how different his life would have been if he’d met my mum sooner. In the same way I’ve thought about the times the two of us could have shared, the stories he could have told me and the advice he could have given. I never got to buy him a pint. He never got to buy me one. At least I can still recall his voice, the acoustic accompaniment to some of the memories I have of him.
As a family we have small keepsakes of him too. There’s the round-faced watch he wore, a combination of gold and silver. There’s a piece of coral from the Caribbean Sea, which he attached to a gold link chain that he almost never took off. And I have something of him that belongs only to me. It’s his nickname. When I came into the Yorkshire academy I was christened Bluey almost immediately. You never get to choose your nickname and you’re always stuck with whatever you’ve been given once it becomes established. At first I recoiled a little uneasily from it. I’d heard so many people call my dad Bluey. Even those who knew him only by reputation would refer to him that way, as though he was their pal. Bluey was his; it seemed to me that the copyright on the nickname belonged solely to him. I didn’t think I had any right to it. Absurd as this may sound, I also felt in the beginning as though I needed his permission to use it.
Now I think my dad would be chuffed to find out that the small boy he knew is Bluey too.
I’ve been thinking about my dad’s relationship with Yorkshire.
I’ve read – and had it said to me – that the club treated him shabbily before he finally left them and then again after he’d gone. There was a reason for that, I think. He’d been so candid and so public about his criticism of the internal politics there, which he loathed. ‘Committees don’t win cricket matches,’ he’d say. ‘They just make it harder for the players.’ My dad knew he was right, but being proved so never offered cast-iron protection against the agendas and self-interest of others. He had plenty of friends at Yorkshire, but not enough of them were in high places to offer practical as well as moral support.
I have to stress, very strongly, that the Yorkshire of now is far different from the Yorkshire of then. Like my dad, I can’t imagine wanting to play for anyone else. I am a Yorkshireman, and I care about Yorkshire as much as he did. Today there’s an established policy of inviting back former players, making them feel that Headingley is still home. What every one of them achieved for the county is respect
ed and counts for something. From what I can surmise, based on the evidence of what happened to my dad and also to a few others, this wasn’t necessarily the case a quarter of a century ago.
For the last five years of his life my dad seldom stepped back into Headingley. He felt effectively banished from it shortly after his retirement. The schism that opened up between him and the county was emphasised when my half-brother Andrew, making his debut for Derbyshire, faced Yorkshire at Chesterfield. We went as a family. My dad put on a flat cap and watched from behind a tree in an attempt not to be noticed. But he wouldn’t go near the Yorkshire dressing room, telling my uncle Ted: ‘If they don’t want me, I don’t want to be there.’
The event that precipitated this was a lunch held in the red-brick building that was once the Headingley pavilion. Two things happened during it, each connected to the other and both petty and ridiculous. My dad declined to wear a name badge because he thought the thick pin would damage the lapel of his light suit. He also felt that everyone in the room would have a reasonably fair idea of his identity without it. You were supposed to ‘reserve’ a place by eventually dropping the badge on to the table. My dad, unaware of this, thought he’d already claimed his and my mum’s seats until he found someone else sitting in one of them. There followed a short round of musical chairs before he ended up on the balcony.
A day or so later Yorkshire sent my dad a letter, alleging that he’d been rude and abusive to an official. Only an apology would get him officially into Headingley again. Otherwise he was ‘no longer welcome there’. My dad felt he’d been unjustly wronged. He put his foot down on a point of principle and refused to move it. I don’t want to idealise him; I know he had his faults. But the idea that Yorkshire would write to him, rather than speak face to face, infuriated him.
When my dad spoke to someone, he always preferred to look them in the eye. Nor was he the sort of man to whisper his views behind a hand. If something was on his mind – especially a grievance or a passionate belief – he told you about it without necessarily calculating the full consequences first. He thought these could be smoothed out later on. He could give an ear-bashing to a player or a reporter, but everything would usually be forgiven and forgotten within 48 hours, the slate wiped scrupulously clean as far as he was concerned. Any player who incurred his displeasure would be told in the dressing room, and any reporter would often find my dad marching into a press box to debate a nuanced point. On one occasion he confronted a correspondent without noticing that another, merely an innocent bystander, was so scared of being struck by shrapnel from the ensuing rumpus that he cowed in a phone cubicle until the whole thing blew itself out. My dad was convinced that no grievance, no problem and certainly no difference of opinion couldn’t be solved if you sat down together and supped a pint or three until last orders was called.
So, while I’m aware that he wasn’t always as tactful as he might have been in private places, such as the dressing room or the press box, I also know he didn’t resort to salty exchanges during public suit-and-tie affairs, especially when women were present. After that Headingley function, he insisted that there was absolutely nothing to apologise for. My mum agreed with him. So an impasse began – and so an impasse persisted.
No one in life is immune from change, but his connection with Yorkshire cricket had elated and sustained my dad for so long that, while not playing for them was bad enough, being made unwelcome at Headingley proved crushing for him. He didn’t feel as though he could walk through the front gate anymore. He brooded over a possible ulterior motive behind the complaint made against him and the ultimatum accompanying it. Since he was thinking of putting himself forward for the committee, he saw the charge as fabricated: a convenient and none too elaborate smokescreen behind which he could be hustled out of the way. His anger intensified and his position became more entrenched because of it. I think he never quite got over the way Yorkshire treated him then.
Some will join the dots too predictably, connecting my dad’s death primarily to his estrangement from cricket. There’s even a theory that cricketers are more susceptible than most to melancholia, depression and suicide both during their careers and afterwards. The evidence offered in support includes the suicide of figures such as AE Stoddart, Albert Trott and Arthur Shrewsbury, who each shot themselves, and Harold Gimblett and RC Robertson-Glasgow, who both took overdoses. I don’t agree. As I see it, playing cricket doesn’t make you vulnerable to mental illness any more than I imagine other jobs do – from digging a ditch to driving a lorry or working nine to five in an office.
‘It’s a great life,’ my dad once said of Yorkshire cricket. I’m aware that without it, and the familiar rhythm and routines of the summer, he was restless and out of sorts in the beginning. But cricket wasn’t responsible for his death. In the end he was worried only about my mum’s cancer, how he would cope if she died and also the financial future of his business. There’s an awful irony about the latter. Only two weeks after his death, the company was asked to take on a big order that would have guaranteed a considerable income.
I wish he’d known that. I wish he’d been aware that there was the promise of so much more ahead for him.
My dad played his last game for Yorkshire in a place where he belonged: his beloved Scarborough. There were nearly 9,000 at North Marine Road to watch him in a 50-over Festival Trophy match against Essex. In early September sunshine, he was applauded all the way to the crease and then back to the pavilion after making 36 in a run-chase, the crowd’s allegiance with him for every shot, every familiar shout of ‘wait on’ or ‘running one’ or ‘not coming’. My mum was there to watch him. She was pregnant with Becky and she held me – then almost one year old – in her arms. When my dad’s innings was over, his career done, he doffed his cap towards all corners and gave a little bow each time, like a performer disappearing into the wings of a stage, the curtain swishing around him before it closes. In their obituary Wisden described him as ‘perhaps the only unequivocally popular man in Yorkshire’. It was certainly true on that day and on that ground.
After my dad died, there was only one place to scatter his ashes.
My mum and Uncle Ted took them to North Marine Road, where Scarborough Cricket Club’s memorial garden is a small patch of greenery not far from the pavilion and between two stands. A plaque, bearing in plain lettering his name and the dates of his birth and death, is affixed nearby. Every time I go there, I visit the spot before the main gates have opened or after the ground has emptied. I have what I call ‘a moment’ with him there. When my mum and Uncle Ted took the lid off the urn, letting the ashes run out, a rush of wind got up from nowhere. The ashes blew back towards them. ‘He wants to have the final word,’ Uncle Ted said.
Perhaps we should have expected that.
My dad’s memorial service had already been staged in Ripon Cathedral, the stone of its twin towers rising over the market town. The view across the Perpendicular nave, from the north aisle towards the south, is spectacular – the arches high-pointed, asymmetrical and Romanesque. More than 600 people were there, listening to the speeches, hearing the soft notes of the cathedral organ, remembering the past. It was here that my dad’s colleague Phil Carrick used the phrase that’s been borrowed often to describe him: ‘He wasn’t a great batsman. Maybe he wasn’t a great wicketkeeper. But he was a great cricketer.’
In diffused light, amid all the architectural beauty, Uncle Ted was the last to speak, a formal goodbye from his best friend, which we thought was most fitting.
Television cameras had filmed some of what had gone before, but the paraphernalia of outside broadcasting – arc lights, cables, sound equipment – was being packed away as Uncle Ted cleared his throat and arranged his notes. He was about to say of my dad: ‘If ever there was a greater character and friend, I have yet to meet him.’ But the words ‘David Leslie Bairstow’, the introduction to a farewell crammed full of their shared experiences, had barely left his lips when a crashing gust of wind
– far stronger than the one at Scarborough – battered the side of the building and brought with it a thick splattering of rain. The sudden rush of the wind rattled the stained-glass windows, almost shaking them out of their ancient frames, before swirling right through the big oak doors, as if flinging them apart, and then filling the whole cathedral. The wind blasted down the aisle and up towards the vaulting of the ceiling in a mighty whoosh that echoed afterwards. It was fleeting, coming and going in scarcely a minute but creating something that seemed extraordinary and freaky.
Uncle Ted had no option. He had to pause, waiting for it to pass. From the wooden lectern he looked down at my mum and at Becky and me. We were sitting in the front row, almost directly in front of him. Uncle Ted stared at my mum. Each had the same thought, flashing instantly into their mind. No other explanation seemed possible to them. My mum looked back at Uncle Ted, smiled and silently mouthed the words:
‘He’s here.’
In truth, of course, my dad’s always here. He’s here whenever and wherever I play because so many spectators look at me but also remember watching him. He’s here when he’s mentioned in relation to what I’ve done, or he’s recalled on the radio or on TV. He’s here again when, together as a family, we go over the quirky stories about him, told umpteen times before but which we’ll never tire of. He’s here when I meet one of his former teammates. He’s here – as large as he ever was – whenever someone I’ve never seen before approaches me and shares some nugget of news about him that I didn’t know. If you got out a map of any cricket-playing country in the world and jabbed the point of a compass into it at random, I’m sure you’d find at least several dozen blokes who considered him to be a friend. In Australia I got stopped by an ex-rugby-league pro, who presented me with one of my dad’s testimonial ties. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I think it’s about time this came back to you.’ He explained how he and my dad had met at Headingley one night and struck up a conversation that lasted until the wee small hours – and beyond. ‘Your dad,’ he said, ‘was a decent bloke.’
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