A Clear Blue Sky: A remarkable memoir about family, loss and the will to overcome

Between deliveries I’ve occasionally drifted out of my crease and patted down or brushed away some imaginary speck of dirt simply because I wanted something to do, something to keep me busy and alert. Or I’ve occupied myself in other ways: twirling my bat in my hand, tugging at my shirt and readjusting my helmet. These small tics are displacement, each designed to banish the sort of thoughts that can gremlin the mind. When you’re so close to a hundred, it’s easy to lose concentration. Your mind can go slack, wandering off abstractedly. Then the hard, sweaty graft that’s gone before is undone in a nanosecond. So I have to stay in the moment. I mustn’t get ahead of myself. I can’t afford to think about the relief I’ll feel when this is over and gone, already part of my statistical record. I can’t afford to think about how handsome my name, illuminated on the scoreboard in big capital letters, will look with three figures beside it. And I can’t afford to think about what the century will mean, professionally as well as personally. Most of all, I mustn’t dwell on how I will feel or how I will celebrate in the middle. Or how my mum Janet and my sister Becky, who are sitting near the pavilion, will feel and celebrate too. Or how proud I will make them – this week of all weeks.

In two days’ time it will be the family’s black anniversary: the date of my dad’s death in 1998. How quickly that always seems to come around. We mark it only among ourselves, and we do so very quietly, remembering the best of him rather than the tragedy of that day. New Year creeps up like a forewarning, and we get ourselves ready for the anniversary in our different ways. They say that for sorrow there is no remedy except time. Every turn of the calendar puts more distance between us and the raw pain of the event, but even a couple of decades on it scarcely lessens the degree of it. A stab of that pain always comes back.

When my dad died, taking his own life, I was eight years old. Becky, who everyone knows as Boo, was seven. My mum had cancer, the first of two bouts of the disease that she’s fought and beaten. In that dark time – the worst imaginable – the three of us held tight to one another like survivors of a shipwreck. It was our only way to get through it. Our house, like our lives, seemed bare and empty and quiet, and our grief seemed inconsolable. We were hollowed out. But we had each other then – and we have each other still – and slowly we learnt to live without him. We came to accept his death, even though we don’t understand it now any more than we did then.

Everyone believes their family is special. Mine just is. It isn’t only about love. It’s also about understanding and trust, support and the empathy between us. Because of what happened, and the way in which we coped with it, the three of us are as close as it’s possible to be, our bond unbreakable.

I got a lot more genetically from my dad than my red hair. I got his eye for a ball. Early on I think he realised it or at least suspected that I could be a prodigy of sorts. Were he alive, or if he could come back to us for just one day – and how many occasions have I thought about that scenario? – I don’t think he’d be too surprised to discover that I’m playing for Yorkshire and England. I bet he’d just give a nod and a knowing smile and say he expected nothing less from me.

When I was the smallest of small boys, a mere lick of a thing, I liked to play pool. My dad and I were once in a pub in North Yorkshire, one of those olde worlde places with low black beams and horse brasses. He had his pint. I had my apple juice. I couldn’t have been more than six years old, possibly even a little younger. The two of us were at the table when a cycling club came in, wanting to play too. I have an inkling that there were five of them. My dad bet – a fiver, I think – that I could take on and whip the lot of them single-handed. The cyclists couldn’t have been more incredulous if my dad had claimed to own a dog that could sing and dance. I was so short that I had to stand on a stool to make a shot. They looked at him as though he’d already drunk several beers too many. They looked at me – a wide-eyed, freckled lad – and accepted the wager without hesitation, certain of some easy cash. I took each of them to the cleaners, much to their mounting stupefaction and my dad’s immense satisfaction. I know he wouldn’t have made the bet if he hadn’t thought I would win it; losing would have embarrassed both of us. So he must have thought his sporting streak was in me too.

If only I could ask him …

He taught me how to hold a cricket bat. ‘Pick it up like an axe,’ he’d say. ‘Grip it as though you’re about to chop wood.’ In knockabout games in our back garden, and especially on beaches as far flung as Barbados and Scarborough, he’d encourage me to give the ball a good tonk for the sheer joy of it. I’d swing my spindle-thin arms at a delivery, trying to belt a huge six to impress him. I’d use one of his old bats – a V500 Slazenger – which he’d sawn down to my size. I kept that bat close to me, almost sleeping with it.

(© Author’s collection)

I’d tag along wherever he coached or turned out in charity matches, his first-class career already over by then. No question about it: my relationship with cricket began with my dad – and also because of him.

A lot of people, especially those who, like him, belong to the generation that grew up in the 1960s, still see me first and foremost as the son of my father. They always will, I guess. That’s because the man who was plain Dad to me, a pal to be trailed after everywhere, was to everyone else David Bairstow, the Yorkshire cricket legend: a wicketkeeper and, for a while, captain emblematic of the county’s traditions and passion for the game. Such public recognition meant there was no privacy in death for him, and consequently no privacy for us, either. Instead, there were front-page headlines, inky black and two inches high, a swarm of reporters and photographers standing at our gate, and television cameras at both his funeral and his memorial service.

Given the amount of publicity his death attracted, and bearing in mind the years that have passed, what I’m about to say seems impossible to believe but is perfectly true. Complete strangers, clearly fervent admirers with fond memories to share, will often come up and say to me casually, ‘So how’s your dad, then?’ Some will launch into an anecdote about him and finish it before I have the chance to tell them that he died a while back (I don’t usually elaborate about the details unless asked). Afterwards, they’ll mumble ‘sorry’ and look a little self-conscious, as if not knowing is something to be ashamed about, which emphatically it isn’t. Not for me. In reply I’ll say ‘no problem’ and sincerely mean it because my dad had clearly touched their lives, even if only fleetingly, and left them a memory cherishable enough to speak out loud. It’s proof, if I needed more of it, of how much he was admired.

How I wish he’d known that …

Others – and this may be even harder to believe – get confused and call me ‘David’, as though my dad’s career at Headingley, which properly started in 1970, and my own, which began there almost four decades later, are somehow one and the same. I’ve got used to this. I’ve been answering questions about my dad ever since I learnt to talk. When your surname is Bairstow and you play in Yorkshire at any level, it’s impossible to be anonymous – especially with a conspicuous mop of red hair.

At first my mum was a little wary about my ambition to become a cricketer. She was concerned in a protective way about the comparisons that she knew would be made straight away between my dad and me. About how I approached and played the game. About my character and his own. About how much I walked and spoke like him too. She worried that there’d be too much hassle and too much pressure placed on me because of it, but she kept all that to herself and never – not once – tried to steer me down a different path.

Since I knew comparisons were unavoidable, I prepared myself for them, even for the grumbling I expected to overhear at some point, such as ‘he’s not a patch on his old man, is he?’ or ‘his dad would have caught that’ or ‘his dad would have knocked that ball into next week’. My mum, who is so level-headed, has always said that ‘you can only be yourself … there’s no point in trying to be anything else’, a slice of practical philosophy that I’ve carried around with me. I’ve drawn so much strength from what she says and the example she constantly sets. ‘Extraordinary’ is too feebly weak a word to fully do her justice. I could say she’s one in a million, but the truth is that she’s rarer even than that – much rarer, in fact.

We live our lives forwards, but only understand them backwards. Everything usually takes a firm shape and makes sense only in retrospect. There are still stages in life when you gaze around and say to yourself: How did I get here? Today at Newland’s, on the brink of this hundred, is one of them for me. But the difference is I know.

I know how I jumped from school to club and then from club to Yorkshire’s academy. I know how I got from the second XI into the County Championship side. And I know how I became an England player.

I’ve always tried to honour my dad and what he did for Yorkshire, which for him frequently meant putting the county’s cause before his own. But my late boyhood, my early teens and then my adolescence were full of net sessions and practice drills he never witnessed, ups and downs he never knew about and matches he never saw. My mum was always there. So was Becky. Often, so were my maternal grandpa Colin, who took on the role of surrogate dad as well as his grandparent duties, and my grandma Joan. My grandpa died only seven months ago. I’m still grieving for him; something in me always will. We travelled en bloc, inseparable as a family. Reflecting on it all now, I know categorically that I wouldn’t have come close to a career in cricket without them. In particular I’ve got to where I am because of my mum and Becky. That’s why everything I’ve ever strived for – and everything I’ve achieved – has been done for them. I’ve wanted to look after them. I’ve wanted to repay them for their backing, their constant belief, even their gentle but persistent nagging of me sometimes.

Now I want to score this century for them too.

If I get it, there’ll be tears shed later on from each of us. We’ll look at one another, and shared memories of the past will make words superfluous.

Just one more run …

There’d be an odd irony about this century, a couple of small details that will make it seem as though everything about it was somehow preordained.

Perhaps so.

Batting is a tightrope walk, and it’s always the precarious next step that bothers you. At the crease, you’re secure only in the ball you’ve just faced. It’s gone and done with, and can’t get you out. But however well you’ve coped with it – you’ve picked the spin or read the late swing, you’ve pulled the bat away from something steeply rising or you’ve brilliantly clobbered a delivery on the up through extra cover – is then irrelevant. What matters is only the battle of the next ball. The nearer you get to a milestone score, especially a hundred, the more you can struggle. You have to handle the sense of anticipation in the crowd and also the expectation you begin to heap on yourself. The impulse to rush towards your hundred is perfectly natural and very human. There’s a desire to get there quickly, so the accomplishment is already behind you. You can end up doing something rash. Or you can find the process debilitating and a torture. Some batsmen call it The Demon on Your Shoulder. Others call it The Joker or The Grudge. You suffer a kind of paralysis because of it. I know that from experience.

I’ve been in the 90s once before for England. That was against South Africa too; at Lord’s, of all places, where to appear on the honours board is a kind of cricketing ennoblement. It was only my fourth Test. I’d made just 38 runs from four innings in the series against the West Indies at the start of the same summer. I was out of the side for the beginning of the series against South Africa to no one’s surprise – including my own, really.

You probably won’t remember why I found myself unexpectedly at Lord’s, facing a pace attack of Morne Morkel, Vernon Philander and Dale Steyn. It was because of what Wisden euphemistically called ‘textual impropriety’. Kevin Pietersen was dropped after allegations that he’d sent disparaging text messages about Andrew Strauss to some of the South African side during the Test at Headingley. It took some guts to axe KP; he’d scored a blazing 149 there, every stroke emphasising sublime, savage power. It also took some guts to bring me in as his replacement so quickly after I’d been dropped. The response, from commentators and critics alike, hovered between the sceptical and the scathing.

Against the West Indies, I’d had problems handling the short ball. The media saw me as a lame duck. The consensus was that the speed of Morkel, Philander and Steyn – fiercer collectively than anything I’d come across before – would wreck me. I’d be sliced and diced every which way, they said. My technique was microscopically picked apart. My temperament was picked apart too, as though I was on a psychiatrist’s couch. The chief complaints against me – in no particular order – were:

That I wouldn’t cope with the bouncer.

That I wouldn’t cope with the occasion.

That I wouldn’t cope, full stop.

Morkel, it was prophesied, would be my bête noire. He’s nearly six-foot-six tall and he has such long arms. If he held them outstretched, he’d present a passable imitation of The Angel of the North. This means every delivery comes at you like something falling off a church steeple. Most batsmen wouldn’t relish facing him if he had a Granny Smith in his hand, let alone a shiny, hard-seamed Duke.

I’d got to know and like Morkel when he ever-so-briefly played for Yorkshire at the beginning of the 2008 season. My mum is the club’s Cricket Administrator and she liaises with the players, making sure those from overseas settle in. She cooked dinner for Morkel at our home and took care of him. He calls her ‘my Yorkshire mum’. Without the ball in his hand he’s a kindly, gentle man. With it, he’s more than a nuisance. Even in the nets, off a shortened run, he was fast enough to make most of his contemporaries look merely ‘nippy’.

In the swirl of controversy around KP, the build-up to the Test became weirdly askew; it was all about the man who wasn’t there. The furious saga about his mobile phone, what was or wasn’t said on it and whether the words constituted innocuous ‘banter’ or not, became a pitched battle. The claims and counter-claims and the accusations and denials swallowed up acres of newsprint and hours of TV, and provoked a blizzard of social-media comment, a lot of it X-rated. I was portrayed as an unfortunate sap, obliged to take on the impossible job of replacing one of the best batsmen on God’s earth. It was assumed I’d turn up, barely trouble the scorers and seldom be heard of again. Since I was expected to fail, the pressure on me wasn’t anything like the pressure on Strauss – about to play his hundredth and last Test – and England’s coach, Andy Flower, both of whom had demonstrated such a fabulous faith in my abilities, an act for which I’ll be eternally thankful. If I cocked up, the flak would be flying at them first and me second.

That Test, the final of the series, wasn’t just about bragging rights and kudos either. We were one down and attempting to cling on to our status as the top Test nation. But, when I came in, we were 54 for four and staring calamity in the face. Morkel was ripping it in at almost 90 miles an hour. He welcomed me with a short leg and a leg gully, which was hardly a code in need of cracking about the length and line of his attack. I’d prepared for it. I’d been in the nets, where our batting coaches, Graham Gooch and Graham Thorpe, had for hours flung short balls at me from a dog stick. I also wore for the first time cricket’s equivalent of a bullet-proof vest – a chest pad.

(© Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images)

The third ball Morkel bowled was six inches short of a length and jumped at me like fat spitting from a pan. I bent down a little and yanked my head out of its flight-path. There were a few more like this – or of a similar variety, some spearing towards my ribcage – before he switched to around the wicket, tilting the angle and making it sharper. When you’re being peppered like this, you’re always waiting for the inevitable – the yorker that’s fast enough to turn your toes to pulp or send a stump cartwheeling. It came, and I was ready for it. I got into position and clipped the thing away for four, which was a turning point psychologically. I’d stood up to Morkel, and now he – along with Steyn and Philander – realised I wasn’t a soft touch. I eased to 50 without much bother. I eased to 90 in the same way. I imagine that whoever’s responsible for putting the names on that oak honours’ board in the Lord’s dressing room was preparing to stencil my own there. Then I got stuck, as if in quicksand. I inexplicably couldn’t get the ball away.

After every innings you replay the chances you missed: the stray delivery on your pads that you should have flicked to the boundary; the half-volley that you curse yourself for mishitting; the short ball you didn’t punish. In 40 minutes, I made only one run. On 95, I failed to score for 14 balls. I had about four chances to regain my authority and my momentum and claim that century. I wasn’t able to take any of them. Finally, out of desperation, I spotted what I thought was the perfect opportunity to on-drive Morkel to the fence. So I went for it. Rather than the romantic sound of willow on leather, I heard the terrible rattle of leather on ash as the bails went for a little dance. I’d played around the delivery.

The ovation I got for an innings-saving score – and then for a 41-ball fifty when batting again – was wonderful music, but not entirely consoling. Nor were the complimentary critiques of each knock. My dad was mentioned. I’d done him proud, they said. I’d evoked his spirit and shown the guts and gusto that, time and again, had hallmarked his own cricket. But we lost the Test, lost the series, lost our number one ranking and Strauss retired as a consequence. Someone once said that the most beautiful rebuke you can ever utter is ‘I told you so’. My performance would have allowed me to use it, but I didn’t. I was too busy kicking myself rotten for not getting the hundred. That was nearly four years ago, which is a lifetime in sport, a profession where most careers constitute not much more than a brief flash of time compared with the life that comes after them.

But Lord’s is only one reason why it would be fitting to get my Test first century now, exacting a kind of revenge against South Africa in the process. On England’s tour here, exactly six years ago, I was a spectator. I sat in an executive box, staring down the line of the stumps. That day I let my eyes roll right across Newlands, one of the great theatres of cricket. It’s the sort of place where you’d gladly play every week purely for the picturesque sight of it. I gathered in every square foot of the ground, which was cast in hot sun and dark shadow. Two South Africans scored centuries in a game that was dramatically drawn in the last over of the last day: Jacques Kallis got one in the first innings; Graeme Smith got another in the second. Watching them in that Test, I quietly resolved – telling no one about it – to come back here and make a century too.

Just one more run …

I can see the executive box where my younger self sat, and I wonder who is sitting in it today. Whoever has the privilege will envy me the plumb position I’ve had during one of the best innings I’ve ever seen. When I came in, we were 223 for five, and Ben Stokes was on 24, just warming up. We ended the first day on 315: him on 74, me on 39. He’s now on double Nelson – 222 – and the two of us, the ginger twins, have taken the score on to 538. Talk about being in the groove. In the past two and a half hours he’s dismantled the South African attack nut and bolt. He’s striking the ball so hard that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it spontaneously combust. The way he’s seeing it, bigger than a party balloon, and the way he’s hitting it, each attacking stroke like a booming detonation, he could probably have reached his first century using one of the stumps. He’s walloped everything everywhere, and none of the bowlers is escaping punishment. No matter how they bowl to him, or where the ball lands, he seems to know what’s coming at him, as if he’s developed a sixth sense. It’s been a prolonged burst of clean, pyrotechnical hitting. The ball is travelling so far that South Africa might be better off posting a couple of fielders on Table Mountain.

Our partnership has been an unselfish one. I’ve known Stokesy for eleven and a half years, ever since we played against one another in an under-15 County Cup match at Sowerby, a ground ringed by tall heavy trees, plain houses and hills topped with a row of unlovely electric pylons. I was 15. He was a fortnight shy of his 14th birthday. Imagine if someone from the future had turned up then, tapped us both on the shoulder and said: ‘One day, lads, the two of you will swap this for Cape Town.’ We’d have dismissed the remark as insane. Stokesy’s dad was also a pro sportsman, a New Zealand rugby league international and then a coach in England. So he knows what it’s like to grow up with a name that gets recognised. He knows, too, that reaching this century for me will be about more than the landmark of the score itself; that the past as much as the present will be entwined within it.

In between overs we come together and touch gloves. Denis Compton, whose day was a few ice ages before my own, would apparently cheerfully ask his most frequent batting partners which club or bar the two of them might frequent later on that night. Or he’d tell them about his gallivanting exploits during the evening before. What Stokesy and I say to one another isn’t remotely as entertaining as that. None of our exchanges will make it into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations either. We offer nothing more than ‘well done, mate’ or ‘keep going’ or ‘you can do it’.

You have this dreamy image of reaching your first Test hundred with one of the showboat strokes – a ravishing drive through extra cover or something smacked along the ground straight past the bowler. But when you’re almost there, right on top of a ton, you’re grateful to get home any old how. Even the faintest of faint edges or something slightly streaky will do – an inside edge past leg stump and the wicketkeeper. Yes, I’d gladly take that.

I haven’t tried to prove I can match Stokesy shot for shot. A year or two ago it would have been different. I would have impetuously tried to keep pace, getting myself caught up in the whirl of things and wanting to demonstrate that I’m no slouch either when it comes to finding the boundary. But I’m a more measured and mature batsman than I used to be; a bit older and a lot wiser than the bloke who got into a tangle and let Morne Morkel get the better of him in 2012.

At lunch I was on 95, which threw up one of those strange coincidences. I know it won’t have gone unnoticed among the South Africans. Morkel in particular will have thought about Lord’s – and he’ll have known that I was thinking about it too. Because of that, I did something I wouldn’t normally do. In the dressing room I didn’t take off my pads or my box or my boots. I wanted, as much as I possibly could, to pretend the break wasn’t happening. In the hubbub I sat largely in silence, left alone as I waited for the clock to tick around and send me back out again. I knew Morkel would be waiting for me; that he’d be thrown the ball again as soon as the afternoon session began. So it proved. He bowled tightly, forcing me to play five of his first six deliveries – all of them dots.

Sometimes you hit a shot that makes you feel it’s going to be your day. It’s something fluid and naturally stylish, taking no effort. You do it not only instinctively but also unconsciously, and you understand immediately afterwards, as you’re still watching the ball sail away from you, that today everything is well-oiled and working solidly. The bat is a physical part of you. This happened to me after I went past fifty. It was an on drive against Morkel. The ball was fullish, not too dissimilar to the one that got me out at Lord’s. I waited for it, got my head over it and then thumped it past him. I felt in charge then, and I still feel in charge now.

Just one more run …

South Africa have taken off Morne Morkel and brought on Stiaan van Zyl, a batsman who can bowl. He’s a bits and pieces medium pacer, called on only occasionally. He’s less experienced in Tests than I am; he’s taken only four wickets in nine appearances before this one. That said, one of his victims was Virat Kohli. And another – in the previous Test at Durban – was me. In the second innings, I was on 79 and eyeing a century the way I am today. But I was running out of partners and went back into my crease to crash the living daylights out of an ordinary delivery. I miscalculated. I didn’t put enough juice into the shot and I holed out at long off, getting a rollicking for it later.