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

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.

My dad was caught in a landscape that, initially at least, wasn’t too dissimilar from the one that Bradford’s most celebrated writer, J.B. Priestley, wrote about so nostalgically in English Journey during the mid-1930s. The city was the product of nineteenth-century industrialism, the sooty factory chimneys a testament to it. The place was ‘determinedly Yorkshire’, said Priestley. He thought it ugly and choking and claustrophobic even before some of its Victorian splendour, colliding unfortunately with the wrecking ball and the bulldozers, was replaced with the brutal architecture of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The moors, however, weren’t far from my dad’s front door, and that was where he went looking for space.

In Marton cum Grafton, he found his own haven. He was an outdoors man and adored the countryside. He liked the open fields, the hedgerows and the dry-stone walls that stretched towards York in the south-east and Harrogate in the south-west. Our fairly modern, mostly red-brick house had its own paddock beyond a large, wide garden. He liked to stand at the bottom of it, looking over the grassy rise and dip of the hills, which pushed themselves into the far distance of the vale. Only a scattering of pitched roofs broke the horizon. He’d observe the birds and the wildlife, calling us whenever anything interesting ran or flew into view. At night, above us was an immense arc of stars.

The seasons changed right in front of us, spread across the fields. In the spring Becky and I would hitch a ride on the back of the hay cart to nearby woods where bluebells grew thickly. The summer meant watching matches played on the village cricket pitch, which had a squat pavilion and a whitewashed boundary. The autumn was rich with apples and conkers and rust-coloured leaves, crunching underfoot. And there was also the typically northern winter, the trees and shrubbery bare and the hard frosts making everything beautifully white. Strange as it may seem, my dad was incredibly fond of winter. He said he’d spent so much of his cricket career chasing the sun – abroad as well as in England – that the rain and gales and the skies as grey as pewter were refreshing for him. The more stormy the day, the more he wanted to get out into it. The wind could crack its cheeks ferociously, the rain could chuck down in torrents, but he’d still pull on a heavy coat and his Wellington boots and go for a walk. I know that what Marton cum Grafton gave us was a tranquil way of living next to the simplicity of nature. I thought of it as seemingly without end.

Delving into your childhood can be rather like walking through drifting fog. That fog is thick enough to obscure some things from you – you can’t bring them back no matter how hard you try – but thin enough in parts to reveal others so vividly that they return in memory’s equivalent of 4-D. So there’s much I can remember about my dad then, and all of it is a comfort to me now.

I remember how much he loved our two dogs, which were Rhodesian ridgebacks. I have no idea – not even my mum does – about why he chose a breed that weighed six-and-a-half stone and can grow at a rate that makes a Shetland pony look the size of a house cat. They were not the sort of dogs you could feed on one tin of Pedigree Chum and a bowl of biscuits. They devoured the meat my dad brought back in industrial qualities from the butcher, and especially the delicacy of pig trotters, a dog’s caviar. The dogs looked fearsome, but were actually gentle souls (though, I admit, our postman may not have seen them as such). One of them, called Kruger, became my dog. There’s a photograph of me as a baby curled up beside him on the floor and, as I grew older, he’d sleep at the end of my bed, a guard on patrol against night-time monsters. My dad played endlessly with the dogs, who would bound towards him as soon as he came home, servants of the master of the house. He only had to look at the dogs, or give the briefest command, for them to obey him.

I remember how much he liked to tease my mum. He once brought home two huge trout with the kind of bright-black saucer eyes that seemed to follow you everywhere. He put the trout, tail first, into the freezer and packed ice around their bodies so that only the head poked out. He knew my mum would be next to open the freezer, discovering the trout staring at her, as if about to lunge at her like a freshwater Jaws. She shrieked the place down … and I don’t think she’s looked at a trout since.

I remember how he liked to be a raconteur, a tale for every audience, and the focus of whatever was going on around him. Especially so if the talk was about cricket. He once nailed Neil Fairbrother’s ‘coffin’ – the term cricketers use for the big rectangular case that holds most of their kit – to the dressing-room floor. Popeye, with bulging muscles and a dozen cans of spinach, couldn’t have moved it afterwards. Nor did he mind telling stories against himself. Bruce French was Nottinghamshire’s wicketkeeper during the years when two Championships went there. He was part of the Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee-inspired team that turned Trent Bridge into a grassy fortress, the pitch sometimes so green that it was almost indistinguishable from the outfield. On that sort of surface – and with their sort of pace and skill – Rice and Hadlee regularly found the outside edge. So scorecards almost always featured the line ‘caught French’ and bowled either one of them. In a career lasting 20 years, overlapping with my dad’s, he claimed over 800 first-class catches, 100 stumpings and played in 16 Tests. Before one match against Yorkshire, Frenchy sneaked a six-foot boa constrictor into the ground. The snake, belonging to his son, got draped first over the metal pegs where he got changed, slithering slowly from one to the next. The boa had a skin that was brown and yellow and green. It had a body as thick as a toddler’s arm and a darting tongue that oscillated from its thin mouth. At the close of play my dad was promised that an epic surprise awaited him in the Notts dressing room. Rather too trustingly, he agreed to be blindfolded. He was led in, the walk taking place in near-silence. Frenchy took the boa in his arms and stealthily held the head of it exactly level with my dad’s eyes. Then his blindfold was whipped off. My dad, so I’m told, became paler than his whites and recoiled, instantly taking two paces backwards. He thought Frenchy was about to throw the boa around his neck.

I remember how much he loved our barbecues and also being in charge of them as ‘head chef’. He had a theory that meat would taste better if you lightly garnished it with beer. He had stubby cans of it, and he’d give one of them to me. He’d then pick me up, like a roll of carpet, and hold me over the grill. I’d yank off the ring pull with my index finger – my small thumb wasn’t strong enough – and then send a spray of alcohol over the steaks, satisfied at the end with a dad-and-son job well done.

I remember how we used to light a fire together, scrunching up paper and fetching the wood, chopped from our own log pile. We’d watch the start of the blaze – the paper turning brown and curling, the wood slowly charring, the first whiff of the smoke and then a spark and a spit and a fabulous burst of flame.

I remember how much he liked a good pub, and the companionship he found there. It may seem odd to say this – though it became perfectly normal to me – but my dad and I spent a lot of time together in pubs.

I remember the pride he took in his vegetable patch, planting it and then prodding it as though the beans and carrots and potatoes it produced were set for a Royal Horticultural Society show.

I remember the mole traps he’d carefully lay across the lawn. I’d trail behind to check each one.

I remember sledging with him down a steep slope, climbing on to his back and clinging on, my arms around his neck. And I remember how the sledge once broke, and we fell into the deep, wet snow. As a substitute, we used an empty fertiliser bag, which whooshed along faster than the sledge had ever done.

I remember the way, if I was caught misbehaving, that one of his hands would appear as though from nowhere, and flick my ear in rebuke.

I remember the way he liked to walk around in bare feet – which is why I do that too – because, he argued, it ‘toughens the soles’.

I also remember him consumed in moments of solitary thought, far away and somewhere else, the extrovert in him at rest. We had a wooden veranda on the back of the house, and sometimes – especially when it rained – he liked to put on his towelling dressing gown, brew himself a mug of tea and sit in a high-backed chair. He’d do nothing but look across the lawn in silence, listening to the steady thrum of the rain on the roof. Sometimes he’d still be there as the fields gradually disappeared into the darkness.

In recalling my dad there, I can actually see him too. He’s a moving image across my mind, as surely as if I’d filmed him. The years fall away. He and I are back in Marton cum Grafton again.

The day of my dad’s funeral at St Andrew’s Church in Aldborough comes back to me for one reason above all others. Not because his teammates Phil Carrick, Geoff Cope, Arnie Sidebottom, Barrie Leadbeater and John Hampshire carried his coffin. Not because of the effusive tributes paid to him – particularly the ‘amazing Technicolor cricketer’ he’d been and the way he’d ‘proceeded to the wicket like an Elizabethan man o’ war’ whenever Yorkshire were in a hole and he arrived to dig them out of it. Not because the vicar, so prescient and ahead of his time, said that ‘perhaps’ the legacy of his death would be a better understanding of the help and support sportsmen need after retiring. And not because everyone agreed that the manner of my dad’s death should never be allowed to define his life; he’d been far too good as a player and far too splendid and irrepressible as a man for that to happen to him.

What I see are the crowds.

The hundreds who sat in the pews – friends, family, the dignitaries and top brass of Yorkshire beside the cricketers he’d played with and against or had coached later on. And the hundreds who waited outside, standing in sombre silence. These were faces my dad wouldn’t have recognised. These were names he’d never have known. They were the people who had come, a few from a fair distance away I’m sure, simply to pay their respects to him, a last thank you for the enjoyment he’d provided, for his commitment to Yorkshire.

No doubt I had met some of them, as I gradually became aware that my dad wasn’t the same as other dads; that he’d done something which set him apart. Wherever we went strangers always came up to ask him about catches he’d taken, runs he’d scored, the stellar names with whom he’d shared a pitch. Conversations would ensue about matches won and lost and the current state of Yorkshire cricket. This was fandom in the most pleasant sense, both in the enthusiasm towards him and also the respectful way in which he was approached in the first place. His hand would be shaken. His back would be slapped. He’d be offered a pint. Whoever made the offer would then plunge into a personal reminiscence, sharing the experience with the words: ‘I remember when …’ My dad always added some rich memory of his own to theirs, the past replayed and wallowed in contentedly. This was long before the age of the selfie – otherwise plenty of them would have been taken – but they’d go away pleased to have met him, taking with them his words as a memento instead.

The image I have of them makes me wonder whether things could have been different. Did my dad really know how much he was loved and admired by so many people? Did he know how much those people cared and would have been rooting for him – and willing to help him get better? If he could have seen it and had it demonstrated so obviously to him – the way it was demonstrated so obviously to me at his funeral – would he have committed suicide?

It’s another ‘what if?’ question, jostling in a long queue behind these: What if we’d arrived home half an hour earlier that night?

Would it have made a difference?

CHAPTER 2

I THINK YOU USED TO PLAY ALONGSIDE MY DAD (#ulink_9e4ec334-60ac-5d74-b206-708777cbc7e4)

Winston Churchill once said: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ It sums up our family’s approach to the aftermath of my dad’s death.

Becky and I passed a near-sleepless silent night, but next morning my mum got us up and made sure we washed and scrubbed ourselves, brushed our teeth and dressed for school in our plain navy and white uniforms. She insisted that we went there, though I don’t remember either of us protesting much at all. It was my mum’s way of bringing a touch of normality to our lives, pressing on without my dad because she knew, absolutely from the start, that we couldn’t do anything else except confront, square on, the grim situation we were all now in. Already our lives had begun to change convulsively – a process that would go on until almost everything familiar to us had been rearranged or was different somehow. Knowing this, my mum came to the conclusion – and I wholeheartedly believe she was right – that we shouldn’t put off doing anything today in the hope that it would somehow seem easier to do tomorrow. The fact that it wouldn’t was the only certainty we had then. We couldn’t think or wish away reality. We couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.

I realise now that you survive the death of someone you love simply by living, however wrong and unnatural it feels at first and however slowly it takes for your own life to find a meaningful shape again. The first task is accepting things, which is always the hardest. In sending Becky and me to school, my mum knew that the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, walking in a straight line and holding our heads up, would be a test for us. She also knew that it was a necessary one.

Bad news travels at an alarming rate. Ours sped like a lit fuse. Shortly after dawn broke, the first reporters and photographers arrived to lean on our closed front gate, and soon an entire scrum of them were gathered there, waiting for the curtains to twitch. Becky and I had to slip out the back door and trudge over the winter fields to get to school, which was less than 150 yards down the road. In the media’s eyes it seemed we had ceased to be people, who had suffered a bereavement and were in need of consolation. We became instead a story to be chased. That, I suppose, is the way of their world, but it shouldn’t be. It felt like a violation.

We left my mum on her birthday – her cards unopened, her presents still wrapped – to deal with the business of death while coming to terms with her own emotions, her own trauma. She went to one of her chemotherapy sessions and discovered that the newspapers, spread across a table in the hospital waiting room, were full of headlines about my dad’s suicide. The doctors, knowing of my dad’s death, had wanted to cancel the session. ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘You can’t do that to me. Not now. Not after what I’ve just gone through.’

In the coming days there were the seemingly endless formal phone calls that had to be made to sort out finances and personal affairs. There were more calls, both incoming and outgoing, to let friends know what had happened and also how, which obliged her time and again to talk about it and answer the predictable but understandably stunned questions that came next. There were the rat-a-tat knocks on the door from newspaper reporters and well-meaning neighbours alike. There were the arrangements for the funeral.

My mum and dad had been married for almost ten years. The two of them, each recently divorced, originally met in a pub in Ossett, a market town between Wakefield and Dewsbury. My mum had just moved into a new house. When my dad asked for her telephone number, she couldn’t remember it. One of her friends, who could, handed it over to him.

It was not the most auspicious of first dates. No roses. No soft music. No candlelit dinner. For some incomprehensible reason my dad decided to take my mum on a tour of some of his familiar drinking haunts in Bradford. None of them would ever have been confused with the American Bar of the Savoy Hotel. There was no sawdust on the floor, but one of the pubs had a spittoon in a corner – and it wasn’t there for ornamental purposes either. The evening slipped slowly downhill from there. My dad had a spot too much to drink, obliging my mum to take charge of his car keys and drive him home. On the way back he sang Dire Straits songs to her from the passenger seat.

(© Author’s collection)

A lot of women would have been washing their hair whenever he called again, offering another night out, but my mum liked his ‘cheekiness’ and also his ‘spontaneity’. He was the sort of man who’d arrange something on the spur of the moment, seldom giving her enough time to put on a smear of lipstick and her glad rags. He was a soul, she also said, who so dearly wanted to be loved, a trait that could be traced back to being raised without his mother. She saw him as a caring and giving person, always agreeing to donate his time to causes, his match tickets to those who asked for them, his advice and expertise when needed. They moved into my mum’s house until our family outgrew its small rooms. For, as well as Becky and me, my half-brother Andrew, from my dad’s previous marriage, came to live with us for a while, the three of us rubbing along without any difficulty. Andrew – 14 years older than me – was someone else I could pester with a ball. He became a County Championship cricketer too, a left-hand bat and wicketkeeper at Derbyshire.

My mum is a Bradford girl; she grew up only four miles away from my dad. She planned to become a primary-school teacher. She even went through most of the training before deciding, late on, that the police force would suit her much better. If you’ve watched either Life on Mars or Prime Suspect 1973 you’ll know that some of the male officers, especially those with a considerable number of years behind them, regarded the female members of the constabulary as useful chiefly for making the tea or typing reports. You had to be twice as good and three times as resilient to avoid being marginalised or patronised – or both. My mum remembers being pushed towards domestic-abuse cases because back then these were generally seen as being ‘a woman’s work’. She did door-to-door enquiries when the Yorkshire Ripper was still on the loose, his identity unknown, and women were cautious about venturing out after dark, and she was on front-line duty during the miners’ strike. In a career spanning 15 years, ending only after Becky was born, almost every day brought something that most of us would dread. One of her first cases was a shooting on an estate. The victim, barely alive, had shed so much blood when my mum got there that his skin was as grey as wet clay.

She was working for the traffic division – often dealing with the most grisly accidents – when she began courting my dad. Once, aware of when he was setting off for a match and the road he’d be taking to get there, she waited to surprise him, flagging down his car. My dad was chauffeuring another player, who saw only a uniformed figure coming towards them. ‘Were you speeding?’ he asked my dad irately, afraid that the pair of them were going to be late for the start of the match. My mum simply leaned through the driver’s window, gave my dad a kiss and said: ‘Have a nice day.’

Her background meant that she was used to handling other people’s tragedies. She’d spent time as a juvenile liaison officer, which demanded a particular compassion. So she’d comforted a lot of strangers who had suffered personal catastrophes; she’d been trained for that. But nothing can entirely prepare you for a catastrophe of your own – certainly not one of the magnitude she now confronted. My mum was suddenly a widow, and the responsibilities it thrust upon her – bills to pay, a job to find, two young children to care for alone – were immense. Her treatment was debilitating, sapping the strength from her body as it fought her disease. But however frail and tired she felt, and however scared she became, her first thoughts were always for Becky and me.

(© Author’s collection)

Ask her how she came through it all, and she’ll say that her police background ‘probably helped’. The trouble she saw and the situations she found herself in made her more resolute as a consequence. Then she will add, quite calmly and straightforwardly: ‘And I didn’t want to die. I had two young children to bring up …’

My mum spoke calmly to Becky and me about my dad’s suicide. She told us that he’d been ill … that his death wasn’t anyone’s fault … that she’d be there for us …

At our age we got the gist without comprehending the complications, the maze of it all. There was no formal counselling for us, no pouring your heart out to someone who would sift through and analyse your grief as though it were a handful of sand. Our family doctor made what seemed to Becky and me casual house calls. The doctor pretended to us that he’d simply been ‘passing by’, but of course everything had been prearranged with my mum. Becky always made him a cup of tea. He’d then start to chat to us, working out whether we needed anything more from him.

I didn’t want to go through counselling. My preference was not to speak of my dad’s death. So I didn’t. That was my way of coping. I had no intention of forgetting my dad or pretending he’d never existed. I loved and missed him too much for that. But I did, so badly, want to shut out the horrific circumstances of his passing. I put them somewhere in my mind where I hoped I wouldn’t run into them every day. That, of course, was impossible. For sometimes thinking of him meant also thinking about why he wasn’t with me – on Father’s Day, and on his birthday and my own, which were only 25 days apart.

With my dad gone, I made a resolution to myself.

I would become the man of the house. Adulthood was still more than a decade away for me. My bedroom walls were covered in posters from Gladiators, the TV show I never missed on a Saturday teatime. But I considered it my duty nonetheless to grow up and mature overnight – and get serious about doing so. I owed it to my mum. I owed it to Becky too. I would do whatever was needed around the home. I would look after my sister, being a genuinely protective big brother to her. I would anticipate my mum’s needs as much as I could, making sure I gave her as little to fret about as possible. I’d graft as hard as I could, both in the classroom and on the field. I’d make my mum proud of me. Most of all, if I had to cry, I swore to myself that I’d do it privately, where no one could see or hear me. If I found it necessary to grieve, I’d be quiet about doing so. I’d hide my hurt – just as my dad had done. And that is what I did, telling no one of my intentions. My mum remembers the two of us being in a neighbour’s house very soon after my dad had died. We were standing in front of a window and staring across their garden. I looked up and said sombrely to her: ‘Don’t worry, Mum. We’re going to be all right.’