Duncan Hamilton - A Clear Blue Sky - A remarkable memoir about family, loss and the will to overcome

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 .