The coroner was patient and sympathetic, aware of my dad’s popularity and the accounts of him as a decent family man. He recorded an open verdict, as certain as he could be that my dad hadn’t meant to die. He was making a further ‘cry for help’, and it had gone wrong in a way that he hadn’t foreseen and didn’t intend because his illness confused him and clouded his judgement. My dad, knowing that we were on our way home, thought we would rescue him, added the coroner. As it turned out, one small innocent delay after another – none of them anyone’s fault – meant we arrived back half-an-hour later than we’d planned.
The coroner’s concise, concluding sentence encapsulated the difficulty for those of us left behind looking for closure and searching for The Why behind his death.
‘I do not know what happened,’ the coroner said. ‘He is the only one who did.’
Though almost 20 years have passed, I’m no closer to an explanation for what happened, which makes it harder to accept. Why my dad decided to end his life, and why he did so that evening, is an unsolvable puzzle. There was no note to read, no definitive clue to discover. There were fragments, just bits and pieces of information, but putting them together to reconstruct his last months never created a coherent whole that made absolute sense and explained everything, especially about what he must have been thinking. No matter how hard I tried, from what I knew as I grew up or discovered subsequently, there were always gaping holes. Questions that can’t be answered. Things that don’t add up. The truth is snagged somewhere in between them, caught in one of those places that’s impossible to reach.
I live with that.
The following day was my mum’s 42nd birthday. Only a few hours before he died my dad had gone to a nearby town and booked a celebratory meal for the two of them. He’d also booked a babysitter to look after Becky and me. That act makes what he did seem even more illogical to us than ever. So did something he said not long before. After a friend of his died, also committing suicide by hanging, he’d asked my mum, disbelievingly: ‘Why on earth would anyone do that?’
I suppose I could track down everyone my dad saw or spoke with towards the end, but I’m sure doing so would produce only more contradictions, more confusion. For on the one hand he’d recently told a journalist friend, during a train journey to London, that he was in fine fettle and eager for 1998 to start. ‘I’m at the top of my form,’ he’d insisted. On the other, he’d told Mike Brearley, who had been his England captain, completely the opposite. ‘He felt awful … things were not good,’ reported Brearley.
So, instead of certainties, there are only theories, and always will be. My mum believes there were ‘small bereavements inside him’, among them the loss of his cricket career, his search for something to replace it – which he never found – and also the death of his father. My dad was an only child. His father raised him all but alone after his mother abandoned the two of them. He was only three years old. My dad never saw his mother again, relying on his aunts to offer the maternal care every child needs. When, shortly before she died, his mother wrote and finally wanted to see him, my dad didn’t want to meet her. He was still playing for Yorkshire then. ‘She’s known where I’ve been for the last thirty years and hasn’t bothered to visit,’ he told my mum. ‘I don’t want to hear from her now. It’s too late.’ My mum tried conciliation, telling him: ‘There are always two sides to a story … perhaps she’ll explain why she left and why she hasn’t been in touch since.’ My dad wasn’t interested. One of the most perplexing letters of condolence we received after my dad’s death came with an Australian postmark. The writer, a complete stranger to us, asked my mum to pass on his sympathies to my dad’s ‘brother’. She wrote back explaining that, as far as she knew, my dad didn’t have a brother. If he did, we still don’t know anything about him.
Apart from the hurt and anger that her unexplained absence left simmering in him, perhaps my dad didn’t want to see his mother again because doing so would have been a betrayal of his father. He was christened Leslie, but everyone called him Des after his own father – apart, of course, from my dad, who referred to him as ‘Pops’. He was a smaller version of my dad with bow legs so pronounced that stopping a pig in a passage would have been difficult for him. He was born on the last day of 1916, the year in which the Battle of the Somme claimed more than a million casualties. Some of the killed, maimed and injured belonged to battalions made up of Bradford Pals, including members of the extended Bairstow family. He was given the middle name Somme because of it. He’d played cricket for Laisterdyke, both before and after the Second World War as a wicketkeeper, served overseas in the army and ended his working life in a chemical factory. He was an old-fashioned sort of gent, usually seen carrying a rolled-up newspaper. As a greeting back to anyone who said hello, he’d tap the top of his forehead with the newspaper, a show of northern politeness.
My dad adored his father. Early in his career he would often dedicate a catch, a stumping or an innings to him, telling reporters: ‘Pops will be proud of that.’ The two of them were good companions and each loved and felt indebted to the other. My dad kept a black-and-white photograph of his father in his wallet and put another much larger and colourised version of it on the wall at home. Every year, paying tribute to his father’s military background, he’d wear his poppy proudly and we would attend the Remembrance Day service at Boroughbridge, the town closest to us.
My dad died almost to the day that his own father had died 16 years before. Was that a coincidence? I don’t know; I never will.
Illness does its early work in secret, so another crucial aspect I don’t know is when his own began. My dad once declared ‘I love life’. For so long he gave every indication of doing that, making it impossible to pinpoint precisely when feeling a little down became melancholy and then tipped into an engulfing depression. My dad had suffered a succession of setbacks. He’d applied for the job as Yorkshire’s Cricket Manager, believing he was the ideal candidate. He didn’t get it. He considered standing for the committee until the prospect of success dimmed for him. He’d been doing occasional commentaries for the BBC, and listeners liked him, but a more permanent role went to someone else. He’d been steadily hunting down promotional work, which was becoming harder to get. He’d been running his own company, winning a contract to merchandise World Cup ties.
Life without cricket was initially harder for my dad than playing the game had ever been. He missed it, and also the adrenalin pump of a performance. He missed the crack and the camaraderie of the dressing room eight years after leaving it too. For two decades he’d got himself set for the glad rush of each new summer, and he sincerely believed he had a few more of them left in him. But, when he was 38, Yorkshire nudged him reluctantly into retirement before he was ready or properly prepared for it. He remained convinced, for at least a season or two afterwards, that he was still good enough for the County Championship team. He was almost waiting for Yorkshire to realise this and recall him, which in the beginning made it more difficult to settle into an alternative career. There is nothing he wouldn’t have done for them. His roots were in Yorkshire cricket. So were his inspirations. And so was his identity, his sense of self.
My dad wore the White Rose on his sleeve, the county’s emblem becoming his own. The county was bone and blood and breath to him. He once stood on top of the huge concrete marker post, emblazoned with that White Rose, which tells the traveller on the M62 where Lancashire ends and Yorkshire begins. He wore his full kit, and brandished a bat with his arms flung wide. This wasn’t a pose. Nor was the beaming expression he wore put on for the sake of a good picture. My dad really did believe that Yorkshire was the epicentre of the world.
The Cricketer once ran a headline that said: ‘Bairstow ready to shed tears for Yorkshire’. Shed tears he did – and plenty of them. I’ve reliably heard that he played every match for Yorkshire – even a friendly – as though it was a Test; and also that every defeat was a grievous wound to him. He once said: ‘I took defeat quite badly. I tried not to show how much I cared to the others. More often than not I went for a long brisk walk on my own. I would march along, getting it out of my system … I was better on my own.’ He also admitted that there were ‘times when I feel down, just like everyone else, and then I need others