A doctor can ask a patient who has a physical pain ‘where does it hurt?’ The patient will point to a specific spot. With a mental illness, it hurts everywhere. During the past decade in particular, we’ve only just begun to understand such a simple fact and take some long and welcome strides towards a more compassionate understanding of it. We’ve also developed an appreciation about the right and wrong ways of discussing and handling mental illness. The language we use when referring to depression has changed. Mercifully gone is the edge of mockery, condescension and flippancy that used to be commonplace. This change was slow in coming, and more change is still needed, but we’ve grown up and matured as a society, realising nowadays that no shame or stigma should ever be attached to the condition.
People in my dad’s day, especially those associated with a macho sport, were wary at best and petrified at worst about coming forward and confessing to a problem. For a man, it wasn’t manly, a situation that seems ridiculous to us now. You could be perceived as weak or written off as damaged goods. That is why my dad disguised his own depression with a façade in those conversations with his doctors. It was a convincing act in which he pretended to be himself, proving again that mental illness can be invisible to the naked eye when the sufferer never complains and presents a pasted-on smile to the world.
At Yorkshire, he’d been given two nicknames. The first was ‘Stanley’, after the Bradford-born writer Stan Barstow, author of A Kind of Loving, one of those popular kitchen-sink novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. No one quibbled over the missing ‘i’. The second, which he relished, was ‘Bluey’, the slang word Australians use for anyone with red hair. My dad also had eyes that were bright blue, so the name, which John Hampshire gave him, stuck. It fitted him as well as a handmade suit; ‘Bluey Bairstow’ rolled off the tongue. There was something breezy and high-spirited about it that matched his approach to the game as well as to life. ‘After that,’ my dad said, ‘no friend ever called me David again – unless they were telling me off.’
However dreadful he surely felt inside during his bad days, I think my dad strove outwardly to be the Bluey everyone expected – confident, lively and always as full of bonhomie as he could be. The copious newspaper reports of his death, each of the cuttings torn and yellow with age now, show how successfully he maintained the pretence. Fred Trueman found his suicide ‘beyond belief’. Fooled like so many others, Brian Close thought my dad had been his ‘normal self’ when he last saw him only a few months before. Even his former teammate Phil Carrick, whose friendship with my dad almost went back to the time both of them were in short pants, was stupefied. ‘I just can’t take it in,’ he said. Another long-standing friend, Michael Parkinson (now Sir Parky), had latterly detected a certain ‘sadness in him’, but still couldn’t credit what had happened. His reply, when hearing about my dad’s suicide, was to dismiss the bringer of such awful news with the incredulous: ‘Don’t be daft. Not Bluey.’
Few knew my dad was sick, and fewer still knew the extent of that sickness, because he hid it far too well.
Torturing yourself with ‘what if?’ questions is pointless. No matter how long you dwell on them you only ever end up circling back to the spot where you started, absolutely no wiser. But you can’t help asking them anyway. So I wonder whether, if modern attitudes had been prevalent back then, allowing my dad to be more open about his depression – making his cry for help more public – he would still be here with us …
Possibly.
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