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,