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
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