TALKS FOR THE FIRST TIME ABOUT HIS DAD’S SUICIDE

FIRST, the bare, stark fact. The matter of public record. My dad David Bairstow was only 46 years and 126 days ol d when he committed suicide almost 20 years ago. My mum Janet, my sister Becky and I found him when we returned home at 8.30pm on one of those typically lampblack and cold January nights. He had hanged himself from the staircase.

Now, the speculation, the what-ifs, the what- might- have- beens, the guesswork.

The great risk of being alive is always that something can happen to you — or to someone you dearly love — at any moment. I learnt that lesson on a Monday evening so ordinary that otherwise it would be indistinguishable from 1,001 others.

Everything seemed normal to me. They say that infants can pick up a minute shift of mood at home, alerting them when something is a little off. I’d gone past the stage of infancy — I was a young child — but the eight-year-old me had registered nothing untoward.

To me, my dad was just my dad, as ebullient and as energetic as ever. I never saw him down or doubtful, or fretful about either himself or our future. I had no inkling that anything was wrong. He didn’t seem like a man full of distractions to me.

In the morning I said goodbye to him and walked to school with Becky, the Christmas holidays over and a new term beginning.

In the early evening my mum took me to football training at Leeds United, bringing Becky too. That our lives changed irrevocably while the three of us were away seemed to me — then as well as now — inconceivable and incomprehensible.

The inquest into my dad’s death, which I didn’t attend, heard evidence about his mental state. That he’d been suffering from depression and stress. That he’d seen both his own doctor and a consultant psychiatrist.

That he’d experienced extreme mood swings, veering between the dramatically high and dramatically low, leaving my mum unsure about ‘which version of him would come through the door’. That he’d been for a drink at one of his favourite pubs a few hours before he died (though the toxicology report revealed no extravagant level of alcohol in his system).

That he’d been concerned about my mum’s health and the treatment she was undergoing for breast cancer, diagnosed less than three months before and far more aggressive than even she appreciated at the time.

She’d had chemotherapy, radiotherapy and then chemotherapy again. She was wearing a wig because her hair had fallen out. I didn’t know — but I learnt later — that the hospital became more concerned about my dad’s emotional state than my mum’s.

He was afraid she was going to die. He was also afraid of how he would cope — and what would happen to us — if she did.

Also, my dad had been particularly anxious about an impending court appearance to answer a drink-driving charge, which would have meant the loss of his licence, a potentially grievous blow to his promotional and marketing business — and to our family finances.

The incident precipitating it was an accident on a quiet country road the previous October. My dad was bringing me home from training at Leeds in his Volkswagen Scirocco. A car, coming in the opposite direction, dazzled him with its headlights.

For a split second, my dad lost control of the wheel. We veered off the road, struck a slight bank and the car tipped over, leaving me on top of my dad. Shoeless, and still wearing my football kit, I freed myself and then clambered over him, escaping through the back window. With only the odd cut and bruise, which was miraculous, I stood in the middle of the road and waited. The driver who’d blinded my dad hadn’t stopped, he’d sped away, unidentifiable.

A friend of mine, also on Leeds’ books, was being taken home by his father. I flagged them down, and the police and an ambulance were called.

That afternoon my dad had been at the funeral of a golfing buddy. Like everyone else, he’d gone to the wake afterwards. The police routinely brought out the breathalyser, finding him over the limit. I can’t condone my dad’s drink- driving, but the circumstances surrounding the case — the car responsible for it, the driver absconding afterwards without a care for our well-being, the fact that my dad hadn’t been speeding — didn’t seem to interest the police.

I, the only other witness, wasn’t even asked to give a statement. I am still livid about that.

The repercussions of the crash rippled out. My dad was mortified he’d put me in danger, mulling over afterwards how much worse the crash could have been. It left him with a debilitating arm injury. His future in local cricket, and also the enormous pleasure he got from playing golf, were jeopardised.

His right arm and shoulder required an operation, and 16 pins and a plate were put in to support his joints, which brought him considerable pain during his recovery.

Fraught with worry as the court case loomed and his other problems accumulated, my dad had not only been drinking too much generally — and he accepted as much — but a few weeks earlier he had also swallowed an overdose of painkillers at home. The same painkillers that had been prescribed for his injuries. He described it as ‘a cry for help’.

My mum had for months urged him to go to a doctor and talk openly about his depression. Either he refused or, after giving in and going, he threw up a smokescreen for the doctor’s benefit. He pretended there wasn’t anything wrong that wouldn’t soon be shaken off. ‘ He and the doctor ended up talking mostly about sport,’ my mum said.

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 he hadn’t foreseen and didn’t intend because his illness confused him and clouded his judgment.

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,

The following day was my mum’s 42nd birthday. A few hours before he died my dad had booked a meal for them