Exclusive extracts from Jonny Bairstow’s must-read book
FIRST, the bare, stark fact. My dad David Bairstow was only 46 years and 126 days old 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 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 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 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 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, 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 had 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 afraid of how he would cope — and what would happen to us — if she did.
My dad had been 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. I freed myself and then clambered over him, escaping through the back window. With only the odd cut and bruise, I stood in the middle of the road and waited. The driver who’d blinded my dad hadn’t stopped, he’d gone, 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.
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 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. ‘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 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 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 don’t know what happened,’ the coroner said. ‘He is the only one who did.’
Almost 20 years have passed and 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, 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, there were always holes. Questions that can’t be answered. Things that don’t add up. The truth is 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 booked a meal for the two of them. He’d also booked a babysitter for Becky and me. That act makes what he did seem even more illogical. 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?’
So, instead of certainties, there are only theories, and always will be. My mum believes there were ‘small bereavements inside him’,
The following day was my mum’s 42nd birthday. A few hours before he died my dad had booked a meal for them...
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.
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 depression.
My dad had suffered a succession of setbacks. He’d applied for the job as Yorkshire’s Cricket Manager. 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, 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 for Yorkshire and England had ever been. He missed it and the adrenalin pump of a performance.
He missed the craic and the camaraderie of the dressing room.
There is nothing he wouldn’t have done for the club. His roots were in Yorkshire cricket. So were his inspirations. So was his identity, his sense of self. 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.
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. But what remains — and always will for me, I think — is how I felt, then and for a 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 degree — especially the first, which is denial. I knew what death was, and I also knew what it meant. Nonetheless, there were times when I half-expected to find my dad 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.
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 the next morning my mum got us up and made sure we washed and scrubbed ourselves, brushed our teeth and dressed for school.
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 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. Knowing this, my mum came to the conclusion 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.
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 chemo 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.’