The day my mum’s cancer came back — and I found myself 5,000 miles away with England in India
I KNOW everyone draws first the easy straight line that connects me to my dad. I don’t blame them, but in doing so one fact, which is the most important of all, usually goes unnoticed or gets ignored. I look so much like my dad — same chin, same cheekbones, same forehead — and I play a little like him too. But I am my mother’s son. I am who I am because of her.
My dad passed on his cricketing talent. My mum has enabled me to use it. Her life’s work has been Becky and me. She’s given our lives balance and structure. She’s taught us to treat everyone decently and equally. Our sense of spirit and our guts come from her. So does our work ethic.
I knew my mum was giving — and would always give — everything she could and more to Becky and me. The money she had went on us. The time she had was ours.
Her investment in us came at an enormous personal cost. Her diary and her social life became entirely dominated by our own. As children do, we must have infuriated and exasperated her, no doubt in the same moment.
We only wanted her to be happy, but some days we must have been more of a nuisance than a help.
There must have been other days, too, when she was fed up, but she didn’t betray it to us, going on indomitably instead and thinking of us first and herself hardly at all.
She didn’t even complain about her cancer. I’ve never heard her ask ‘Why me?’, though the question would not only be legitimate but also perfectly understandable for someone who has been through so much so often.
Everyone who survives cancer knows the victory against it may only be temporary. You know eventually that you might have to fight all over again. Almost 15 years after my mum’s first bout of cancer, a second bout occurred. This time she needed an operation.
It was the winter of 2012, only four days before Christmas. I was on England’s tour of India. My mum didn’t want me to know what was happening to her in case it affected my form.
She decided that I shouldn’t be told until after the surgeon had done his work. Only Becky changed her mind. ‘You’ve got to tell him,’ she said. ‘He’ll want to come home and be with you.’
I was in Pune. The temperature was over 30 degrees. Your mobile phone is locked away when a game starts, so England’s security officer Reg Dickason had to bring a message. It was no more than a solemn ‘Your mum wants to speak to you’, a handful of words that I knew were drenched in meaning. It could only be bad news. I was on the outfield, preparing for the match.
‘I ran off to reclaim my phone, saying nothing to anyone at first.
I called my mum without being able to reach her. ‘I need to know what’s wrong,’ I said to Reg. So he told me. The trek home began as a long day’s journey into a sleepless night. Mumbai is only 90 miles away from Pune, but the drive there took five hours. The wait for a flight to Manchester took five hours more. The flight itself took 12 hours. I touched down at 10am.
I was on the road almost an hour later. Since it was the weekend before Christmas, the holiday rush had begun, and it took almost two hours to travel from the airport to the hospital in York.
The car got stuck in a jam and I told the driver in panic: ‘Please, just get me there somehow, anyhow, any way.’ I arrived just 20 minutes before my mum was wheeled into theatre for an 11-hour operation. There was just enough time to kiss her and hold her hand.
The ward had been spruced up with tinsel and cards. I didn’t notice them. The hospital released my mum so she could spend Christmas at home with us. I helped cook dinner — though none too skilfully on my part — with Becky. We fetched and carried and fussed her, the fact she was there and recovering more important than presents or food or decorations.