The Twelfth Man 2018

32 A CLEAR BLUE SKY The story of a family’s trauma and togetherness. I NTERNATIONAL CRICKET schedules are not what they were back in the 1970s. Back then Wombwell’s hardworking secretary, Jack Sokell, was able to cajole and persuade countless county and indeed England Test cricketers (past and present) to accept his winter invite to visit WCLS or to collect a much-deserved Society award. A young Yorkshire wicket-keeper/ batsman, David Bairstow, first made the pilgrimage in 1973 as part of a Yorkshire CCC evening and he was back the following winter to pick up his CB Fry Young Cricketer of the Year award. Over the next decade or so the cheerful and effervescent Yorkshire glove-man visited the Society on five further occasions. Having won the Arthur Wood wicket-keeper of the year award in 1974 he returned in March 1980 to collect it again for his deeds in 1979 (the summer he won his first Test cap), in the company of a certain England all- rounder called Ian Botham. Secretary, Jack, recalled that evening as ‘packed, lively and at times chaotic!’ ‘Bluey’ last visited WCLS in 1985, four years later his son Jonny came into the world. Fast-forward then to 2009 and the Society’s Les Bailey award for the most promising young Yorkshire player went to Jonny Bairstow after an impressive debut season. Jonny was chosen as the 2010 recipient of the same award and in 2011 was selected as the winner of the CB Fry Young Cricketer of the Year by WCLS, the same prize his father had collected 37 years earlier. That same summer, Jonny added Wombwell’s Denis Compton award for flair to his collection and in 2015 he was chosen to receive that award once again. But such is the commitment and burden on an International/Test cricketer in the 21st Century it is very likely WCLS will have to wait a considerable time yet before Jonny Bairstow can make the same visit that his father undertook on seven occasions in the 1970s and ‘80s. Until then cricket lovers’ and WCLS members should unquestionably read Jonny’s A Clear Blue Sky, written and compiled with the help of another award-winner, sports writer, Duncan Hamilton. This book is so much more than the countless autobiographies of modern cricketers, which turn up year after year. It gives us the incredibly moving story of a family: a family heart-broken, distraught and numbed by loss. How can you not be moved when you read passages, like this one from page five: ‘In that dark time – the worst imaginable – the three of us held tight to one another like survivors of a shipwreck. Our house, like our lives, seemed bare and empty and quiet, and our grief seemed inconsolable. We were hollowed out. But we had each other then – and we have each other still – and slowly we learnt to live without him…’ The extract above serves to capture the essence of how Jonny, his sister, Becky (known as Boo), his grandpa (Colin), grandma (Joan) and of course his mother, Janet, supported by ‘Uncle Ted’ and friends, re-built their lives from that ‘shipwreck’. Jonny rightly credits the strength and resilience of his mum, despite her own battle with cancer, not once (at the time of David’s suicide), but again in 2012. He sums up the great role she has played in his life and in that of his sister: