“A Clear Blue Sky” is not your everyday cricket read
Despite being filled with charming family stories, Yorkshire history as well as a vital and insightful narrative about the importance of mental health, “A Clear Blue Sky” is indeed a cricket book. But it is also so much more than just a book about cricket.
I harbour a hatred for New Year’s Eve and resolutions. I am also a hypocrite. As such, I’ve resolved to read a book a week in 2018, and to write something about each book as I go. Perhaps this is a year-long hobby, rather than a resolution. Call it what you will.*
There will no set theme, save that I’ll try and take in as many genes and points of view and as I can. It would be far too easy to just read the perspectives of mid-twenties white males with average beards and unhealthy fixations with the Richmond Football Club.
Perhaps I should put a clause in here about sports books. I’ll try my absolute best to choose only those with a significant point of difference — be it the quality of the writing, or the fact that the book sheds light on something greater than sport itself.
There will be no set format for each piece of writing. Some will be reviews and others will be summaries. Some will be essays. In all likelihood, some will also be complete bollocks. The plan is to go wherever the book takes me — a boat against the current.
Happy reading, and a happy year to you all!
P.S. Feel free to suggest a title for me — I have about forty spots to fill…
A Clear Blue Sky — Jonny Bairstow & Duncan Hamilton
Day 2 of the Boxing Day Test — December 27. The MCG is packed. Jimmy Anderson bowls wide of the off-stump and the ball is taken without a sound by the waiting gloves of Jonny Bairstow.
He throws it nonchalantly sideways and then gazes upwards at the faces in the stands staring back. I wonder if he feels like an animal in a zoo enclosure.
Keeping wicket allows time to drift and the mind to wander as the ball makes its way back to the hand of the bowler. You don’t get that luxury while you bat, and it is in the midst of those nervous moments between balls that Bairstow’s book, A Clear Blue Sky, begins. He’s fidgeting, gardening, shirt tugging and bat twirling his way through the nineties towards his maiden Test hundred.
Despite this introductory moment, the book isn’t about the nineties, or batting, or playing this team on this day and making this many. It’s about why, when he finally strikes a boundary to bring up that hundred, he raises his bat and his helmet, and tilts his head back to look at the sky.
Jonny Bairstow’s father, David, or “Bluey”, committed suicide in 1998. He was forty-six and Jonny was just eight. It is impossible to fathom what it would be like to arrive home at 8:30pm on an otherwise indistinguishable Monday evening to find your father has hanged himself from the staircase — until that precise scenario confronts you.
Along with his sister Becky, Jonny went to school the following morning. In the book, he quotes Winston Churchill: “When you’re going through hell, keep going!”
Unfortunately carrying on isn’t all that easy. Robert Frost finished “Out, out–“, a poem about the death of a boy working on a sawmill, thus: “And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”
It’s not that simple to turn to your affairs and head to school to carry on as if nothing has changed. The questions nag. What could we have done? Why did he do this?
As Jonny acknowledges and accepts by the book’s end, there is no answer. The “why” is an unsolvable puzzle, which means that this book takes shape as an attempt to understand a life rather than a death. The lion’s share is about David, rather than Jonny. It amounts to a tribute, piecing together all of the things you can’t know about your father when you’re eight.
David Bairstow kept wicket for England and Yorkshire, and the county was “blood and bone and breath to him”. He was built like a “muck stack” and “had the sort of personality that filled up a room when he entered”.
That the son shares the enthusiasm of the father for Yorkshire CCC is obvious throughout. The book is worth reading simply for the detail it gives about England’s most storied cricketing county.
Perhaps most compellingly, there is plenty of room dedicated to the stories that father and son never had the chance to tell one another over a beer, and room for Jonny to discover the places and people his father loved — Scarborough’s cricket ground, especially.
The final chapter — “I Am Bluey” — echoes the song, “He Lives in You”, from the musical version of The Lion King. Simba recognises that in himself, his father, Mufasa, lives on. Jonny was known from early on at Yorkshire by his father’s nickname, Bluey. By the end of the book, he reflects on how “chuffed” his Dad would be to know it was passed down.
Even when the book turns to more detailed cricketing matters, it’s never totally about Jonny. David is always there. As Jonny reflects late in the book, “He always is”.
On the experience of facing Mitchell Johnson in Australia in 2013/14, Bairstow says that he considered sending the bowler a thank you note when he announced his retirement. But true to form, he also takes the chance to discuss his father’s own experiences facing Dennis Lillee and Michael Holding. It’s that sort of book.
A Clear Blue Sky is a magnificent change from your everyday cricket read, though it doesn’t ignore the game itself. You could read it for just the cricket, just the family stories, just the Yorkshire history, or just the vital message it holds about the importance of mental health, and still be satisfied. That all four are interwoven throughout meant that I ultimately struggled to put it down.
So, in a nutshell…
Reading time: Two days
Should you read it? Definitely (possibly twice)
*And I should really add a disclaimer about my chances of success…
If my cricketing record is any guide, passing fifty books this year will be a struggle.
More likely, I will do what I did for the illustrious Brighton CC Under 15s of 2008 — scrap around, taking far too long to acquire my 35, playing things I really ought to whack with a very dead bat and nicking to second slip things that I really ought to have refused to indulge.
Of course, the catch at second slip was dropped by the pork pie fielding there, prolonging the boredom of the crowd — eleven parents, four unfortunate siblings and three dogs — until I play all around a straight one.
With some luck, my batting partner will hang around for another hour or so, leaving me ample time to ensure everyone who cares to listen knows that the ball started on leg and hit the top of off, before said partner can debunk my story as little more than “Fake News”.
