A Clear Blue Sky: A remarkable memoir about family, loss and the will to overcome

Just one more run …

I can see the executive box where my younger self sat, and I wonder who is sitting in it today. Whoever has the privilege will envy me the plumb position I’ve had during one of the best innings I’ve ever seen. When I came in, we were 223 for five, and Ben Stokes was on 24, just warming up. We ended the first day on 315: him on 74, me on 39. He’s now on double Nelson – 222 – and the two of us, the ginger twins, have taken the score on to 538. Talk about being in the groove. In the past two and a half hours he’s dismantled the South African attack nut and bolt. He’s striking the ball so hard that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it spontaneously combust. The way he’s seeing it, bigger than a party balloon, and the way he’s hitting it, each attacking stroke like a booming detonation, he could probably have reached his first century using one of the stumps. He’s walloped everything everywhere, and none of the bowlers is escaping punishment. No matter how they bowl to him, or where the ball lands, he seems to know what’s coming at him, as if he’s developed a sixth sense. It’s been a prolonged burst of clean, pyrotechnical hitting. The ball is travelling so far that South Africa might be better off posting a couple of fielders on Table Mountain.

Our partnership has been an unselfish one. I’ve known Stokesy for eleven and a half years, ever since we played against one another in an under-15 County Cup match at Sowerby, a ground ringed by tall heavy trees, plain houses and hills topped with a row of unlovely electric pylons. I was 15. He was a fortnight shy of his 14th birthday. Imagine if someone from the future had turned up then, tapped us both on the shoulder and said: ‘One day, lads, the two of you will swap this for Cape Town.’ We’d have dismissed the remark as insane. Stokesy’s dad was also a pro sportsman, a New Zealand rugby league international and then a coach in England. So he knows what it’s like to grow up with a name that gets recognised. He knows, too, that reaching this century for me will be about more than the landmark of the score itself; that the past as much as the present will be entwined within it.

In between overs we come together and touch gloves. Denis Compton, whose day was a few ice ages before my own, would apparently cheerfully ask his most frequent batting partners which club or bar the two of them might frequent later on that night. Or he’d tell them about his gallivanting exploits during the evening before. What Stokesy and I say to one another isn’t remotely as entertaining as that. None of our exchanges will make it into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations either. We offer nothing more than ‘well done, mate’ or ‘keep going’ or ‘you can do it’.

You have this dreamy image of reaching your first Test hundred with one of the showboat strokes – a ravishing drive through extra cover or something smacked along the ground straight past the bowler. But when you’re almost there, right on top of a ton, you’re grateful to get home any old how. Even the faintest of faint edges or something slightly streaky will do – an inside edge past leg stump and the wicketkeeper. Yes, I’d gladly take that.

I haven’t tried to prove I can match Stokesy shot for shot. A year or two ago it would have been different. I would have impetuously tried to keep pace, getting myself caught up in the whirl of things and wanting to demonstrate that I’m no slouch either when it comes to finding the boundary. But I’m a more measured and mature batsman than I used to be; a bit older and a lot wiser than the bloke who got into a tangle and let Morne Morkel get the better of him in 2012.

At lunch I was on 95, which threw up one of those strange coincidences. I know it won’t have gone unnoticed among the South Africans. Morkel in particular will have thought about Lord’s – and he’ll have known that I was thinking about it too. Because of that, I did something I wouldn’t normally do. In the dressing room I didn’t take off my pads or my box or my boots. I wanted, as much as I possibly could, to pretend the break wasn’t happening. In the hubbub I sat largely in silence, left alone as I waited for the clock to tick around and send me back out again. I knew Morkel would be waiting for me; that he’d be thrown the ball again as soon as the afternoon session began. So it proved. He bowled tightly, forcing me to play five of his first six deliveries – all of them dots.

Sometimes you hit a shot that makes you feel it’s going to be your day. It’s something fluid and naturally stylish, taking no effort. You do it not only instinctively but also unconsciously, and you understand immediately afterwards, as you’re still watching the ball sail away from you, that today everything is well-oiled and working solidly. The bat is a physical part of you. This happened to me after I went past fifty. It was an on drive against Morkel. The ball was fullish, not too dissimilar to the one that got me out at Lord’s. I waited for it, got my head over it and then thumped it past him. I felt in charge then, and I still feel in charge now.

Just one more run …

South Africa have taken off Morne Morkel and brought on Stiaan van Zyl, a batsman who can bowl. He’s a bits and pieces medium pacer, called on only occasionally. He’s less experienced in Tests than I am; he’s taken only four wickets in nine appearances before this one. That said, one of his victims was Virat Kohli. And another – in the previous Test at Durban – was me. In the second innings, I was on 79 and eyeing a century the way I am today. But I was running out of partners and went back into my crease to crash the living daylights out of an ordinary delivery. I miscalculated. I didn’t put enough juice into the shot and I holed out at long off, getting a rollicking for it later.

Van Zyl has been put on to remind me of Durban. To lull me into relaxing against him and committing another error. The difference between him and Morkel, who is fielding on the boundary, is as stark as the difference between a light breeze and a lashing wind. Van Zyl sends down innocuous-looking deliveries, the odd one drifting away or cutting back. I’m wary of him purely because of my score. To get from 95 to 99, I filched one single off Morkel and three off Van Zyl. I’m still waiting for the unexpected from him. The Wonder Ball. Something he’s hidden so far. Something that seems nothing in the air but is everything off the pitch – either dipping low, towards my bootstraps, or darting up, forcing me to fend it off.

Like Donald Bradman before him, Brian Lara said he didn’t focus so much on the fielders as on the gaps between them. I’m checking and rechecking the set of the field, looking for the spaces too, so that I’ll know with a nailed-on certainty where to send anything loose. South Africa are tinkering with the field. It’s dragged in before minor adjustments are made – a yard here, a few paces there. It’s an attempt to deprive me of a single and persuade me to hit over the top. This drawn-out process is also an attempt to niggle and make me feel nervous. It won’t. I’m telling myself three things:

Patience … Patience … Patience.

The crowd is pent-up. There’s cheering and hollering and chanting until just before the ball is bowled, when a silence engulfs the ground. It’s as though everyone is holding their breath for me.

It’s the fourth ball of the 118th over. It’s the 161st ball of my innings.

Possibly the heat has wearied Van Zyl. Or possibly he is just a tad too eager to get at me, and the strenuous effort he puts into the delivery throws his stride out, leaving him fractionally off-balance. Whatever the reason, his arm gets dragged down just a sliver as he heaves his body into it. As a batsman, you’re constantly dealing with the infinitesimal. Judgements are made in millimetres and in microseconds. Get any calculation wrong, and you’re likely to perish. Everything happens so quickly, the ball on top of you after a blur and a kerfuffle of movement. In the time it takes to blink you’re working out speed, trajectory and direction. Even someone of Van Zyl’s relatively sedate pace demands that. But I see this ball early. And, almost as soon as it leaves his hand, I know its length and line. I also know which stroke I’ll play – a cut past backward point, a shot I’ve executed in games innumerable times and practised innumerable times more. My dad loved the cut. ‘If they bowl short outside the off stump, it’s bingo,’ he used to say. This is bingo for me too. I go back and across my stumps, ever so slightly crouching. I’m in position, waiting for it before it arrives. This is my moment and I’ve come to meet it.

You know when you’ve hit a good shot. I use a bat that weighs 2 pounds and 9 ounces, and it makes a reassuringly solid sound when I connect properly. The ball pings off the middle. I start to run, but there’s no need. It’s going for four.

The ‘YES’ I scream in response is half roar, half rebel yell. It’s loud enough for someone to hear it in Leeds. I’m still shouting it, and still wearing my helmet, when I lean back, arms outstretched. Then I yank my helmet off, kiss the badge on the front of it and hold my bat aloft. I tilt my head upwards. All I see is the unblemished arch of the sky, clearer and bluer than ever. All I hear is the crowd – the clapping, the cheers, the thunder of voices. What I feel is absolute relief and the profoundest joy. I am experiencing what I can only describe as the sense of complete fulfilment, which is overwhelming me.

I’m so grateful to Ben Stokes. It’s second nature to dash to your partner when he reaches a hundred, sharing the stage with him. Stokesy doesn’t. He stands back, a spectator like everyone else, allowing me a minute alone. He knows. Finally, he throws one of those big, tattooed arms around me and says: ‘Soak it up. Take it all in, mate.’

I do.

And what comes back, of course, crowding into my mind, is the past, which puts everything into context. My dad. My grandpa. My grandma. My mum. My sister. I could weep now. I could let the tears out, but I fight against them instead, closing my eyes to dam them up.

My dad always liked to know where my mum was sitting before he went in to bat. He drew comfort from the fact that she was there and giving her support – even when he couldn’t see her distinctly. At the beginning of his innings he’d search for her from the crease and settled only when he’d fastened on to the approximate location or, better still, actually spotted her in a row, usually because of something she was wearing. I’m exactly the same. I’ll always look in her direction, searching for her face among a thousand others.

My mum is sometimes unable to look when I bat; she might hide in a corridor when I get near a landmark score. I know she’ll have braved this one out, but everyone is standing and applauding so I can’t see her at first. I point with my bat towards where I know for certain she and Becky are sitting, a gesture for them alone.

Eventually the noise of the crowd dies away, and I think of starting my innings again. But first I take one last look at the sky. If heaven has a pub, I hope my dad is in it now. I hope he’s ordering a pint to celebrate.

Then I hope he orders another.

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