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

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

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

EVERYTHING I’VE EVER STRIVED FOR, EVERYTHING I’VE EVER DONE

THE VIEW FROM THE VERANDA

I THINK YOU USED TO PLAY ALONGSIDE MY DAD

THE PERFECT 10

KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID

THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA

THE POP AND FIZZ OF CHAMPAGNE

THE SMALLEST ROOM AT LORD’S

ARE YOU HERE FOR ALL THE TESTS?

TWO PHOTOGRAPHS, TWO ERAS

A DAMP DAY IN FRONT OF THE WESTERN TERRACE

I AM BLUEY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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COVER

TITLE PAGE

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However dreadful he surely felt inside during his bad days, I think my dad strove outwardly to be the Bluey everyone expected – confident, lively and always as full of bonhomie as he could be. The copious newspaper reports of his death, each of the cuttings torn and yellow with age now, show how successfully he maintained the pretence. Fred Trueman found his suicide ‘beyond belief’. Fooled like so many others, Brian Close thought my dad had been his ‘normal self’ when he last saw him only a few months before. Even his former teammate Phil Carrick, whose friendship with my dad almost went back to the time both of them were in short pants, was stupefied. ‘I just can’t take it in,’ he said. Another long-standing friend, Michael Parkinson (now Sir Parky), had latterly detected a certain ‘sadness in him’, but still couldn’t credit what had happened. His reply, when hearing about my dad’s suicide, was to dismiss the bringer of such awful news with the incredulous: ‘Don’t be daft. Not Bluey.’

Few knew my dad was sick, and fewer still knew the extent of that sickness, because he hid it far too well.

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