by Bear Grylls
One by one the other boys would drop off the bar, and I would be left hanging there, battling to endure until the point where even Mr Sturgess would decide it was time to call it.
I would then scuttle back to my mark, grinning from ear to ear.
‘Down, please, Mr Sturgess,’ became a family phrase for us, as an example of hard physical exercise, strict discipline and foolhardy determination. All of which would serve me well in later military days.
So my training was pretty well rounded. Climbing. Hanging. Escaping.
I loved them all.
Mum, still to this day, says that growing up I seemed destined to be a mix of Robin Hood, Harry Houdini, John the Baptist and an assassin.
I took it as a great compliment.
CHAPTER 7
My favourite times from that era were Tuesdays after school, when I would go to my Granny Patsie’s flat for tea, and to spend the night.
I remember the smell there as a mix of Silk Cut cigarettes and the baked beans and fish fingers she cooked me for tea. But I loved it. It was the only place away from home that I wasn’t ever homesick.
When my parents were away, I would often be sent to spend the night in the house of an older lady who I didn’t know, and who didn’t seem to know me, either. (I assume it was a friendly neighbour or acquaintance, or at least hope it was.)
I hated it.
I remember the smell of the old leather photo frame containing a picture of my mum and dad that I would cling to in the strange bed. I was too young to understand that my parents would be coming back soon.
But it taught me another big lesson: don’t leave your children if they don’t want you to.
Life, and their childhood, is so short and fragile.
Through all these times and formative young years, Lara, my sister, was a rock to me. My mother had suffered three miscarriages after having Lara, and eight years on she was convinced that she wasn’t going to be able to have more children. But Mum got pregnant, and she tells me she spent nine months in bed to make sure she didn’t miscarry.
It worked. Mum saved me.
The end result, though, was that she was probably pleased to get me out, and that Lara finally got herself a precious baby brother; or in effect, her own baby. So Lara ended up doing everything for me, and I adored her for it.
Whilst Mum was a busy ‘working’ mother, helping my father in his constituency duties and beyond, Lara became my surrogate mum. She fed me almost every supper I ate – from when I was a baby up to about five years old. She changed my nappies, she taught me to speak, then to walk (which, with so much attention from her, of course happened ridiculously early). She taught me how to get dressed, and to brush my teeth.
In essence, she got me to do all the things that either she had been too scared to do herself, or that just simply intrigued her, such as eating raw bacon or riding a tricycle down a steep hill with no brakes.
I was the best rag doll of a baby brother that she could have ever dreamt of.
It is why we have always been so close. To her, I am still her little baby brother. And I love her for that. But, and this is the big but, growing up with Lara, there was never a moment’s peace. Even from day one, as a newborn babe in the hospital’s maternity ward, I was paraded around, shown off to anyone and everyone – I was my sister’s new ‘toy’. And it never stopped.
It makes me smile now, but I am sure it is why in later life that I craved the peace and solitude that mountains and the sea bring. I didn’t want to perform for anyone, I just wanted space to grow and find myself amongst all the madness.
It took a while to understand where this love of the wild came from, but in truth it probably developed from the intimacy found with my father on the shores of Northern Ireland and the will to escape a loving but bossy elder sister. (God bless her!)
I can joke about this nowadays with Lara, and through it all she still remains my closest ally and friend; but she is always the extrovert, wishing she could be on the stage or on the chat show couch, where I tend just to long for quiet times with my friends and family.
In short, Lara would be much better at being famous than me. She sums it up well, I think:
Until Bear was born I hated being the only child – I complained to Mum and Dad that I was lonely. It felt weird not having a brother or sister when all my friends had them. Bear’s arrival was so exciting (once I’d got over the disappointment of him being a boy, because I’d always wanted a sister!).
But the moment I set eyes on him, crying his eyes out in his crib, I thought: That’s my baby. I’m going to look after him. I picked him up, he stopped crying, and from then until he got too big, I dragged him around everywhere.
One of the redeeming factors of my early years in smoky London was that I got to join the Scouts aged six, and I loved it.
I remember my first day at the Scouts, walking in and seeing all these huge boys with neatly pressed shirts, covered in awards and badges. I was a tiny, skinny squirt in comparison, and I felt even smaller than I looked. But as soon as I heard the scoutmaster challenge us to cook a sausage with just one match, out on the pavement, I was hooked.
One match, one sausage … hmm. But it will never burn long enough, I thought.
Then I was shown how first to use the match to light a fire, then to cook the sausage. It was a eureka moment for me.
If anyone present during those Scout evenings had been told that one day I would hold the post of Chief Scout, and be the figurehead to twenty-eight million Scouts worldwide, they would have probably died of laughter. But what I lacked in stature and confidence, I always made up for with guts and determination, and those qualities are what really matter in both the game of life and in Scouting.
So I found great release in Scouting, and great camaraderie as well. It was like a family, and it didn’t matter what your background was.
If you were a Scout, you were a Scout, and that was what mattered.
I liked that, and my confidence grew.
CHAPTER 8
Soon my parents bought a small cottage in the Isle of Wight, and from the age of five to eight I spent the term times in London, which I dreaded, and school holidays on the island.
Dad’s job allowed for this because as an MP he got almost school-length holidays, and with a constituency situated en route between London and the Isle of Wight, he could do his Friday drive-through ‘clinic’ before heading down to the island. (It was probably not a model way to do his duties, but as far as I was concerned it worked great.)
All I wanted was to get to the island as quickly as possible. And for me it was heaven. Mum and Dad were continually building on to our small cottage, to try and make it ever slightly bigger, and soon this would become our main home.
Life on the island ranged from being wild, windy and wet in winter, to being more like a holiday camp in the summer, full of young people of my age, many of whom are still my closest friends today.
I felt, for the first time, liberated and free to explore and be myself.
The other great thing about the island was that my Grandpa Neville lived barely four hundred yards away from our house.
I remember him as one of the greatest examples of a man I have ever known, and I loved him dearly. He was gentle, kind, strong, faith-filled and fun-loving; and he loved huge bars of chocolate (despite always angrily refusing them, if given one as a treat). Without fail, they would be gone within minutes, once you walked away.
He lived to ninety-three and did his daily exercises religiously. You would hear him in his bedroom mumbling: ‘Knee-beeend, touch tooes, reach up high, and breathe …’ He said it was the key to good health. (Not sure where the chocolate or buttered toast fitted into the regime but hey, you gotta live life as well.)
Grandpa Neville died, seated on a bench at the end of our road, near the sea. I miss him still today: his long, whiskery eyebrows, his huge hands and hugs, his warmth, his prayers, his stories, but above all his shining example of how to live a
nd how to die.
My Uncle Andrew summed Neville up beautifully:
Neville remained a schoolboy at heart; thus he had a wonderful rapport with the young. Enthusiasm, Encouragement and Love were his watchwords.
He was an usher at Winston Churchill’s funeral and moved easily amongst royalty, but was equally at ease in any company. He lived up to Kipling’s: ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch.’
He was both a perfect sportsman and a perfect gentleman. I never heard him speak ill of anyone; I never saw him perform an unkind act. He was in all respects a wonderful man.
Granny Patsie was also a huge part of my upbringing on the island: a remarkable lady with an extraordinary life behind her.
She was kind, warm, yet fragile. But to us she was simply Granny. As she got older, she struggled, with tender vulnerability, against depression. Maybe it was, in part, due to guilt over her infidelity to Neville, when she was younger.
As an antidote, though, she developed a penchant for buying expensive, but almost entirely pointless objects, in the conviction that they were great investments.
Among these, Granny bought a fully decked-out, antique, gypsy caravan, and a shop next to the village fish and chippie, two hundred yards up the road from our home. The problem was that the caravan rotted without proper upkeep, and the shop was turned into her own personal antiques/junk shop.
It was, of course, a disaster.
Add to that the fact that the shop needed manning (often by various members of our family, including Nigel, who for most of the time sat fast asleep in a deckchair outside the shop, with a newspaper over his head), and you get the idea that life was both unprofitable and characterful. But above all, it was always fun.
(Nigel was Granny’s loveable rogue of a second husband, who actually also had been a very successful politician in his time. He had won an MC (Military Cross) during the Second World War, and went on to hold a junior ministerial post in government in later life. To me, though, he was a kindly, gentle grandfather-figure, loved by us all.)
So growing up at home was always eventful, although it was also definitely chaotic. But that was typical of my parents – especially my mother, who, even by her own wacky standards, was, and remains, pretty off beat … in the best sense of the word.
In fact I tend to sum my family up with the quote: ‘Families are like fudge – mostly sweet with a few nuts!’
The good side of this meant that, as a family, we were endlessly moving around and meeting streams of interesting characters from all over the world, who gravitated to Mum – this was all just part of life. Whether we were camping in an old van, travelling to listen to some American motivational speaker, or helping Mum in her new business of selling blenders and water filters.
Meals were eaten at varying times of the day and night, pork chops were pulled out of a bin with the immortal words: ‘These are absolutely fine.’ (Even if Dad had thrown them out the day before, as they had turned silvery.)
It seemed that the sole aim of my mother was to fatten her family up as much as possible. This actually has pushed me the other way in later life and given me a probably ‘unhealthy’ obsession with being healthy. (Although I do probably have my mother to thank for my cast-iron stomach that has helped me so much filming my survival shows over the years. God bless those pork chops after all.)
Everyone around us tended just to see the fun side of Mum’s wackiness, but the down side of it was that for us as a family it was, at times, quite draining. It meant that she was always right, despite some of her ideas or beliefs definitely bordering on the wacko.
We would often catch her wandering around the garden with a copper rod, assuring us that she needed ‘earthing’ against the excessive electricity in the house. (Considering that we never had the heating on, and mainly burnt candles instead of switching on lights, this kind of led us to suspect something wasn’t entirely normal about our mother.)
But that was Mum for you; and with only the rare exceptions, my childhood was blessed with love and fun, both of which have remained driving forces for me in my life with my own family.
CHAPTER 9
My mother and father had met when Mum was twenty-one and Dad was twenty-nine. Theirs was a pretty crazy love affair, involving endless break-ups and reunions, until eventually they eloped to Barbados and got married.
Their relationship remained one full of love, although in many ways, Mum was a product of her parents’ divorce. She had a deep-rooted fear of being left, and that often made her overly protective of Dad.
So, for us to go out climbing or sailing, involved Dad and me having to sneak out. (Which, of course, we both loved.) I guess it made every outing a mission. And we had masses of those missions in my early years.
But as I got older and could start to plan my own expeditions, however small they were, I felt sad that I didn’t get to do more with my dad, just us two alone. I just know how much he loved our adventures, but he did feel that his loyalty was split between Mum and me.
Dad had never really experienced much intimacy with his own parents, growing up.
His father was a hard-working, dedicated, but pretty stern army officer, who reached the rank of brigadier. Maybe his rank was gained at the expense of a cosy family life; I know for certain that Dad struggled with his father’s coldness.
As a kid, I was always a little scared of Grandpa Ted. (Almost entirely unfounded, as it happened. Yes, he was stern, but with hindsight, he was a kind, loyal man, loved by many.)
The scariest thing about Grandpa Ted was his big dogs.
On one occasion, when I was aged six, one mauled me as I sat on the floor trying to play with it. The dog bit me straight down the centre of my face, and my flesh split down my nose and lips.
I was raced to hospital for emergency suturing, where my mother decided the duty nurse was taking too long, so took the matter into her own hands and did the stitches herself.
She did a great job, by the way, and unless you look closely at my face you wouldn’t notice the scars – although my nose does actually look pretty wonky. In fact, the editor of Men’s Journal magazine in America, when I did the close up for their cover, asked me laughingly if I had lost a lot of boxing matches when young. But the truth is that ever since the dog attack my nose has always been kind of squiffy.
If Grandpa Ted was very stern with my own father when he was growing up, then Dad’s mother was even sterner still. She had a fierce reputation not only as a great character, but also as someone who did not tolerate foolhardiness – and foolhardiness was my own father’s middle name. So Dad grew up with an equally fierce reaction to this serious, firm upbringing – and became a practical joker from day one.
I remember hearing endless stories: such as him pouring buckets of water over his elder sister and her new boyfriend as he peered down on them from his bedroom window above.
In many ways Dad never really grew up. It is what made him such a wonderful father, gentleman and friend. And, in turn, I never had the ambition to grow up too fast, either.
I remember once, on a family skiing trip to the Alps, Dad’s practical joking got all of us into a particularly tight spot.
I must have been aged about ten at the time, and was quietly excited when Dad spotted a gag that was begging to be played out on the very serious-looking Swiss-German family in the room next door to us.
Each morning their whole family would come downstairs, the mother dressed head to toe in furs, the father in a tight-fitting ski suit and white neck scarf, and their slightly overweight, rather snooty looking thirteen-year-old son behind, often pulling faces at me.
The hotel had the customary practice of having a breakfast form that you could hang on your door handle the night before if you wanted to eat in your room. Dad thought it would be fun to fill out our form, order 35 boiled eggs, 65 German sausages and 17 kippers, then hang it on the Swiss-German family’s door.
It was
too good a gag to pass up.
We didn’t tell Mum, who would have gone mad, but instead filled out the form with great hilarity, and snuck out last thing before bed and hung it on their door handle.
At 7 a.m. we heard the father angrily sending the order back. So we repeated the gag the next day.
And the next.
Each morning the father got more and more irate, until eventually Mum got wind of what we had been doing and made me go round to apologize. (I don’t know why I had to do the apologizing when the whole thing had been Dad’s idea, but I guess Mum thought I would be less likely to get in trouble, being so small.)
Anyway, I sensed it was a bad idea to go and own up, and sure enough it was.
From that moment onwards, despite my apology, I was a marked man as far as their son was concerned.
It all came to a head when I was walking down the corridor on the last evening, after a day’s skiing, and I was just wearing my ski thermal leggings and a T-shirt. The spotty, overweight teenager came out of his room and saw me walking past him in what were effectively ladies’ tights.
He pointed at me, called me a sissy, started to laugh sarcastically and put his hands on his hips in a very camp fashion. Despite the age and size gap between us, I leapt on him, knocked him to the ground and hit him as hard as I could.
His father heard the commotion, and raced out of his room to find his son with a bloody nose and crying hysterically (and over-dramatically).
That really was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I was hauled to my parents’ room by the boy’s father and made to explain my behaviour to Mum and Dad.
Dad was hiding a wry grin, but Mum was truly horrified, and that was me grounded.
