by Bear Grylls
We were perfect candidates for a disaster.
Trudging through deep snow, when you are young, cold, wet and tired is hard. And the minutes became hours, and the hours began to rack up.
It was soon dark.
We pushed on; Dad was concerned, I could tell. He was a mountain man, but hadn’t anticipated that we would be doing anything other than a quick couple of simple ski runs. He hadn’t foreseen this. It was a simple mistake, and he acknowledged it. We kept going down; we were soon amongst deep forest, and even deeper snow.
We then reached a fork in the valley. Should we go left or right? Dad called it left. I had a very powerful intuition that right was the choice we should make. Dad insisted left. I insisted right.
It was a fifty-fifty call and he relented.
Within two hundred yards we stumbled across a snowy track through the woods and followed it excitedly. Within a mile it came out on a mountain road, and within ten minutes we had flagged down a lift from a car heading up the hill in the darkness.
We had found salvation, and I was beat.
The car dropped us off at the gates of the garrison thirty minutes later. It was, by then, late into the night, but I was suddenly buzzing with energy and excitement.
The fatigue had gone. Dad knew that I had made the right call up there – if we had chosen left we would still be trudging into the unknown.
I felt so proud.
In truth it was probably luck, but I learnt another valuable lesson that night: listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind.
As we tromped back through the barracks, though, we noticed there was an unusual amount of activity for the early hours of a weekday morning. It soon became very clear why.
First a sergeant appeared, followed by another soldier, and then we were ushered into the senior officers’ block.
There was my uncle, standing in uniform looking both tired and serious. I started to break out into a big smile. So did Dad. Well, I was excited. We had cheated a slow, lingering hypothermic death, lost together in the mountains. We were alive.
Our enthusiasm was countered by the immortal words from my uncle, the brigadier, saying: ‘I wouldn’t smile if I was you …’ He continued, ‘The entire army mountain rescue team is currently out scouring the mountains for you, on foot and in the air with the search and rescue helicopter. I hope you have a good explanation?’
We didn’t, of course, save that we had been careless, and we had got lucky; but that’s life sometimes. And the phrase: ‘I wouldn’t smile if I was you,’ has gone down into Grylls family folklore.
CHAPTER 15
Those were some of the many fun times. But life can’t be all fun – and that leads me nicely on to school.
As a young boy, I was unashamedly open to the world and hungry for adventure, but I was also very needy for both love and for home. That in itself, made me woefully unprepared for what would come next.
My parents decided the right and proper thing for a young English boy to do was to be sent away to boarding school. To me, aged eight, it was a mad idea. I mean I was still hardly big enough to tie my own shoelaces.
But my parents both felt it was the best thing for me, and so with the best of intentions, they sent me away to live and sleep at a school far from home, and I hated it.
As we pulled up at the big school gates, I saw tears rolling down my dad’s face. I felt confused as to what part of nature or love thought this was a good idea. My instinct certainly didn’t; but what did I know. I was only eight.
So I embarked on this mission called boarding school. And how do you prepare for that one?
In truth, I found it really hard; there were some great moments like building dens in the snow in winter, or getting chosen for the tennis team, or earning a naval button, but on the whole it was a survival exercise in learning to cope.
Coping with fear was the big one. The fear of being left and the fear of being bullied – both of which were very real.
What I learnt was that I couldn’t manage either of those things very well on my own.
It wasn’t anything to do with the school itself, in fact the headmaster and teachers were almost invariably kind, well-meaning and good people, but that sadly didn’t make surviving it much easier.
I was learning very young that if I was to survive this place then I had to find some coping mechanisms.
My way was to behave badly, and learn to scrap, as a way to avoid bullies wanting to target me. It was also a way to avoid thinking about home. But not thinking about home is hard when all you want is to be at home.
I missed my mum and dad terribly, and on the occasional night where I felt this worst, I remember trying to muffle my tears in my pillow whilst the rest of the dormitory slept.
In fact I was not alone in doing this. Almost everyone cried, but we all learnt to hide it, and those who didn’t were the ones who got bullied.
As a kid, you can only cry so much before you run out of tears and learn to get tough.
I meet lots of folk nowadays who say how great boarding school is as a way of toughening kids up. That feels a bit back to front to me. I was much tougher before school. I had learnt to love the outdoors and to understand the wild, and how to push myself.
When I hit school, suddenly all I felt was fear. Fear forces you to look tough on the outside, but makes you weak on the inside. This was the opposite of all I had ever known as a kid growing up.
I had been shown by my dad that it was good to be fun, cosy, homely – but then as tough as boots when needed. At prep school I was unlearning this lesson, and adopting new ways to survive.
And aged eight, I didn’t always pick them so well.
CHAPTER 16
I remember all of us in our dormitory counting down the days, (like prisoners!) until the next ‘exeat’, or weekend at home.
Boy, they took a long time to come round, and man, then the glorious weekends would go past quickly.
It was unbridled joy on the day we broke up, seeing my mum and dad arrive first out of all the parents, and have Dad press his huge nose against our classroom window, pulling a silly face. It was embarrassing, but heavenly.
Conversely, those Sunday night drives back to school were truly torturous. Give me SAS Selection any day … and that was bad, trust me.
Dad seemed to find dropping me back to school even worse than I did, which was at least some consolation. But it also just added to my confusion as to why I was being sent away.
But what made me most scared wasn’t just being away from home – it was the bullying.
A few poor, and entirely innocent boys just seemed to get picked on by one or two bullies. These bullies would truly make life hell for their hapless victims. Not only physically but also emotionally; systematically alienating their victims and teasing them relentlessly and heartlessly.
It has made me detest bullying in adult life. If I see it anywhere I go mad.
I was lucky to avoid being on the receiving end of this bullying at that young age, but it meant that I had to learn to cower and keep off the radar. And cowering and hiding are bad emotions for a kid.
Like most of the fears we all carry into later life, they are so often based on what ‘could or might’ happen, rather than what actually did.
But bullying and absent parents aside, boarding school really wasn’t all bad, and in truth I was so lucky to get an amazing education in the best ones around.
The headmaster and his wife at the school were real gems, and they genuinely cared and looked after every boy as best they could. But a school is a school, and the heart of a school is what happens when the teachers’ backs are turned.
In the school’s favour, I learnt so much more than how to hide from bullies, and we were genuinely encouraged to be real little people, with real interests.
We were allowed to make camps in the woods with our buddies, and a blind eye was turned when we sneaked off to build even better secret camps in the out-of-bounds ar
eas. We held door-die conker championships where we soaked our conkers for weeks on end in vinegar to harden them up, and the once a term table-tennis competition was treated like Wimbledon itself.
Each Saturday night the whole school would crowd into the hall, perched on benches to watch a classic old Second World War film on an old, flickery cine-reel, and afterwards we each got one chocolate bar as our weekly treat.
I would cut this up into segments and ration it for as many days as I could manage.
All that was brilliant fun. It was like living in a different century, and I am certain the school intended it to be like that.
It was ‘old-school’ in the best of ways.
We skated on the frozen lake in winter, which was tested for strength by the poor Latin teacher on a horizontal ladder, and I was allowed to go cross-country, whatever the weather, which I always loved. And ‘Health and Safety’ was kept healthily at bay.
Above all, we were taught to look out for each other and to think big, and those are pretty vital life skills, which I am still so grateful for today.
By the end of my five years at prep school, though, I was also getting pretty naughty, and, on one occasion I – with a few buddies – pushed my luck a little far. I was caught red-handed with beer cans in my rugby boots, cigarettes under my pillow and attempting a ‘break-in and entry’ to the deputy-headmaster’s house to steal his cigars.
The headmaster told us in no uncertain terms that: ‘Enough is enough. One more slip up and you’ll all be “out”.’
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I was caught French kissing the daughter of another headmaster, whose school we were staying at on our way back from a field trip. The irony is that I wasn’t entirely to blame, either.
Fifteen of us were sleeping on the floor of a gym in this school we were staying at for a night, and during the evening I had spotted the young teenage daughter of the headmaster looking us all up and down. That night, she crept into our dormitory in the dark. (Brave girl for venturing into a room full of thirteen-year-old boys.) And she then volunteered to snog one of us.
My hand shot up like a rocket, and she came straight over and slapped her mouth over mine. Aged thirteen, I didn’t realize that it was possible to breathe and kiss at the same time, so thirty seconds later I had to break free, gasping frantically for breath. She looked at me like I was some weirdo, and then ran out.
But she ran straight out and bumped into her father on his headmaster patrol, and, of course, made up the story that we had lured her into our dormitory, and that I had then tried to kiss her!
It was the final straw.
I was politely ‘asked to leave’ the school, along with a few of the other troublemakers who had been alongside me in most of these misadventures.
As it was so close to the end of the summer term, though, no sooner had we all been ‘expelled’, than we were then all summoned back. Somehow, all of our parents had gotten together and agreed that the best punishment would be to send us back to school after the term had ended, and make us spend a week of our summer holiday copying out Latin textbooks.
It worked.
That was the nail in the coffin for me. I left prep school with a determination that no child of mine would ever be forced to go away against their will, and that I would do all I could to help them grow up without fear.
Surely public school couldn’t be any worse? I thought.
At least there wouldn’t be any more randy headmaster’s daughters out to snitch on me.
CHAPTER 17
Eton College has the dubious honour of being the most famous school on the planet; and that makes it both a privileged, and a pretty daunting, place to go.
But like most things in life, it is all about what you make of it.
In my case, yes it was scary, but in many ways, it was also the making of me.
Unlike many public schools, Eton has much more in common with a university than a college. It gives you great freedoms, as long as you prove yourself trustworthy of those freedoms. I liked that. I felt empowered and free to explore and pursue those things I was good at.
But it wasn’t like that at the beginning.
Eton has to be one of the most intimidating places to turn up to as a nervous thirteen-year-old.
I was excited but terrified.
(I have since become pretty familiar with such emotions through many expeditions and missions, but at the time it was new territory.)
The redeeming factor was that I wasn’t the only soul who felt like this when I arrived. I was really fortunate to go into a popular ‘house’ with fun people, and it made all the difference to my time at Eton.
Very quickly, I made a few great friends, and they have remained my closest buddies ever since. But they were friendships formed in the trenches, so to speak, and there is nothing that forms friendships faster than facing off or escaping from bullies together.
It is amazing quite how small and insignificant you can feel turning up at Eton as a new boy. The older pupils look like gods and giants.
Shaving, masturbating, testosterone-fuelled giants.
Each ‘house’ is made up of fifty boys spanning across all the years, from thirteen to eighteen, and they all live in that house together.
Early on, each new boy is summoned individually to the top year’s common room (called library), and made to perform a bizarre series of rituals, determined by the older boys and their whims and perversions.
One by one we were called in.
I was one of the first. This was a good thing – it meant the older pupils had yet to get into full flow. I escaped relatively unharmed, with only having to demonstrate how to French kiss a milk bottle.
As I had only ever kissed one person (the prep-school headmaster’s daughter some months earlier, and that in itself had been an unmitigated disaster), I wasn’t exactly showing this milk bottle much of a virtuoso performance. The older boys soon got bored of me and I was dismissed; passed and accepted into the house.
I soon found my feet, and was much less homesick than I was at prep school. Thank God. I learnt that with plenty of free time on our hands, and being encouraged to fill the time with ‘interests’, I could come up with some great adventures.
I and a couple of my best friends started climbing the huge old oak trees around the grounds, finding monkey routes through the branches that allowed us to travel between the trees, high up above the ground.
It was brilliant.
We soon had built a real-life Robin Hood den, with full-on branch swings, pulleys and balancing bars high up in the treetops.
We crossed the Thames on the high girders above a railway bridge, we built rafts out of old polystyrene and even made a boat out of an old bathtub to go down the river in. (Sadly this sank, as the water came in through the overflow hole, which was a fundamental flaw. Note to self: test rafts before committing to big rivers in them.)
We spied on the beautiful French girls who worked in the kitchens, and even made camps on the rooftops overlooking the walkway they used on their way back from work. We would vainly attempt to try and chat them up as they passed.
In-between many of these antics we had to work hard academically, as well as dress in ridiculous clothes, consisting of long tailcoats and waistcoats. This developed in me the art of making smart clothes look ragged, and ever since, I have maintained a life-long love of wearing good quality clothes in a messy way. It even earned me the nickname of ‘Scug’, from the deputy-headmaster. In Eton slang this roughly translates as: ‘A person of no account, and of dirty appearance.’
CHAPTER 18
The school regime refused to make it easy for us on the dress side of things, and it dictated that even if we wanted to walk into the neighbouring town of Windsor, then we had to wear a blazer and tie.
This made us prime targets for the many locals who seemed to enjoy an afternoon of ‘beating up’ the Eton ‘toffs’.
On one occasion, I was having a pee in the loos o
f the Windsor McDonald’s, which were tucked away downstairs at the back of the fast food joint. I was just leaving the Gents when the door swung open, and in walked three aggressive-looking lads.
They looked as if they had struck gold on discovering this weedy, blazer-wearing Eton squirt, and I knew deep down that I was in trouble and alone. (Meanwhile, my friends were waiting for me upstairs. Some use they were being.)
I tried to squeeze past these hoodies, but they threw me back against the wall and laughed. They then proceeded to debate what they were going to do to me.
‘Flush his head down the toilet,’ was an early suggestion. (Well, I had had that done to me many times already at Eton, I thought to myself.)
I was OK so far.
Then they suggested defecating in the loo first.
Now I was getting worried.
Then came the killer blow: ‘Let’s shave his pubes!’
Now, there is no greater embarrassment for a young teenager than being discovered to not have any pubes. And I didn’t.
That was it.
I charged at them, threw one of them against the wall, barged the other aside, squeezed through the door, and bolted. They chased after me, but once I reached the main floor of the McDonald’s I knew I was safe.
I waited with my friends inside until we were sure the thugs had all left, then, cautiously, slunk back across the bridge to school. (I think we actually waited over two hours, to be safe. Fear teaches great patience.)
There were a few other incidents that finally encouraged me to take up karate and aikido, the two martial arts that they ran at Eton.
One of those incidents involved one of the sixth-form boys in our house. I won’t name him, bully though he was, as he is probably a respectable married man and businessman now. But at the time, he was mean, aggressive and built like a body-builder.
He had these wild eyes, and after one of his heavy glue-sniffing sessions, he would tend to go insane.
