by Bear Grylls
At the end I narrowly passed as one of only three out of twenty-five, with the report saying: ‘Approved for Officer Selection: Grylls is fit, enthusiastic, but needs to watch out that he isn’t too happy-go-lucky.’ (Fortunately for my future life, I discarded the last part of that advice.)
But passing this course gave me great confidence that if I wanted to, after school, I could at least follow my father into the commandos.
I was also really fortunate at Eton to have had a fantastic housemaster, and so much of people’s experience of Eton rests on whether they had a housemaster who rocked or bombed.
I got lucky.
The relationship with your housemaster is the equivalent to that with a headmaster at a smaller school. He is the one who supervises all you do, from games to your choice of GCSEs, and without doubt he is the teacher who gets to know you the best – the good and the bad.
In short, they are the person who runs the show.
Mr Quibell was old-school and a real character – but two traits made him great. He was fair and he cared; and as a teenager those two qualities really matter to one’s self-esteem.
But, boy, did he also get grief from us.
Mr Quibell disliked two things: pizzas and Slough.
Often, as a practical joke, we would order a load of Slough’s finest pizzas to be delivered to his private door; but never just one or two pizzas, I am talking thirty of them.
As the delivery guy turned up we would all be hidden, peeping out of the windows, watching the look of both horror, then anger, as Mr Quibell would send the poor delivery man packing, with firm instructions never to return.
The joke worked twice, but soon the pizza company got savvy.
One of the optional subjects that we could study at Eton was motor-mechanics. Roughly translated as ‘find an old banger, pimp it up, remove the exhaust and rag it around the fields until it dies’.
Perfect.
I found an exhausted-looking, old, brown Ford Cortina estate that I bought for thirty pounds, and, with some friends, we geared it up big time.
As we were only sixteen we weren’t allowed to take it on the road, but I reckoned with my seventeenth birthday looming that it would be perfect as my first, road-legal car. The only problem was that I needed to get it MOT’d, to be considered roadworthy, and to do that I had to get it to a garage. That involved having an ‘adult’ drive with me.
I persuaded Mr Quibell that there was no better way that he could possibly spend a Saturday afternoon than drive me to a repair garage (in his beloved Slough). I had managed to take a lucky diving catch for the house cricket team the day before, so was in Mr Quibell’s good books – and he relented.
As soon as we got to the outskirts of Slough, though, the engine started to smoke – big time. Soon, Mr Quibell had to have the windscreen wipers on full power, acting as a fan just to clear the smoke that was pouring out of the bonnet.
By the time we made it to the garage the engine was red-hot and it came as no surprise that my car failed its MOT – on more counts than any car the garage had seen for a long time, they told me.
It was back to the drawing board, but it was a great example of what a good father figure Mr Quibell was to all those in his charge – especially to those boys who really tried, in whatever field it was. And I have always been, above all, a trier.
I haven’t always succeeded, and I haven’t always had the most talent, but I have always given of myself with great enthusiasm – and that counts for a lot. In fact my dad had always told me that if I could be the most enthusiastic person I knew then I would do well.
I never forgot that. And he was right.
I mean, who doesn’t like to work with enthusiastic folk?
CHAPTER 23
Two final stories from my school days …
The first involves my first ever mountaineering expedition, done in winter to Mount Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales, and the second is winning my first girlfriend. (Well, when I say girlfriend, I mean I kissed her more than once and we were together almost a week.)
But first the Snowdon mission.
As the planned expedition was in wintertime, Watty, one of my best school buddies, and I had two months to get excited and pack for it. When the trip finally came around our backpacks were so heavy that we could hardly lift them.
Lesson one: pack light unless you want to hump the weight around the mountains all day and night.
By the time we reached Snowdonia National Park on the Friday night it was dark, and with one young PT teacher as our escort, we all headed up into the mist. And in true Welsh fashion, it soon started to rain.
When we reached where we were going to camp, by the edge of a small lake half way up, it was past midnight and raining hard. We were all tired (from dragging the ridiculously overweight packs), and we put up the tents as quickly as we could. They were the old-style A-frame pegged tents, not known for their robustness in a Welsh winter gale, and sure enough by 3 a.m. the inevitable happened.
Pop.
One of the A-frame pegs supporting the apex of my tent broke, and half the tent sagged down on to us.
Hmm, I thought.
But both Watty and I were just too tired to get out and repair the first break, and instead we blindly hoped it would somehow just sort itself out.
Lesson two: tents don’t repair themselves, however tired you are, however much you wish they just would.
Inevitably, the next peg broke, and before we knew it we were lying in a wet puddle of canvas, drenched to the skin, shivering, and truly miserable.
The final key lesson learnt that night was that when it comes to camping, a stitch in time saves nine; and time spent preparing a good camp is never wasted.
The next day, we reached the top of Snowdon, wet, cold but exhilarated. My best memory was of lighting a pipe that I had borrowed off my grandfather, and smoking it with Watty, in a gale, behind the summit cairn, with the PT teacher joining in as well.
It is part of what I learnt from a young age to love about the mountains: they are great levellers.
For me to be able to smoke a pipe with a teacher was priceless in my book, and was a firm indicator that mountains, and the bonds you create with people in the wild, are great things to seek in life.
(Even better was the fact that the tobacco was home-made by Watty, and soaked in apple juice for aroma. This same apple juice was later brewed into cider by us, and it subsequently sent Chipper, one of the guys in our house, blind for twenty-four hours. Oops.)
If people ask me today what I love about climbing mountains, the real answer isn’t adrenalin or personal achievement. Mountains are all about experiencing a shared bond that is hard to find in normal life. I love that fact that mountains make everyone’s clothes and hair go messy; I love the fact that they demand that you give of yourself, that they make you fight and struggle. They also induce people to loosen up, to belly laugh at silly things, and to be able to sit and be content staring at a sunset or a log fire.
That sort of camaraderie creates wonderful bonds between people, and where there are bonds I have found that there is almost always strength.
Anyway, now for the second story: and to the subject of girls.
Or lack of them.
CHAPTER 24
Eton, for all its virtues, seriously lacked girls. (Well, apart from the kitchen girls who we camped out on the roof waiting for night after night.)
But beyond that, and the occasional foxy daughter of a teacher, it was a desert. (Talking of foxy daughters, I did desperately fancy the beautiful Lela, who was the daughter of the clarinet teacher. But she ended up marrying one of my best friends from Eton, Tom Amies – and everyone was very envious. Great couple. Anyway, we digress.)
As I said, apart from that … it was a desert.
All of us wrote to random girls that we vaguely knew or had maybe met once, but if we were honest, it was all in never-never land.
I did meet one quite nice girl who I discovered wen
t to school relatively nearby to Eton. (Well, about thirty miles nearby, that is.)
I borrowed a friend’s very old, single-geared, rusty bicycle and headed off one Sunday afternoon to meet this girl. It took me hours and hours to find the school, and the bike became steadily more and more of an epic to ride, not only in terms of steering but also just to pedal, as the rusty cogs creaked and ground.
But finally I reached the school gates, pouring with sweat.
It was a convent school, I found out, run entirely by nuns.
Well, at least they should be quite mild-natured and easy to give the slip to, I thought.
That was my first mistake.
I met the girl as prearranged, and we wandered off down a pretty, country path through the local woods. I was just summoning up the courage to make a move when I heard this whistle, followed by this shriek, from somewhere behind us.
I turned to see a nun with an Alsatian, running towards us, shouting.
The young girl gave me a look of terror, and pleaded with me to run for my life – which I duly did. I managed to escape and had another monster cycle ride back to school, thinking: Flipping Nora, this girl business is proving harder work than I first imagined.
But I persevered.
One good way of meeting girls was to join Eton’s ‘Strawberry Cricket Club’, which was a school team for people who were meant to be half-decent at cricket but who didn’t want to take it very seriously.
Instead of playing other schools, it was designed to play local clubs. This mainly consisted of pub teams and their female supporters, and the concept was brilliant fun, made even better by the fact that we had bright pink sweaters and it was all considered a bit of a joke.
It was just my sort of team, and I signed up at once.
One custom, that we had, was that the first person on the team to go into bat had to drink a certain quantity of liquor that the team had begged, borrowed or stolen en route to the venue beforehand.
On this particular match I was in first; a super-sized can of cider was produced from the depths of someone’s cricket bag. I drank it down, walked in to bat, took my crease, and steadied myself.
The first ball of the day came thundering down and I took a giant swipe at it and hit a belter of a six. Brilliant, I thought. Now let’s do that again.
The second ball came, and attempting another monster shot, I missed it completely, spun around, fell over and landed on my stumps. Out!
As I returned to the pavilion, I noticed, sitting on the sideline, a beautiful girl in a flowing summer dress sipping a can of Coke and smiling at me. If my legs weren’t like jelly from the cider, they definitely were now.
We got chatting, and I discovered that she was called Tatiana, and that her brother was playing for the opposition. She had also found my batting saga quite amusing.
To top it all, she was aged twenty – two years older than me – and didn’t go to a convent school, but to a German university.
Now, there was a weekend out of school coming up the next day, and I had planned to head down home to the Isle of Wight with about ten school friends, all together. I boldly asked Tatiana if she might like to join us. (I was buzzing on adrenalin and cider, and couldn’t believe I had actually dared to invite her out.)
She accepted and, before I knew what was happening, we were at home in the Isle of Wight, my parents away, and with all my friends and this beautiful girl – who for some unknown reason couldn’t get enough of me.
This was indeed very new territory.
We had an amazing weekend, and I got to kiss Tatiana non-stop for thirty-six hours, and she even shared my bed for two whole nights.
Unbelievable.
Sadly she then returned to university in Germany, and that was the end of that. I guess she just moved on.
But the truth is that such good fortune didn’t come around very often at an all-boys’ school. When it did, you had to thank your lucky stars.
CHAPTER 25
Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.
I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.
But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.
As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.
But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.
Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.
The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.
The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.
I mean, what does a child know about faith?
It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known.
Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about.
Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg.
I was devastated.
I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life.
‘Please, God, comfort me.’
Blow me down … He did.
My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.)
To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies.
This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes.
The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life.
This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being.
Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree.
I had found a calling for my life.
I do owe so much of my faith to a few best friends at school who, especially in the early days, nurtured that faith in me. They helped me, guided me, and have stood beside me ever since as my buddies: the great Stan, Ed and Tom.
As for my other great buddies at school, like Mick, Al, Watty, Hugo and Sam, they simply consi
dered this new found Christian faith of mine was a monumental waste when it came to getting girls!
Talking of getting girls, in case you were wondering, it was because of my faith that I only kissed that beauty of a German girl I met, and didn’t end up making love. (Although, I must admit, it took all my strength at the time to resist that one!)
Despite all my friends thinking I was utterly mad, deep down I felt a determination to try to keep my virginity for my wife one day.
But that really is another story …
CHAPTER 26
So that was Eton for me, and I look back now with a great sense of gratitude: gratitude that I got to have such a great education, and gratitude that my father had worked so damned hard so as to be able to afford to send me there.
I never really thanked him as I should have – but I just hope somehow he knows how grateful I am for all he gave me.
Eton did, though, teach me a few key lessons: it showed me the value of a few close friends, and how those friendships really matter as we walk through our days. It also taught me to understand that life is what you make of it. And with that there comes responsibility.
No one will do it all for you. That is left to each of us: to go out, to grab life and to make it our own.
My time at Eton did develop in me a character trait that is essentially, I guess, very English: the notion that it is best to be the sort of person who messes about and plays the fool but who, when it really matters, is tough to the core.
I think it goes back to the English Scarlet Pimpernel mentality: the nobility of aspiring to be the hidden hero. (In fact, I am sure it is no coincidence, that over the years, so many senior SAS officers have been also Old Etonians. Now explain that one, when the SAS really is the ultimate meritocracy? No school tie can earn you a place there. That comes only with sweat and hard work. But the SAS also attracts a certain personality and attitude. It favours the individual, the maverick and the quietly talented. That was Eton for you, too.)
