by Bear Grylls
Charlie and I would find giant hedges in London parks and repeatedly leap into them from high branches of trees, using them as natural crash mats.
We dressed up in gorilla suits and sat on the rocks that overlooked a central London park café mainly frequented by the local old folk. Their faces were priceless.
I also remember managing successfully to push both Charlie’s knees through the railings of that same lakeside café, and then leaving him there, to repay him for some other gag he had played on me. He tried everything to get free – from olive oil, to being pulled and manipulated by passers-by – and it was only as the café was calling the fire brigade that I relented and managed to prise him free.
Together, we climbed across the giant River Thames by crossing under, rather than on top of, one of the big bridges. It was exciting climbing and brilliant fun – until Charlie’s car and house keys fell out of his pocket into the river.
We even fell through the ice of a frozen lake together in Ireland, one New Year, barely making it out alive. The girls we were with soothed our wounds with hot drinks and warm blankets for hours afterwards. And we milked their sympathy for days.
The list goes on and on, and I am proud to say it continues today. He is still one of my most lovely, loyal, and fun friends, and I am so grateful for that friendship.
Oh, and by the way, he is the most insanely talented artist on the planet, and makes an incredible living touching people’s lives through art. I thought I should mention that.
Anyway, I had one more trip planned for my year out, and after that I decided that I should probably (reluctantly) go to university.
But first I needed some more money.
I tried being a barman, but was fired for being scruffy, and then finally Ed, one of my old school friends, said why didn’t I start some self-defence classes in London, and make them exclusive to girls?
It was an inspired idea.
I had some flyers printed, and persuaded a few health clubs to allow me to run classes in their aerobics studios. I loved it from the very start. (Although, sadly the clubs dissuaded me from making the classes exclusively for girls!)
Invariably I would get the occasional macho lad who would turn up determined to prove to everyone how tough they were. Luckily these types never lasted long, as I basically taught the ethos of minimal force, and the art of using an aggressor’s force against himself. The machos soon got bored of this passivity.
On the whole the folk who signed up were committed, well-meaning people who just wanted to learn how to defend themselves if they were ever in a tough spot.
Soon the number of clubs I taught at was growing, and I was beginning to earn some half-decent money. But it had always been a means to an end – the end being to travel.
It was time to move on.
I felt a bit guilty when I stopped teaching the classes, as the regulars were so much fun, but I made sure I handed the clubs on to other good instructors I knew.
I had loved the camaraderie of it all, but I had bigger dreams that I wanted to follow.
CHAPTER 31
I soon had enough money saved to take my old school friend Watty up on his offer of travelling through northern India together, hiking and exploring.
His family knew a retired Indian Army officer who wanted to start a trekking company for young school leavers; and we were to be his English guinea pigs, upon whom he could test various different treks and adventures.
It was a dream opportunity.
We spent a month hiking through the Indian Himalayas, around Darjeeling and beyond. We travelled on the roofs of trains, slept on wooden beds in remote mountain villages, and rode the white waters down mountain rivers.
We also got to explore the spectacular regions of western Bengal and northern Sikkim, both of which were then restricted zones for tourists, due to the border disputes with Pakistan, but for which the Indian Army officer had arranged special permits.
We visited the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, outside of Darjeeling, where they ran a winter mountaineering school run by Indian Himalayan guides, and I was hooked. The place was like a shrine to the great mountaineers, and the stories of death and adventure on the highest peaks on earth had me entranced.
Meanwhile, Watty had fallen in love with a local Indian girl, which proved a massive distraction to adventure, as far as I could see. He announced he was off to go and visit her family; but all I wanted to do was hike the mountains in the distant hope of getting to see Everest herself.
When I rose early one freezing cold mountain morning, woefully ill-equipped in terms of appropriate clothing, footwear or sleeping bag, I finally got to watch the sun rise over Everest in the distance, looming like a giant across the horizon.
Now, like Watty, I, too, was in love.
On our return to lower altitudes, I bought a large, rolled-up, laminated poster of Everest (which was a bigger version of the one that my father had given me when I was a young boy, after one of our climbing forays), and I vowed to myself that one day I would risk it all and attempt to climb the biggest, highest mountain on earth.
The truth is that, at that stage of my life, I had no idea what such an expedition would really involve. I had minimal high-altitude experience and, according to all the books, I was far too young to make a serious high-altitude mountaineer.
But I had a dream, and that always makes people dangerous.
Dreams, though, are cheap, and the real task comes when you start putting in place the steps needed to make those dreams a reality. I had never been one for idle threats, and I made my Everest intentions clear to all who were close to me.
To a man, they thought I was mad.
Before leaving India I had one more ambition I longed to fulfil – I had always dreamt of meeting Mother Teresa.
I discovered that her ‘mission of mercy’ headquarters was based in Calcutta, so we routed by train into the huge, terrifying, sprawling metropolis of one of the world’s biggest cities. And that alone is an experience.
The station was a seething mass of hurrying, scurrying, hustling bodies; it was physically impossible to move faster than a slow shuffle, and you just got taken in whichever direction the crowd was moving. The noise, and the smell of faeces and sweat, was overpowering. There were no other Westerners as far as I could see.
Little could have prepared me for what I saw on the squalid streets of Calcutta, beyond the main drag and city centre. I had never seen people dying on a street in front of my eyes before. I had never seen legless, blind, ragged bodies, lying in sewers, holding their arms out begging for a few rupees.
I felt overwhelmed, inadequate, powerless and ashamed – all at once.
Watty and I finally found the small hospital and nunnery that was Mother Theresa’s mission. Amongst a city of suffering, we had found a haven of love, cleanliness, calm and care.
We returned there every day we were in Calcutta, we gave the remaining notes we had in rupees into her collection box and I wrote Mother Theresa a folded, hand-written note to say how her work had moved me.
I just wanted to thank her and encourage her.
I never expected any reply.
Knock me down, if two months later I didn’t get a personal letter from her saying thank you. I still have it to this day. Believe me when I say that all we gave were a few pounds in total.
Her response is called grace, and it amazed me.
Her being, and her whole way of life (even though we never even met her), was a living, breathing example of God’s presence on this earth, and it changed how I saw both myself and the world around me, very powerfully. I realized that I had been given privileges beyond those any person could ever hope for, and that we, in turn, have a duty of care towards the world and her people.
But I wasn’t yet sure what this meant for me.
I just know that I left the squalor, dirt and suffering of Calcutta with a sense that, in Mother Theresa’s life, we had experienced a brush with God that was both beaut
iful and very real.
There is a simple Bible verse, Matthew 23:12, which says: ‘Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.’ This speaks pretty strongly to how I feel about the whole fame issue, and it has coloured so much of what I see in people nowadays.
The more I live, the more aware I become of the greatness of the everyday man (and I don’t mean this in any sycophantic way). I witness tough people doing tough jobs every day, as we travel to the many extremes of the world, filming.
Maybe it’s a lone worker, digging a roadside ditch in the middle of the night in the pouring rain on a small jungle track in a remote part of China; or someone more ‘regular’ (whatever that means), like a coffee vendor in some unsung town in middle America, just doing the daily grind.
Whichever extreme it is, I find myself admiring these people more and more. Unsung. Uncelebrated. Uncomplaining.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. At this stage, I was still a young, wide-eyed pup, with bleached blond, pony-tailed hair, freshly home from a hiking trip to India, with a determination to live life to the max.
CHAPTER 32
The vigour with which I wanted to get on and live life was countered by the slumber-like crawl I adopted to the prospect of returning to ‘higher education’.
I had only scraped a few A levels, gaining the grades ACDC. (I did, though, love the fact that they spelt the name of a cool rock band.)
I also noted the irony of the fact that the only exam for which I had done literally no revision, and for which I had been told the key ingredient was common sense, I had gained an A grade in.
General Studies is a subject where the questions are like: ‘Describe how a sailing boat might be sailed backwards.’ ‘Explain how trees might be shown to “communicate”.’ I was good at those, but bad at swotting and economics.
Anyway, having only just escaped from years of academic learning, I had little motivation to apply to go to university. At the same time, though, I lacked the confidence to ditch the idea of university completely. Oh, God, did I really have to go to uni?
In a desperate bid for a fun alternative, I spent three days in the month leading up to the start of the university year, sitting in the foyer of MI5, the British counter-espionage service, asking to interview for a job.
I had initially written to MI5, and had received a succinct reply saying thank you for my letter, but there were no posts currently available for me. The letter was signed off by a Miss Deborah Maldives.
Now, I might have been born at night but it wasn’t last night, and even I could tell that Miss Deborah Maldives was a fake name.
I made up my mind to go and offer myself in person.
In hindsight, I quite admire the balls that I showed to go to each of the many entrances of MI5 HQ in central London, over and over again, day after day, asking to speak directly to Miss Deborah Maldives.
Each time, I told the security guard that I had a meeting booked with her, and waited.
Each time I was politely told that no one of that name worked there and that my name certainly wasn’t down for any meeting.
So, I would leave, and try the next entrance along.
Eventually, on the umpteenth attempt, I was told to my surprise, that Miss Deborah Maldives was coming down to see me.
I suddenly wasn’t quite so sure what to do with myself, as I waited anxiously in MI5’s marble foyer. Oh, God, Bear. What have you done, you idiot?
Finally a stocky-looking gentleman, who definitely didn’t look like a Deborah Maldives, appeared at the other side of the revolving, security-controlled glass doors. He beckoned me forward and the door started to turn for me.
Moment of truth, I thought, and walked through.
Mrs (or Mr) Deborah Maldives sat me down in an interview room and told me that there were proper channels to apply for MI5, and sitting in each entrance’s foyer, day after day, was not one of them.
He then smiled.
He admitted that I had shown the sort of spirit that was required for counter-espionage work and suggested I reapply, direct to him, when I had a university degree. I took the card, shook his (her) hairy hand, and scarpered.
So there is some better motivation to go to university, after all, I thought.
Frantically, I applied late, in the vain hope that somewhere, anywhere, might accept me.
CHAPTER 33
The Royal Marines description of me as ‘happy-go-lucky’ is good for many things, but somehow it doesn’t wash with university applications.
And with my mediocre A level results I was getting a hefty number of rejections winging my way.
A lot of my good friends were heading to Bristol University. But I had as much chance of getting in there with my ACDC grades as Deborah Maldives had of winning a beauty pageant. Yet I really wanted to be with my buddies.
I finally persuaded the University of the West of England (UWE) (which was the less academic version of Bristol University) to offer me a place studying modern languages. (Incidentally, I had only pulled this off by going down there in person and begging the admissions lady for a place, face to face, after sitting outside her office all day. This was becoming a familiar pattern. Well, at least, I have always been persistent.)
I wasn’t allowed to study purely Spanish, which I loved, so I had to do German and Spanish. My run-in with the beautiful German Tatiana had led me to believe that the German language might be as beautiful as her.
Boy, was I wrong.
The language is a pig to learn.
This became the first nail in the coffin of my university experience.
The up side was that me and my best friends, Eddie, Hugo, Trucker, Charlie, Jim and Stan, all got to share a house together.
Now when I say house, I use the term loosely. It was actually an old disused hotel called The Brunel. Situated in the roughest, cheapest part of Bristol, where call girls and drug dealers cruised the streets, The Brunel soon developed somewhat of a legendary status amongst our circle of friends as an outpost, full of eccentric Old Etonians living in bohemian squalor.
I quite liked the reputation.
We would breakfast on the street, smoke pipes in our dressing gowns, and race each other up the steep hills, carrying books under our arms en route to lectures.
We had all sorts of strange visitors endlessly coming in and out uninvited, including several regular homeless guys off the street.
Neil was one such guy, and he loved coming round leading us on daytime raids of the industrial bins around the back of the local Sainsbury’s supermarket. We would sneak round in our car (as subtly as we could with an old, smoky Ford, full of students crammed in the back). One of us would then leap out, diving head first into the compressor, before throwing out great sides of salmon and bundles of out of date hot cross buns, to the eagerly awaiting arms below.
We also went a couple of times a week to help out in the soup kitchen at the homeless centre down the road from us, and got to know ever-increasing numbers of colourful folk around us.
Sadly Neil died soon after, of a drugs overdose, and I suspect not many of those Brunel homeless characters are still alive today. But it was a formative time for us as friends living together and taking our first tentative steps in the outside world, away from school.
Highlights of The Brunel featured the likes of Mr Iraci, our landlord, coming round and being greeted by myself, stark naked, painting cartoons on my bedroom wall to liven the place up a bit; or Eddie showing another pretty girl his technique for marinating venison in a washing-up bowl full of Bordeaux wine.
Our housekeeping kitty of funds would miraculously evaporate due to Hugo’s endless dinner parties for just him and up to ten different girls that he had been chatting up all week.
Stan developed a nice technique for cooking sausages by leaving them on the grill until the hundred decibel smoke alarm went off, indicating they were ready. (On one occasion, Stan’s sausage-cooking technique actually brought the f
ire brigade round, all suited and booted, hoses at the ready. They looked quite surprised to see all of us wandering down in our dressing gowns, asking if the sausages were ready, whilst they stood in the hall primed for action, smoke alarm still blaring. Happy days.)
I also fondly remember Mr Iraci coming round another time, just after I had decided to build a home-made swimming pool in the ten foot by ten foot ‘garden’ area out the back.
I had improvised a tarpaulin and a few kitchen chairs and had filled it optimistically with water. It held for about twenty minutes … in fact just about until Mr Iraci showed up to collect his rent.
Then it burst its banks, filling most of the ground floor with three inches of water, and soaking Mr Iraci in the process.
Truly the man was a saint.
CHAPTER 34
Trucker and I did quite a bit of busking together on our guitars, doing the rounds at various Bristol hot spots.
This included the local old people’s home, where I remember innocently singing the lyrics to ‘American Pie’. The song culminates with the spectacularly inappropriate claim that this would be the day that I’d die.
A long, awkward pause followed, as we both realized our predicament.
The home wasn’t a long-standing gig after that.
We also played together with another friend of ours called Blunty, who went on to become a worldwide singing sensation after he left the army, under his real name of James Blunt. I am not sure Blunty will consider those jamming sessions as very formative for him, but they make for fun memories now all the same.
Good on him, though. He always had an amazingly cool singing voice.
During this first year at The Brunel, though, two key events happened.
The first was finding such a good buddy in Trucker. We had hit it off at once. We laughed together masses, and found that we had so much in common: our faith, a thirst for adventure and a love of the fun, quirky things and people in life.
