by Bear Grylls
So ended another cracking family holiday!
CHAPTER 10
When I was growing up, my Aunt Mary-Rose and Uncle Andrew (another former army brigadier) would often come and stay for Christmas with us at home.
I remember once when Dad (with me in tow, and in training), stretched cling film over their loo seat (always a great gag). But it went down terribly.
So Dad just tried another.
And eventually, after several other poorly received practical jokes, my aunt and uncle decided it was time to go home … early.
What they hadn’t bargained on was that my father had anticipated that very move, and had removed their car’s spark plugs ahead of time, so all they could do was sit in the car, fuming, all packed up, with the car engine turning over and over.
My aunt and uncle, though, have always been such close friends of our family, and looking back through my life they have been a wonderful, kind, constant for me. I cherish their friendship so much.
Despite the jokes, Dad always felt the same way. It is proof that love can tease its own.
Dad’s cold upbringing bred in him a determination to do it differently. Where he lacked affirmation and cuddles, he gave both to Lara and me in spades.
Above all, Dad wanted to be a cosy father to us, and he was – the best. For that I am so grateful, and despite losing him all too early, when I was aged twenty-six, the truth is that I could not have had better preparation and training for life than I received through his example.
He was a politician for over twenty years, and was a loyal, hard-working, back-bencher MP; but he never reached the higher echelons of political office. He never really seemed to want that.
What he aspired to most in life was to be close to his family.
There was no doubt that he loved his work, and he worked to make a difference and to better people’s lives, but his ambitions lacked that ruthless drive so common in politics, and our lives were so much richer for it.
I guess his career was being a good dad.
I remember, for example, the time at prep school when I was chosen for the under nines’ rugby team. Well, to be more accurate, I was chosen to be linesman, as I wasn’t good enough for the actual team.
Anyway, it was a cold, miserable winter’s day, and there were no spectators out watching, which was uncommon. (Normally, at least a few boys or teachers would come out to watch the school matches.) But on this cold blustery day the touchlines were deserted, except for one lone figure.
It was my dad, standing in the rain, watching me, his son, perform my linesman duties.
I felt so happy to see him, but also felt guilty. I mean, I hadn’t even made the team and here he was to watch me run up and down waving a silly flag.
Yet it meant the world to me.
When the half-time whistle blew it was my big moment.
On I ran to the pitch, the plate of oranges in my hands, with Dad applauding from the touchline.
Lives are made in such moments.
Likewise, I remember Dad playing in the fathers’ and sons’ cricket match. All the other fathers were taking it very seriously, and then there was Dad in an old African safari hat, coming in to bat and tripping over his wicket – out for a duck.
I loved that fun side of Dad, and everyone else seemed to love him for it as well.
To be a part of that always made me smile.
CHAPTER 11
I remember vividly, as a young teenager, finding an old photograph of my father from when he was seventeen and a fresh-faced Royal Marines commando. He looked just like me … but much smarter and with a parting in his hair.
Next to this photograph in the album was a shot of him ice-climbing with his fellow marines on the north face of Ben Nevis in winter: a treacherous place to be if things go wrong.
I asked him about the climb, and he told me how a rock-fall had almost killed him outright that day, when a boulder the size of a basketball had been dislodged two hundred feet above him.
It had missed his head by less than a foot and smashed into a thousand tiny rock fragments just below him on a ledge.
He felt he had been handed his ‘get out of jail free’ card that day, a moment of grace and good fortune. He always told me: ‘Never depend on those luck moments – they are gifts – but instead always build your own back-up plan.’
I use that thinking a lot in my job nowadays. Thanks, Dad, if you can read this from the other side.
As a young boy I used to love any trips away with him.
I look back now and can see how much my father also found his own freedom in the adventures we did together, whether it was galloping along a beach in the Isle of Wight with me behind him, or climbing on the steep hills and cliffs around the island’s coast.
It was at times like these that I found a real intimacy with him.
It was also where I learnt to recognize that ‘tightening’ sensation, deep in the pit of my stomach, as being a great thing to follow in life. Some call it fear.
I remember the joy of climbing with him in the wintertime. It was always an adventure and often turned into much more than just a climb. Dad would determine that, not only did we have to climb a sheer hundred-and-fifty-foot chalk cliff, but that also German paratroopers held the high ground. We therefore had to climb the cliff silently and unseen, and then grenade the German fire position once at the summit.
In reality this meant lobbing clumps of manure towards a deserted bench on the cliff tops. Brilliant.
What a great way to spend a wet and windy winter’s day when you are aged eight (or twenty-eight, for that matter).
I loved returning from the cliff climbs totally caked in mud, out of breath, having scared ourselves a little. I learnt to love that feeling of the wind and rain blowing hard on my face. It made me feel like a man, when in reality I was a little boy.
We also used to talk about Mount Everest, as we walked across the fields towards the cliffs. I loved to pretend that some of our climbs were on the summit face of Everest itself.
We would move together cautiously across the white chalk faces, imagining they were really ice. I had this utter confidence that I could climb Everest if he was beside me.
I had no idea what Everest would really involve but I loved the dream together.
These were powerful, magical times. Bonding. Intimate. Fun. And I miss them a lot even today. How good it would feel to get the chance to do that with him just once more.
I think that is why I find it often so emotional taking my own boys hiking or climbing nowadays. Mountains create powerful bonds between people. It is their great appeal to me.
But it wasn’t just climbing. Dad and I would often go to the local stables and hire a couple of horses for a tenner and go jumping the breakwaters along the beach.
Every time I fell off in the wet sand, and was on the verge of bursting into tears, Dad would applaud me and say that I was slowly becoming a horseman. In other words, you can’t become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again, a good number of times.
There’s life in a nutshell.
CHAPTER 12
On one occasion we were on Dartmoor, a wild part of the UK in all seasons, and were staying at a small inn, walking and riding each day.
It was in the depth of winter, with snow on the ground, and I can remember how freezing cold it was every day.
My young, boyish face felt as if it was literally about to freeze solid. I couldn’t feel the end of my nose at all, which for someone with a big one like myself (even aged ten), was a scary new physical phenomenon.
I started to cry; that usually worked to show Dad that things were serious and needed his attention. But he just told me to ‘cover up better and push through it. We are on a proper expedition now, and this is no time to whinge. The discomfort will pass.’
So I shut up, and he was right; and I felt proud to have endured in my own little way.
Moments like that encouraged me to believe that I could persevere
– especially (and more importantly), when I felt cold and rotten.
Nothing, though, was ever forced on me by him, but a lot was expected if I was to join in these adventures. As my own confidence grew, so did the desire to push myself, each time a little bit further.
We also spent a lot of days messing about together boating. Mum had been thoroughly put off boats by my dad early on in their marriage, due to what she called his ‘gung-ho attitude’. I, though, loved the ‘gung-ho’ bits, and craved for the weather to be bad and the waves to be big.
I had a real goal one day to own my own speedboat; to be able to drive around in it and to tinker with the engine. Obviously a real speedboat was out of the question, but instead I got to build one with my dad: a very cool little eight-foot wooden rowing boat with a 1.5 h.p. engine on the back.
The boat was barely fast enough to make any progress against the incoming tides, but it was perfect for me. We rigged up an improvised cable system, linked to a steering wheel bolted into the bench, and I was away.
I would head off to meet my mum and dad at a small bay a few miles around the coast – I would go by sea, they would walk. I just loved the freedom that I found, being in charge of a boat on the sea.
I was always pushing Dad to allow me to take Lara’s second-hand Laser sailing boat out on my own. (This was a single-handed racing dinghy, super-prone to capsizing, and requiring substantially more weight than my puny eleven-year-old frame could offer.)
I just thrived off the challenge; the solitude; the big waves and spray.
I loved the time alone, just nature and me – but only as long as I had that safety net of knowing that Dad was nearby on hand to help in a crisis. (Which was often the case.)
And I felt on top of the world as I sailed back into harbour, drenched like a drowned rat, grinning from ear to ear, hands and muscles burning from holding the lines so tightly, against the same strong wind that had driven all the other boats back to port.
It was a feeling that I could be a little different from everyone else of my age, and that, if pushed, I could battle against the forces of nature, and prevail. Adventure felt the most natural thing in the world, and it was where I came alive. It is what made me feel, for the first time, really myself.
As I got older and the rest of my world got more complicated and unnatural, I sought more and more the identity and wholeness that adventure gave me.
In short, when I was wet, muddy and cold, I felt a million dollars, and when I was with the lads, with everyone desperately trying to be ‘cool’, I felt more awkward and unsure of myself. I could do mud, but trying to be cool was never a success.
So I learnt to love the former, and shy away from the latter.
(Although I gave ‘cool’ a brief, good go as a young teenager, buying winkle-picker boots and listening to heavy metal records all through one long winter, both of which were wholly unsatisfying, and subsequently dropped as ‘boring’.)
Instead, I would often dress up in my ‘worst’ (aka my best) and dirtiest clothes, stand under the hosepipe in the garden, get soaking wet – in December – and then go off for a run on my own in the hills.
The locals thought me a bit bonkers, but my dog loved it, and I loved it. It felt wild, and it was a feeling that captured me more and more.
Once, I returned from one such run, caked in mud, and ran past a girl I quite fancied. I wondered if she might like the muddy look. It was, at least, original, I thought. Instead, she crossed the road very quickly, looking at me as if I was just weird.
It took me a while to begin to learn that girls don’t always like people who are totally scruffy and covered in mud. And what I considered natural, raw and wild didn’t necessarily equal sexy.
Lesson still in progress.
CHAPTER 13
On one occasion, probably aged about eleven, I remember being dared by a local friend of mine from the Isle of Wight to attempt, with him, a crossing of the harbour at low tide.
I knew the reputation of the harbour, and I felt in my bones that it was a bad idea to attempt to beat the mud and sludge.
But it also sounded quite fun.
Now, to cross the harbour at low tide would be no mean feat, as the mud was the worst thick, deep, oozy, limb-sucking variety … and in short, it was a damned stupid plan, flawed from the start.
Within ten yards of the shore I knew it was a bad idea, but foolishly, I just kept going. Sure enough, by the time we were about a third of the way out, we were stuck, and I mean really stuck.
I was up to my chest in black, stinking, clay, slime and mud.
We had used up so much energy in the short distance we had travelled that we were soon utterly beat, utterly stationary, and in utterly big trouble.
Each time we tried to move we got dragged down further, and I felt that awful sense of panic you get when you realize that you are into something beyond your control.
By the grace of God two things then happened. First of all, I found out, by experiment, that if I tried to ‘swim’ on the surface of this mud and not to fight it, then I could make very slow progress. Well, at least, progress of sorts. So, slowly we both turned around and literally clawed our way back towards the shore, inch by inch.
The second thing that happened was that someone on the shore spotted us and called the lifeboat. Now I knew we were in trouble – whether we made it out or not.
By the time the lifeboat had arrived on the scene we had made it ashore, both looking like monsters from the deep, and we had scarpered.
My mother inevitably heard about what had happened, as well as the part about the lifeboat being launched to rescue us. I was made, rightly, to go round to the coxswain of the lifeboat’s house and apologize in person, as well as offer myself to do chores for the crew in penance.
It was a good lesson: know your limits, don’t embark on any adventures without a solid back-up plan, and don’t be egged on by others when your instincts tell you something is a bad idea.
Apart from the odd disaster, I found that as I grew up I gravitated more and more to the outdoors. Because my mother never really enjoyed Dad and me going off on joint missions, as I got older those occasions of adventuring together with Dad sadly decreased.
As an aside, the one occasion in later life that I did get him out in the bigger mountains with me was a year or so after I had passed SAS Selection. I suggested we take a hike into the Brecon Beacons to climb some of the peaks in south Wales which had been the focal point of so many of my military marches and tests.
I arranged for Dad to be met at Merthyr Tydfil train station by Sgt Taff, my troop sergeant.
‘How will I recognize Taff?’ Dad had asked.
‘You’ll recognize him,’ I replied. Taff looked military through and through: short, stocky, tight-haired, and with a classic soldier’s handlebar moustache.
Taff collected Dad, and we all met up at the foot of the Brecon Beacons. The mountains were shrouded in a howling gale. We got halfway up the first peak, yet after an exciting river crossing of a raging torrent that was normally only ever a trickle of a stream, I noticed Dad’s nose was bleeding badly.
He looked very pale and tired, so we headed down.
We had a fun few days together like this in the mountains, but by the time he got home to my mother she accused me of half-killing him and told us that there would be: ‘Strictly no more “death expeditions”.’
I understood where she was coming from, but she kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater, and her blanket ban on our trips simply meant that Dad and I missed out on a load of fun adventures that I know he was so keen to do.
Now that Dad is no longer with us, I feel sad we didn’t exploit those precious years together more. But that is life sometimes.
The final, real adventure I had with Dad growing up was also my first taste of being in a life-threatening, genuine survival situation – and, despite the danger, I found that I just loved it.
This final mission also probably had something
to do with my mother’s ban on Dad and me undertaking any further escapades into the wild. Yet like all great adventures, it started off so innocently …
CHAPTER 14
We were on a family holiday to Cyprus to visit my aunt and uncle. My Uncle Andrew was then the brigadier to all the British forces on the island, and as such a senior military figure I am sure he must have dreaded us coming to town.
After a few days holed up in the garrison my uncle innocently suggested that maybe we would enjoy a trip to the mountains. He already knew the answer that my father and I would give. We were in.
The Troodos Mountains are a small range of snowy peaks in the centre of the island, and the soldiers posted to Cyprus use them to ski and train in. There are a couple of ski runs but the majority of the peaks in winter are wild and unspoilt.
In other words, they are ripe for an adventure.
Dad and I borrowed two sets of army skis and boots from the garrison up in the hills and spent a great afternoon together skiing down the couple of designated runs. But designated runs can also be quite boring. We both looked at each other and suggested a quick off-piste detour.
I was all game … aged eleven.
It wasn’t very far into this ‘between the trees’ deep-powder detour that the weather, dramatically, and very suddenly, took a turn for the worse.
A mountain mist rolled in, reducing visibility to almost zero. We stopped to try and get, or guess, our directions back to the piste, but our guess was wrong, and very soon we both realized we were lost. (Or temporarily geographically challenged, as I have learnt to call it.)
Dad and I made the mistake that so many do in that situation, and ploughed on blind, in the vain hope that the miraculous would occur. We had no map, no compass, no food, no water, no mobile telephone (they hadn’t even been invented yet), and in truth, no likelihood of finding our way.