Mud, Sweat and Tears

by Bear Grylls

  His veins would look as if they were going to explode from the muscles in his arms, neck and forehead, and he had a nasty habit of announcing he was on the warpath by blasting on a foghorn that he had somehow acquired.

  For a while, his chosen targets to beat up were both me and my next-door room-mate, Ed, and when that foghorn blew you knew it was time to scarper.

  Once, I remember hearing it blast, and Ed and I ran into my room, frantically looking for a place to hide. We opened the cupboard, crouched inside … and hoped like hell he wouldn’t find us.

  The foghorn got louder and louder, until finally my study door swung open with a bang … then there was silence.

  We held our breath as this wild man turned the room upside down, breathing heavily and cursing us under his breath.

  Finally there was a pause in the room’s destruction. Then we heard his footsteps move towards the cupboard. Another pause.

  Then the cupboard door was torn open violently, and we were both suddenly staring into the wild frenzied eyes of our nemesis.

  We screamed.

  He grabbed our heads and whacked them together, and after that the rest was a bit of a blur. He threw us around the room for a while and finished with putting us both in half nelson armlocks so hard that I was convinced my shoulder would snap.

  Finally, bored, he kicked us, demonstrating what he said was a ‘ninja jack-kick’, then left.

  That was it, I thought to myself, I have to learn how to defend myself properly.

  Apart from the odd occasion like that, and a few bog-flushings, oh, and quite regularly being winched up by your boxer shorts and hung off the clothes peg on the back of your door, the days passed busily.

  The difference between the fear and bullying at Eton, to what we experienced at prep school, is that at least I didn’t have to face those demons alone. There was generally someone to share those negative experiences with.

  This time round, it was my buddies and me together, taking flak in the trenches.

  And, somehow, I found I thrived on our misadventures.

  CHAPTER 19

  I signed up as soon as I could for the karate and aikido clubs, and found that I loved the martial arts way – the focus, the camaraderie, and above all the acquiring of an art that requires the use of guile over power, technique over force.

  And I stuck with it. That was the real key to getting good at martial arts: time and motivation – and I certainly had the motivation, thanks to the foghorn.

  A few of my friends also signed up with me, and came along to the early classes. In actual fact they were invariably much better than me when we started – often stronger, fitter, and more flexible – but after a few weeks they all began to drop out.

  It was hard sometimes on a Sunday evening, when everyone else was messing around playing table tennis or watching TV, to drag yourself out into the winter’s darkness and head off to get battered for two hours in the gym by some maniacal martial arts teacher.

  But I kept going and kept going, and I guess I did a bit of a Forrest Gump on it: I just stuck at it – and I am so pleased I did.

  One summer I got the chance to tour as part of the KUGB (Karate Union of Great Britain) team to Japan. It was a dream come true.

  I remember being dropped off at the coach station in London by my mother, and nervously waving her goodbye. I was neatly dressed in a blazer and tie, with my karate team badge neatly sewn in place on my lapel.

  The coach was filled with the rest of the karate squad, gathered from all over the UK – none of whom I had met before.

  I could instantly see that they were all bigger, tougher and louder than me – and I was pretty scared. Japan felt a frighteningly long way away.

  I took a deep breath and sat down in the coach, feeling very small and insignificant.

  The team was an eclectic mix of karate experts – from London taxi drivers to full time professional fighters. (The only other Etonian who had been selected as part of the team was Rory Stewart, the MP who went on to become known for his epic walk through Afghanistan, as well as governing a province of occupied Iraq aged only thirty.) This was going to be an interesting trip, I thought.

  But I had nothing to fear.

  The squad completely took me under their wing as their most junior member, and arriving in Tokyo as a fresh-faced teenager, away from home, was eye-opening for me.

  We headed up to the mountains outside of Tokyo and settled into the training camp.

  Here we began to study and train under Sensei Yahara, one of the most revered karate grandmasters in the world. Each night we slept on the floor in small wooden Japanese huts, and by day we learnt how to fight – real and hard.

  The training was more exacting and demanding than anything I had previously encountered. If our positions or stances weren’t pinpoint accurate, we would receive a firm crack from the bamboo ‘jo’ cane.

  We quickly learnt not to be lazy in our stances, even when tired.

  In the early evenings when we finished training I would walk the two miles down the mountain to a small roadside hut and buy milk bread, a form of sweet, milk cake, and I would slowly eat it on my way back to the camp.

  Then I would bathe in the natural hot volcanic springs and soak my tired muscles. And I loved it all.

  On our return to Tokyo, en route back to the UK, we got to witness a private training session of the top twenty karate fighters in the world. It was intense to watch. Fast, brutal at times, yet like poetry in motion.

  I was even more hooked than I had been before.

  One day I would be that good, I vowed.

  I will never forget the day I finally got awarded my black belt, and the pride I felt.

  The day of the grading had taken three years to arrive, and for those three years I had given it my all: training at least four or five times a week, religiously.

  The final examination came and my mother came down to watch it. She hated watching me fight. (Unlike my school friends, who took a weird pleasure in the fights – and more and more so as I got better.)

  But Mum had a bad habit.

  Instead of standing on the balcony overlooking the gymnasium where the martial arts grading and fights took place, she would lie down on the ground – amongst everyone else vying to get a good view.

  Now don’t ask me why. She will say it is because she couldn’t bear to watch me get hurt. But I could never figure out why she just couldn’t stay outside if that was her reasoning.

  I have, though, learnt that there is never much logic to my wonderful mother, but at heart there is great love and concern, and that has always shone through with Mum.

  Anyway, it was the big day. I had performed all the routines and katas and it was now time for the kumite or fighting part of the black-belt grading.

  The European grandmaster Sensei Enoeda had come down to adjudicate. I was both excited and terrified – again.

  The fight started.

  My opponent (a rugby ace from a nearby college), and I, traded punches, blocks and kicks, but there was no real breakthrough.

  Suddenly, I found myself being backed into a corner, and out of instinct (or desperation), I dropped low, spun around and caught my opponent square round the head with a spinning back fist.

  Down he went.

  Now this was not good news for me.

  It was bad form, and showed a lack of control.

  On top of that, you simply weren’t meant to deck your opponent. The idea was to win with the use of semi-contact strikes, delivered with speed and technique that hit but didn’t injure your opponent.

  So I winced, apologized and then helped the guy up.

  I then looked over to Sensei Enoeda, expecting a disapproving scowl, but instead was met with a look of delight. The sort of look that a kid gives when handed an unexpected present.

  I guess that the fighter in him loved it, and on that note I passed and was given my black belt.

  I had never felt so proud as I did finally wearing tha
t belt after having crawled my way up the rungs of yellow, green, orange, purple, brown – you name it – coloured belts.

  I had done this on my own and the hard way, and you can’t buy your way to a black belt.

  I remember being told by our instructor that martial arts is not about the belts, it is about the spirit; and I agree … but I still couldn’t help sleeping with my black belt on that first night.

  Oh, and the bullying stopped.

  CHAPTER 20

  By the end of my time at Eton I had become one of the youngest second dan black belts in the country, a rank one higher than black belt.

  I had started training also in aikido, which I loved, as a more lock and throw martial art, in comparison to the more physical punches and kicks of karate. But as a teenager I thrived off that physical side of karate.

  After school, and during my time in the army, I stopped training in karate every week, mainly on the grounds that I was always so tired by the time I got back from some army exercise. The prospect of another additional ‘beasting’ session became a bridge too far for me to maintain at that level.

  Instead I have kept up my martial arts ever since by practising in either ninjutsu or aikido, as well as yoga, as often as I can. All of these are less physical than karate, but feel like more of a life-journey to master as an art form. And on that journey I am still at the very beginning.

  But it all began with the foghorn and those relentlessly physical Sunday-night training sessions.

  The only other karate story worth telling from school days is my dubious claim to fame of kicking a mass murderer in the balls.

  The Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal was a pupil at Eton at the same time as me, and he also loved his karate. We would often train together, and he became a good friend in many ways, despite being quite an unusual character at times.

  Fighting with him did, though, require a degree of respect, as he was, after all, royalty and a semi-deity in his home country.

  Having said that, he was also pretty wild, and was not only older and stronger than me, but also a terrifying fighter, with his deep black moustache and ponytail. So I felt quite free to give it my all.

  On one occasion, a hard front kick from me, aimed at his stomach, ended up ricocheting off and planting itself firmly in his groin.

  Ow.

  All my apologies didn’t help the fact that he couldn’t walk properly for a week.

  Some ten or so years later, back in his home country, he went completely insane and, in a fit of drug- and alcohol-induced rage, driven by some family dispute, he shot dead almost the entire royal family as they sat at dinner.

  It was the Kingdom of Nepal’s darkest hour.

  CHAPTER 21

  The karate gave me a great avenue to be able to push myself physically – and I thrived on the challenge.

  I wanted more.

  I started to run, but not normally. I would load up a backpack with weights and run at night for long distances, pouring with sweat. I pushed myself hard – sometimes until I vomited. I was exploring my limits and I felt alive on that edge. I was never the fastest, the strongest or the best at anything, but that only served to fire me.

  I had a hunger to push myself, and I found out that I could dig very deep when I needed to. I don’t really know where or how this hunger came about, but I had it. I call it the ‘fire’.

  Maybe it was trying to seek an identity in this big new world. Maybe it was frustration from my younger years. I don’t really know; but I did know that I was beginning to be able to do stuff that no one else at school could do, and it felt good.

  One of those things was climbing. Not just normal climbing. I developed a taste for climbing the highest school buildings and steeples, at night.

  And I loved it.

  I would explore all the forbidden areas of the school and grounds, and I knew I was faster and more agile than any of the security guards that patrolled the college.

  I remember one night attempting an ascent of the school library dome, which stood about a hundred and twenty feet high on top of a huge classical library building.

  The top dome was lead-lined and as smooth as marble, but with a classic line of weakness – the lightning conductor wire running up the dome’s side.

  Sir Ranulph Fiennes, as a pupil at Eton, had wrestled with the problem of scaling this dome as well, and had finally conquered it by improvising a stepladder made with many small carpentry clamps he had ‘borrowed’ from the school’s woodwork shed.

  I knew it would be possible to do it without such climbing ‘aids’ if only the lightning conductor held my weight.

  The night of the first ascent was clear, and the sky bright with stars, and I moved nimbly from garden to garden, over walls, down passageways and across tree limbs to reach the rear foot of the building. I had one accomplice with me, my good friend Al.

  A series of rooftops, then drainpipes, put us within fifteen feet of the library roof, at which point the dome started. But to get on to the roof itself, some sixty feet up, involved first climbing an overhanging, classical-looking narrow ledge.

  Standing, balanced precariously on the narrow top of a drainpipe, you had to give a good leap up to grab hold of the narrow ledge, and then swing your whole body up and over.

  It took some guts, and a cool head for heights.

  Get it wrong and the fall was a long one, on to concrete.

  In an attempt to make it harder, the school security officers had put barbed wire all around the lip of the roof to ensure such climbs were ‘impossible’. (This was probably installed after Ran Fiennes’s escapades on to the dome all those years earlier.) But in actual fact the barbed wire served to help me as a climber. It gave me something else to hold on to.

  Once on to the roof, then came the crux of the climb.

  Locating the base of the lightning conductor was the easy bit, the tough bit was then committing to it.

  It held my weight; and it was a great sense of achievement clambering into the lead-lined small bell tower, silhouetted under the moonlight, and carving the initials BG alongside the RF of Ran Fiennes.

  Small moments like that gave me an identity.

  I wasn’t just yet another schoolboy, I was fully alive, fully me, using my skills to the max.

  And in those moments I realized I simply loved adventure.

  I guess I was discovering that what I was good at was a little off-the-wall, but at the same time recognizing a feeling in the pit of my stomach that said: Way to go, Bear, way to go.

  My accomplice never made it past the barbed wire, but waited patiently for me at the bottom. He said it had been a thoroughly sickening experience to watch, which in my mind made it even more fun.

  On the return journey, we safely crossed one college house garden and had silently traversed half of the next one.

  We were squatting behind a bush in the middle of this housemaster’s lawn, waiting to do the final leg across. The tutor’s light was on, with him burning the midnight oil marking papers probably, when he decided it was time to let his dog out for a pee. The dog smelt us instantly, went bananas, and the tutor started running towards the commotion.

  Decision time.

  ‘Run,’ I whispered, and we broke cover together and legged it towards the far side of the garden.

  Unfortunately, the tutor in question also happened to be the school cross-country instructor, so was no slouch.

  He gave chase at once, sprinting after us across the fifty metre dash. A ten-foot wall was the final obstacle and both of us, powered by adrenalin, leapt up it in one bound. The tutor was a runner, but not a climber, and we narrowly avoided his grip and sprinted off into the night.

  Up a final drainpipe, back into my open bedroom window, and it was mission accomplished.

  I couldn’t stop smiling all through the next day.

  CHAPTER 22

  I had gained another nickname at school (apart from ‘Bear’, which I had had since I was a baby, courtesy of my sister Lar
a), and that was ‘Monkey’.

  Stan started that one, and I guess my love of both building and tree-climbs was behind the name. Whether it was Bear or Monkey, I never minded, as I really didn’t like my real name of Edward – it felt so stuffy and boring. Monkey or Bear was OK by me – and they have both stuck into adult life.

  During my time at Eton, I led regular night-time adventures, and word spread. I even thought about charging to take people on trips.

  I remember one where we tried to cross the whole town of Eton in the old sewers. I had found an old grille under a bridge that led into these four-foot-high old brick pipes, running under the streets.

  It took a little nerve to probe into these in the pitch black, with no idea where the hell they were leading you; and they stank.

  I took a pack of playing cards and a torch, and I would jam cards into the brickwork every ten paces to mark my way. Eventually I found a manhole cover that lifted up, and it brought us out in the little lane right outside the headmaster’s private house.

  I loved that. ‘All crap flows from here,’ I remember us joking at that time.

  But I also sought to pursue some more legal climbing adventures, and along with Mick Crosthwaite, my future Everest climbing buddy, we helped resurrect the school’s mountaineering club.

  Eton’s great strength is that it does encourage interests – however wacky. From stamp-collecting to a cheese and wine club, mountaineering to juggling, if the will is there then the school will help you.

  Eton was only ever intolerant of two things: laziness and a lack of enthusiasm. As long as you got ‘into something’, then most other misdemeanours were forgivable. I liked that: it didn’t only celebrate the cool and sporty, but encouraged the individual, which in the game of life, matters much more.

  Hence Eton helped me to go for the Potential Royal Marines Officer Selection Course, aged only sixteen. This was a pretty gruelling three-day course of endless runs, marches, mud yomps, assault courses, high-wire confidence tests (I’m good at those!), and leadership tasks.