The Climb: The Autobiography

by Chris Froome

  I liked to tell people, especially Kenyans, that Rocky and Shandy were free to slither about the house at night, then return to their cage in the morning. It was a complete lie, but I saw people listening with wide eyes, thinking, ‘Wow, this boy has got snakes around his property.’

  Pythons don’t show affection or fetch sticks but there are compensations, particularly the novelty factor. Nobody I knew had two pythons. In fact, nobody I knew even had one python. When I went to the local supermarket I brought Rocky and Shandy with me. They weren’t fully grown yet. But neither was I. The sight of us freaked some people out.

  Rocky was my favourite. He was mellow and relaxed as pythons go, and I could hold him without any problems. Shandy was the opposite. He was moody and far harder to handle. Neither of them had much time for Mum. If they were in the house sitting with me on the couch and Mum came in, they didn’t like it. They either smelled her fear or her cigarette scent and if she got within a couple of metres they lunged at her. Fortunately, they never came close to catching her and when Mum left the room they would settle down again. I don’t know what it was about Mum they didn’t like. Everybody else always thought she was great.

  Not too long after the arrival of Rocky and Shandy, I went on holiday to South Africa to see Noz. Things had settled down for us all since Noz had left Kenya, although he was still struggling to build his new conference management business. I would travel to South Africa once a year or so to see him. I was amazed by the sprawling metropolis that is Johannesburg: shopping centres, movie theatres, arcades and sweetshops. The trips were good but it was always great to get back too.

  The days of going to the Banda School would soon be drawing to an end now I was thirteen, and there was no question of me following my brothers to Rugby School in England. Mum and Noz had put more thought into this than I had. One evening in Johannesburg, Noz, his partner, Jen, and I were out for something to eat at a small restaurant when Noz raised the subject. There was no beating around the bush.

  ‘You’re going to come to school here.’

  There were tears. It might have been better if he had at least attempted to beat around the bush. Back in Nairobi, Mum was now working in a surgery. She had regular clients, we were getting by financially and I loved living in Kenya. The visits to Johannesburg were always enjoyable, and always a bit different, but home was home. This was the end of the world being presented to me in a snug restaurant. Leave everything you know. Leave Mum to her fate with Rocky and Shandy. And vice versa. Say goodbye to all your friends.

  Generally, kids from the Banda School would move on to a secondary school on Langata road called Hillcrest and that’s where most of my friends were heading. Only the really bright students or those with well-off parents would go to prestigious boarding schools in the UK. But these were the facts of life: an education at Hillcrest cost three or four times more than the equivalent experience would cost in South Africa. It was not a long menu of life choices that was being offered to me in the restaurant that night.

  Noz’s business was growing slowly, that was obvious. They were still running everything from home with just one telephone, and although there was income, it was not a Rugby School level of income. It was not even enough for Hillcrest.

  This was all quite a shock but I would adapt and I would go to school in South Africa. It was not my choice because it was not a choice.

  Mum had a dread. Well, two dreads. Me leaving, and Rocky and Shandy staying. When I moved down to South Africa, the two growing pythons would not be coming with me. I told her soothingly that Rocky and Shandy were low maintenance, really. If she could just throw them each a live rabbit every month they would be fine.

  Rock pythons aren’t for everyone, although they themselves aren’t particularly choosy. In the Malindi district in Kenya a farm manager once stepped on a rock python and, having wrestled with the snake for an hour, was dragged up a tree. While hanging up there waiting to be squeezed to death and swallowed he managed to raise the alarm with his mobile phone. Villagers and police were able to free him. The snake was detained but escaped the following day.

  Tip: if you get attacked by a twelve-foot python (the southern subspecies like Rocky and Shandy don’t grow any bigger although other rock pythons can stretch to over twenty foot long) and it is trying to wrap itself around you, all you have to do is try to grab the head and hold the tail. Once you have those two in your hands you can start unwinding the snake in the opposite direction to how they are wrapping themselves around you. This was not the sort of handy hint I wanted to be leaving with my mum as I was heading off to secondary school.

  I had been bitten on numerous occasions by Rocky and Shandy. As the primary carer I often had to check their mouths for dirt. This is a common problem with snakes, and the dirt can cause an infection in their lip. To prevent this, I used newspaper as a base in their cages, but I also had to pull their lip down from time to time and use a toothpick or a small stick to remove the offending grime. They wouldn’t appreciate my dentistry at all. Rocky or Shandy would lunge and there would be a horrible ripping sound as they tore at my flesh. It was a powerful impact, and felt like somebody hitting me. When the snake pulled away I would hear more ripping and there would be blood flowing and a temporary tattoo of teeth marks. Thankfully, these bites were not poisonous, and they healed quickly.

  By the time I was due to go to South Africa in May, when I was fourteen, Rocky and Shandy would have grown to around a metre in size. Not quite huge, but still large enough to enjoy eating live rats. I started them on mice. Locally bred. I built a little cage and bought a small family of white mice that came from a lab in Nairobi. I had three or four of them to start with, but in a couple of months this grew to twenty or thirty of them scurrying around.

  The mice bred so quickly that I was able to feed Rocky and Shandy with a plentiful supply, but inevitably the snakes soon outgrew their modest diet. I could no longer even see the bulge in their stomachs after they had eaten a mouse. It was time to move on to rats. These weren’t really an option for breeding at home so I ended up buying rat traps.

  It’s an interesting fact that snakes won’t eat dead food. They are hygiene conscious like that. A dead rat would be deemed completely unacceptable from a bacterial and a freshness point of view, and for that reason Rocky and Shandy wouldn’t be enticed by anything that had already been killed. Thanks but no thanks. So the rat traps had to be non-lethal. The poor rodent would head down a funnel and get stuck. I would then come along and release the rat into the python cage. It was particularly tricky if I disturbed Rocky or Shandy by getting up and leaving suddenly just after they had killed their dinner. If I was wanted on the phone or if my mum called me, they could go right off the rat if they hadn’t started eating it yet. They would leave it there like a child refusing to eat its greens.

  I liked to innovate though. The lengths involved in catching a rat meant that having one rejected by a disturbed python was extremely frustrating. As a solution, and drawn straight from the ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ file, I experimented with putting the dead rats into the oven to heat them up again. I would then take the heated rat and dangle it annoyingly in front of Rocky and Shandy to make them agitated enough to lunge for it again. The number of times I got bitten doing that was considerable. On the other hand, who wanted to waste a rat that had taken a week to catch?

  These were activities I loved as a thirteen-year-old boy. But they would be a lot to ask of my mother when I left home.

  I came to understand my brother’s abduction of my favourite rabbit. Jeremy had a python to feed, after all. At one stage during these nomadic years of Mum and me house-sitting between Karen and Langata, we had two empty houses. We stayed in a cottage while my grandparents occupied the main house. The cottage was opposite a kindergarten which had pet bunny rabbits as class pets.

  You can sense what is coming. The bunnies couldn’t. Some days when my school had finished and after all the kindergarten kids had go
ne home I would ride around there on my bike. Firstly, I liked doing tricks on their playground where they had ramps. Secondly, the kindergarten served as a sort of takeaway restaurant. When Rocky and Shandy were still small I dropped by the rabbit cage from time to time and took away one or two baby rabbits to bring home in my pocket.

  As an adult, the guilt about that stays with me. Young children would arrive at class the next day and their little baby bunny rabbits would be gone. I did find it very hard feeding rabbits to Rocky and Shandy because the rabbits, especially when the snakes grabbed them and started the coiling process, let out a loud high-pitched squeal. I felt like intervening and stopping it. But the pythons had to be fed and it was my responsibility.

  When I got to South Africa the life expectancy of the kindergarten bunnies in my neighbourhood would mysteriously shoot up. I was not sure how Mum would feed Rocky and Shandy, but I knew that she wouldn’t be heading down to the kindergarten with two empty pockets.

  4

  A year before I was due to finish at Banda, Noz and I had spent a holiday visiting potential schools around South Africa. Mostly we looked at boarding schools. We had finally settled on St Andrew’s in Bloemfontein.

  It was tough. For a start, I arrived at a strange time. The English school system used in Kenya clashed with the South African school calendar so I arrived in Bloemfontein in the middle of the school year, and in the middle of winter. I felt as odd as a second left foot. More importantly, I was freezing, absolutely freezing. I had one duvet cover and one jumper. Everything was a shock to the system. I was so far out of my comfort zone that I became disoriented. The school was very strict, boys only and predominantly Afrikaans. It was enthusiastically Christian. We had chapel every morning and many of the pupils came from religious families. The overall feeling of the place seemed to be somewhere between a military academy and a monastery.

  In our cupboards our clothes had to be folded in an extremely specific way, with sheets of smooth paper placed inside our shirt and then the shirt folded around the paper in a particular fashion. It made our shirts look perfect and unwrinkled, which was a clever trick, but not of huge interest to me as a teenage python keeper and trick cyclist. Everything had to be meticulous.

  There were two people to a very small room, which was something of a culture shock. I was billeted with a boy called Clinton Foster. He was from Botswana, which I was pleased about because he was also not a South African. He had been there longer than me, having arrived at the right time of year, and he showed me the ropes.

  Altogether, there were four of us outsiders: myself, Clinton, a guy called Mark Dunne from Zimbabwe and one other guy, another Zimbabwean. We were put into a special class to teach us Afrikaans, with the goal of being able to pass some exams in four or five years’ time. Again, this was tough, but at least it was easy to find help in a school full of Afrikaans speakers.

  Our maths teacher was an old Afrikaner who, to my amazement, couldn’t speak more than a few sentences of English. I was being taught maths in Afrikaans and most of it was sailing over my head. Maths was still one of my favourite subjects; I had always been more at home with numbers than with words. One day in maths class the teacher was ranting on in furious Afrikaans and I was lost. I turned round to ask someone behind me what he had just said, but everyone was writing frantically and I was confused. The teacher looked round and saw me talking. He picked up one of the old wooden-backed dusters for the blackboard and hurled it straight for my head. He missed me by inches and hit the poor boy I had asked for help.

  Some of the teachers were resourceful people. One of them had a cane which he had a nickname for. It was called Poopytoll. I didn’t know what this meant, but presumably it was something imaginative about your bum being your ‘poopy’, and ‘toll’, as in paying the toll. I didn’t know precisely; I didn’t care much.

  We were a small school, consisting of just a few hundred pupils, but every morning we would face the world wearing our blue ties and blazers and our wooden boater hats. It was Afrikaans with a dash of England.

  The most difficult adjustment to make was the hard labour. We had dorm inspections twice a week, after school and on weekends. We were made to dress up in full regalia with the blazer, the hat and the tie. Then we each had to stand outside our door and wait for the axe to fall. There were rules. You couldn’t just leave your bed with a duvet and a pillow on it. Sinner! You had to pack away the pillow and the duvet and replace them with a quilt that was immaculate and absolutely free of wrinkles. Wrinkles were an abomination before the Lord. We had to fold the corners in a special way into hospital corners – the edges were so sharp and pressed that you could cut your fingers on them. Obviously if we did bleed, we would have to hold our fingers out of the window. We then had to make a perfect V and tuck the quilt under nicely so that it looked ultra-neat. I had never done anything like this in my life. The prefects would walk into the room, look around and pull the bed out to check for dust. The dust could be anywhere, from the windows to the floor, but they would find it even though we had been mopping, sweeping and panicking. We weren’t given much time to get the room ready, so the work would be frantic and our hearts would beat like crazy with fear. We were petrified by the prefects. They loved their work. They would go through our rooms forensically, snooping right into the corners, running their fingers along the skirting boards. Any brown stains or dust coming away on their fingers and we were in trouble.

  The prefect tossed our room up anyway he wanted. He threw everything out of our cupboards, crinkled all the paper for the shirts and even turned our beds upside down. Then he would calmly walk out again.

  ‘Right. Another inspection in half an hour. Get your stuff ready.’

  To add to the pressure and intensity of the situation, I’d be standing outside my door praying that they wouldn’t happen to stumble upon my secret stash of ‘tuck’ – my sweets, chocolates and biscuits that I’d brought back from my last visit home. At the bottom of my clothes cupboard, I would unscrew the floor panel and hide my bounty. Had the prefects discovered my hiding place, they would have ‘confiscated’ (and later devoured) the contents.

  We youngsters also had to skivvy to clean the room of someone older. I did it for one of the prefects but there were two or three of us on rotation so we took turns.

  If the dorms were messy or if we had been noisy after lights-out they would give us all hard labour. The prefects would take us out on a Saturday morning or a Sunday, depending on where the ‘sport’ was due to take place. A prefect once made us carry him outside on to the rugby field sitting on his couch, so that he could lounge there and watch. From his throne he would make us run and do press-ups, as well as these torture squats where we had to squat 90 degrees down until we were almost sitting. We had our hands out and we would crouch there holding the pose for maybe five minutes of agony. We were shaking but the prefect would still come along and whack our outstretched hands with a stick.

  As we were only fourteen years of age, it wasn’t hard to make us break down and start crying. A few of my overweight classmates couldn’t perform the exercises at all, but if anyone stopped then the whole group would have to start again. That was the mentality.

  It was awful, but the boys who weren’t as fit became the enemy. If they collapsed in a drill, some of my other classmates would get up and just go for them. There was fighting and deep trauma for some of my friends. I was lucky that I was in good shape so I didn’t attract too much attention.

  Hard labour was the worst, but there were other things that they didn’t tell us about in the prospectus. If we were ever late for anything, punishment would inevitably follow. Mostly they would make us stand in the quad or in front of the chapel on a weekend day from ten o’clock in the morning until four in the afternoon. Rain or shine, we would have to remain bolt upright and dead still, like figures in Pompeii. Living like this day-to-day was a struggle – but I was determined to survive.

  Although Bloemfontein was tough a
nd lonely, the experience taught me things. You are your own best resource when things are bad, and I had found my own ways of having fun. When Noz’s business started to pick up I was bought a stunt bike which I took with me to Bloemfontein after about six months, by which point I had sussed out the lie of the land. Other kids had proper bicycles but the stunt bike was all that I needed. I could get pretty high on it and the forks wouldn’t bend, no matter how hard I pounded them. I loved doing tricks, spinning it around and performing wheelies. It provided me with a world of my own to escape to. Racing would come later, but in Bloemfontein the bike served different needs. St Andrew’s was a mixed school, made up of us boarders and the day boys who got paroled to go home every evening and on weekends. The bike became my passport to freedom because I could use it to visit my friends who were day boys. I would stay weekend afternoons at a friend’s house and we would play computer games or watch television until I had to return for evening roll call.

  We had our first ride together.

  ‘You know,’ he said to me afterwards, ‘you look pretty good on a bike, a natural. You’re obviously keen and you want to improve. Why don’t you come training with us?’

  I drank that in for the instant boost it gave me. A shot of pure enthusiasm.

  ‘Really?’

  Kinjah said I was a natural. He was a pro. It had to be true.

  Later they would joke that my elbows were so wide when I rode that I looked as if I were about to start flapping my arms to take flight, but I didn’t know that then. Cycling had me, hook, line and sinker.