Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [10]
He lived to ninety-three and did his daily exercises religiously. You would hear him in his bedroom mumbling: ‘Knee-beeend, touch tooes, reach up high, and breathe …’ He said it was the key to good health. (Not sure where the chocolate or buttered toast fitted into the regime but hey, you gotta live life as well.)
Grandpa Neville died, seated on a bench at the end of our road, near the sea. I miss him still today: his long, whiskery eyebrows, his huge hands and hugs, his warmth, his prayers, his stories, but above all his shining example of how to live and how to die.
My Uncle Andrew summed Neville up beautifully:
Neville remained a schoolboy at heart; thus he had a wonderful rapport with the young. Enthusiasm, Encouragement and Love were his watchwords.
He was an usher at Winston Churchill’s funeral and moved easily amongst royalty, but was equally at ease in any company. He lived up to Kipling’s: ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch.’
He was both a perfect sportsman and a perfect gentleman. I never heard him speak ill of anyone; I never saw him perform an unkind act. He was in all respects a wonderful man.
Granny Patsie was also a huge part of my upbringing on the island: a remarkable lady with an extraordinary life behind her.
She was kind, warm, yet fragile. But to us she was simply Granny. As she got older, she struggled, with tender vulnerability, against depression. Maybe it was, in part, due to guilt over her infidelity to Neville, when she was younger.
As an antidote, though, she developed a penchant for buying expensive, but almost entirely pointless objects, in the conviction that they were great investments.
Among these, Granny bought a fully decked-out, antique, gypsy caravan, and a shop next to the village fish and chippie, two hundred yards up the road from our home. The problem was that the caravan rotted without proper upkeep, and the shop was turned into her own personal antiques/junk shop.
It was, of course, a disaster.
Add to that the fact that the shop needed manning (often by various members of our family, including Nigel, who for most of the time sat fast asleep in a deckchair outside the shop, with a newspaper over his head), and you get the idea that life was both unprofitable and characterful. But above all, it was always fun.
(Nigel was Granny’s loveable rogue of a second husband, who actually also had been a very successful politician in his time. He had won an MC (Military Cross) during the Second World War, and went on to hold a junior ministerial post in government in later life. To me, though, he was a kindly, gentle grandfather-figure, loved by us all.)
So growing up at home was always eventful, although it was also definitely chaotic. But that was typical of my parents – especially my mother, who, even by her own wacky standards, was, and remains, pretty off beat … in the best sense of the word.
In fact I tend to sum my family up with the quote: ‘Families are like fudge – mostly sweet with a few nuts!’
The good side of this meant that, as a family, we were endlessly moving around and meeting streams of interesting characters from all over the world, who gravitated to Mum – this was all just part of life. Whether we were camping in an old van, travelling to listen to some American motivational speaker, or helping Mum in her new business of selling blenders and water filters.
Meals were eaten at varying times of the day and night, pork chops were pulled out of a bin with the immortal words: ‘These are absolutely fine.’ (Even if Dad had thrown them out the day before, as they had turned silvery.)
It seemed that the sole aim of my mother was to fatten her family up as much as possible. This actually has pushed me the other way in later life and given me a probably ‘unhealthy’ obsession with being healthy. (Although I do probably have my mother to thank for my cast-iron stomach that has helped me so much filming my survival shows over the years. God bless those pork chops after all.)
Everyone