Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [12]
Each morning their whole family would come downstairs, the mother dressed head to toe in furs, the father in a tight-fitting ski suit and white neck scarf, and their slightly overweight, rather snooty looking thirteen-year-old son behind, often pulling faces at me.
The hotel had the customary practice of having a breakfast form that you could hang on your door handle the night before if you wanted to eat in your room. Dad thought it would be fun to fill out our form, order 35 boiled eggs, 65 German sausages and 17 kippers, then hang it on the Swiss-German family’s door.
It was too good a gag to pass up.
We didn’t tell Mum, who would have gone mad, but instead filled out the form with great hilarity, and snuck out last thing before bed and hung it on their door handle.
At 7 a.m. we heard the father angrily sending the order back. So we repeated the gag the next day.
And the next.
Each morning the father got more and more irate, until eventually Mum got wind of what we had been doing and made me go round to apologize. (I don’t know why I had to do the apologizing when the whole thing had been Dad’s idea, but I guess Mum thought I would be less likely to get in trouble, being so small.)
Anyway, I sensed it was a bad idea to go and own up, and sure enough it was.
From that moment onwards, despite my apology, I was a marked man as far as their son was concerned.
It all came to a head when I was walking down the corridor on the last evening, after a day’s skiing, and I was just wearing my ski thermal leggings and a T-shirt. The spotty, overweight teenager came out of his room and saw me walking past him in what were effectively ladies’ tights.
He pointed at me, called me a sissy, started to laugh sarcastically and put his hands on his hips in a very camp fashion. Despite the age and size gap between us, I leapt on him, knocked him to the ground and hit him as hard as I could.
His father heard the commotion, and raced out of his room to find his son with a bloody nose and crying hysterically (and over-dramatically).
That really was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I was hauled to my parents’ room by the boy’s father and made to explain my behaviour to Mum and Dad.
Dad was hiding a wry grin, but Mum was truly horrified, and that was me grounded.
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