Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [17]
It was soon dark.
We pushed on; Dad was concerned, I could tell. He was a mountain man, but hadn’t anticipated that we would be doing anything other than a quick couple of simple ski runs. He hadn’t foreseen this. It was a simple mistake, and he acknowledged it. We kept going down; we were soon amongst deep forest, and even deeper snow.
We then reached a fork in the valley. Should we go left or right? Dad called it left. I had a very powerful intuition that right was the choice we should make. Dad insisted left. I insisted right.
It was a fifty-fifty call and he relented.
Within two hundred yards we stumbled across a snowy track through the woods and followed it excitedly. Within a mile it came out on a mountain road, and within ten minutes we had flagged down a lift from a car heading up the hill in the darkness.
We had found salvation, and I was beat.
The car dropped us off at the gates of the garrison thirty minutes later. It was, by then, late into the night, but I was suddenly buzzing with energy and excitement.
The fatigue had gone. Dad knew that I had made the right call up there – if we had chosen left we would still be trudging into the unknown.
I felt so proud.
In truth it was probably luck, but I learnt another valuable lesson that night: listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind.
As we tromped back through the barracks, though, we noticed there was an unusual amount of activity for the early hours of a weekday morning. It soon became very clear why.
First a sergeant appeared, followed by another soldier, and then we were ushered into the senior officers’ block.
There was my uncle, standing in uniform looking both tired and serious. I started to break out into a big smile. So did Dad. Well, I was excited. We had cheated a slow, lingering hypothermic death, lost together in the mountains. We were alive.
Our enthusiasm was countered by the immortal words from my uncle, the brigadier, saying: ‘I wouldn’t smile if I was you …’ He continued, ‘The entire army mountain rescue team is currently out scouring the mountains for you, on foot and in the air with the search and rescue helicopter. I hope you have a good explanation?’
We didn’t, of course, save that we had been careless, and we had got lucky; but that’s life sometimes. And the phrase: ‘I wouldn’t smile if I was you,’ has gone down into Grylls family folklore.
CHAPTER 15
Those were some of the many fun times. But life can’t be all fun – and that leads me nicely on to school.
As a young boy, I was unashamedly open to the world and hungry for adventure, but I was also very needy for both love and for home. That in itself, made me woefully unprepared for what would come next.
My parents decided the right and proper thing for a young English boy to do was to be sent away to boarding school. To me, aged eight, it was a mad idea. I mean I was still hardly big enough to tie my own shoelaces.
But my parents both felt it was the best thing for me, and so with the best of intentions, they sent me away to live and sleep at a school far from home, and I hated it.
As we pulled up at the big school gates, I saw tears rolling down my dad’s face. I felt confused as to what part of nature or love thought this was a good idea. My instinct certainly didn’t; but what did I know. I was only eight.
So I embarked on this mission called boarding school. And how do you prepare for that one?
In truth, I found it really hard; there were some great moments like building dens in the snow in winter, or getting chosen for the tennis team, or earning a naval button, but on the whole it was a survival exercise in learning to cope.
Coping with fear was the big one. The fear of being left and the fear of being bullied – both of which were very real.
What I learnt was that I couldn’t manage either of those things very well on my own.
It wasn’t anything to do with the school itself, in fact the headmaster and teachers were almost invariably kind, well-meaning and good people, but that sadly didn’t make surviving