Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [18]
I was learning very young that if I was to survive this place then I had to find some coping mechanisms.
My way was to behave badly, and learn to scrap, as a way to avoid bullies wanting to target me. It was also a way to avoid thinking about home. But not thinking about home is hard when all you want is to be at home.
I missed my mum and dad terribly, and on the occasional night where I felt this worst, I remember trying to muffle my tears in my pillow whilst the rest of the dormitory slept.
In fact I was not alone in doing this. Almost everyone cried, but we all learnt to hide it, and those who didn’t were the ones who got bullied.
As a kid, you can only cry so much before you run out of tears and learn to get tough.
I meet lots of folk nowadays who say how great boarding school is as a way of toughening kids up. That feels a bit back to front to me. I was much tougher before school. I had learnt to love the outdoors and to understand the wild, and how to push myself.
When I hit school, suddenly all I felt was fear. Fear forces you to look tough on the outside, but makes you weak on the inside. This was the opposite of all I had ever known as a kid growing up.
I had been shown by my dad that it was good to be fun, cosy, homely – but then as tough as boots when needed. At prep school I was unlearning this lesson, and adopting new ways to survive.
And aged eight, I didn’t always pick them so well.
CHAPTER 16
I remember all of us in our dormitory counting down the days, (like prisoners!) until the next ‘exeat’, or weekend at home.
Boy, they took a long time to come round, and man, then the glorious weekends would go past quickly.
It was unbridled joy on the day we broke up, seeing my mum and dad arrive first out of all the parents, and have Dad press his huge nose against our classroom window, pulling a silly face. It was embarrassing, but heavenly.
Conversely, those Sunday night drives back to school were truly torturous. Give me SAS Selection any day … and that was bad, trust me.
Dad seemed to find dropping me back to school even worse than I did, which was at least some consolation. But it also just added to my confusion as to why I was being sent away.
But what made me most scared wasn’t just being away from home – it was the bullying.
A few poor, and entirely innocent boys just seemed to get picked on by one or two bullies. These bullies would truly make life hell for their hapless victims. Not only physically but also emotionally; systematically alienating their victims and teasing them relentlessly and heartlessly.
It has made me detest bullying in adult life. If I see it anywhere I go mad.
I was lucky to avoid being on the receiving end of this bullying at that young age, but it meant that I had to learn to cower and keep off the radar. And cowering and hiding are bad emotions for a kid.
Like most of the fears we all carry into later life, they are so often based on what ‘could or might’ happen, rather than what actually did.
But bullying and absent parents aside, boarding school really wasn’t all bad, and in truth I was so lucky to get an amazing education in the best ones around.
The headmaster and his wife at the school were real gems, and they genuinely cared and looked after every boy as best they could. But a school is a school, and the heart of a school is what happens when the teachers’ backs are turned.
In the school’s favour, I learnt so much more than how to hide from bullies, and we were genuinely encouraged to be real little people, with real interests.
We were allowed to make camps in the woods with our buddies, and a blind eye was turned when we sneaked off to build even better secret camps in the out-of-bounds areas. We held door-die conker championships where we soaked our conkers for weeks on end in vinegar to harden them up, and the once a term table-tennis competition was treated like Wimbledon itself.
Each Saturday night the whole school would crowd into the hall, perched on benches to watch a classic old Second World War film on an old, flickery