Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [20]
The redeeming factor was that I wasn’t the only soul who felt like this when I arrived. I was really fortunate to go into a popular ‘house’ with fun people, and it made all the difference to my time at Eton.
Very quickly, I made a few great friends, and they have remained my closest buddies ever since. But they were friendships formed in the trenches, so to speak, and there is nothing that forms friendships faster than facing off or escaping from bullies together.
It is amazing quite how small and insignificant you can feel turning up at Eton as a new boy. The older pupils look like gods and giants.
Shaving, masturbating, testosterone-fuelled giants.
Each ‘house’ is made up of fifty boys spanning across all the years, from thirteen to eighteen, and they all live in that house together.
Early on, each new boy is summoned individually to the top year’s common room (called library), and made to perform a bizarre series of rituals, determined by the older boys and their whims and perversions.
One by one we were called in.
I was one of the first. This was a good thing – it meant the older pupils had yet to get into full flow. I escaped relatively unharmed, with only having to demonstrate how to French kiss a milk bottle.
As I had only ever kissed one person (the prep-school headmaster’s daughter some months earlier, and that in itself had been an unmitigated disaster), I wasn’t exactly showing this milk bottle much of a virtuoso performance. The older boys soon got bored of me and I was dismissed; passed and accepted into the house.
I soon found my feet, and was much less homesick than I was at prep school. Thank God. I learnt that with plenty of free time on our hands, and being encouraged to fill the time with ‘interests’, I could come up with some great adventures.
I and a couple of my best friends started climbing the huge old oak trees around the grounds, finding monkey routes through the branches that allowed us to travel between the trees, high up above the ground.
It was brilliant.
We soon had built a real-life Robin Hood den, with full-on branch swings, pulleys and balancing bars high up in the treetops.
We crossed the Thames on the high girders above a railway bridge, we built rafts out of old polystyrene and even made a boat out of an old bathtub to go down the river in. (Sadly this sank, as the water came in through the overflow hole, which was a fundamental flaw. Note to self: test rafts before committing to big rivers in them.)
We spied on the beautiful French girls who worked in the kitchens, and even made camps on the rooftops overlooking the walkway they used on their way back from work. We would vainly attempt to try and chat them up as they passed.
In-between many of these antics we had to work hard academically, as well as dress in ridiculous clothes, consisting of long tailcoats and waistcoats. This developed in me the art of making smart clothes look ragged, and ever since, I have maintained a life-long love of wearing good quality clothes in a messy way. It even earned me the nickname of ‘Scug’, from the deputy-headmaster. In Eton slang this roughly translates as: ‘A person of no account, and of dirty appearance.’
CHAPTER 18
The school regime refused to make it easy for us on the dress side of things, and it dictated that even if we wanted to walk into the neighbouring town of Windsor, then we had to wear a blazer and tie.
This made us prime targets for the many locals who seemed to enjoy an afternoon of ‘beating up’ the Eton ‘toffs’.
On one occasion, I was having a pee in the loos of the Windsor McDonald’s, which were tucked away downstairs at the back of the fast food joint. I was just leaving the Gents when the door swung open, and in walked three aggressive-looking lads.
They looked as if they had struck gold on discovering this weedy, blazer-wearing Eton squirt, and I knew deep down that I was in trouble and alone. (Meanwhile, my friends were waiting for me upstairs. Some use they were being.)
I tried to squeeze past these hoodies, but they threw