Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [21]
‘Flush his head down the toilet,’ was an early suggestion. (Well, I had had that done to me many times already at Eton, I thought to myself.)
I was OK so far.
Then they suggested defecating in the loo first.
Now I was getting worried.
Then came the killer blow: ‘Let’s shave his pubes!’
Now, there is no greater embarrassment for a young teenager than being discovered to not have any pubes. And I didn’t.
That was it.
I charged at them, threw one of them against the wall, barged the other aside, squeezed through the door, and bolted. They chased after me, but once I reached the main floor of the McDonald’s I knew I was safe.
I waited with my friends inside until we were sure the thugs had all left, then, cautiously, slunk back across the bridge to school. (I think we actually waited over two hours, to be safe. Fear teaches great patience.)
There were a few other incidents that finally encouraged me to take up karate and aikido, the two martial arts that they ran at Eton.
One of those incidents involved one of the sixth-form boys in our house. I won’t name him, bully though he was, as he is probably a respectable married man and businessman now. But at the time, he was mean, aggressive and built like a body-builder.
He had these wild eyes, and after one of his heavy glue-sniffing sessions, he would tend to go insane.
His veins would look as if they were going to explode from the muscles in his arms, neck and forehead, and he had a nasty habit of announcing he was on the warpath by blasting on a foghorn that he had somehow acquired.
For a while, his chosen targets to beat up were both me and my next-door room-mate, Ed, and when that foghorn blew you knew it was time to scarper.
Once, I remember hearing it blast, and Ed and I ran into my room, frantically looking for a place to hide. We opened the cupboard, crouched inside … and hoped like hell he wouldn’t find us.
The foghorn got louder and louder, until finally my study door swung open with a bang … then there was silence.
We held our breath as this wild man turned the room upside down, breathing heavily and cursing us under his breath.
Finally there was a pause in the room’s destruction. Then we heard his footsteps move towards the cupboard. Another pause.
Then the cupboard door was torn open violently, and we were both suddenly staring into the wild frenzied eyes of our nemesis.
We screamed.
He grabbed our heads and whacked them together, and after that the rest was a bit of a blur. He threw us around the room for a while and finished with putting us both in half nelson armlocks so hard that I was convinced my shoulder would snap.
Finally, bored, he kicked us, demonstrating what he said was a ‘ninja jack-kick’, then left.
That was it, I thought to myself, I have to learn how to defend myself properly.
Apart from the odd occasion like that, and a few bog-flushings, oh, and quite regularly being winched up by your boxer shorts and hung off the clothes peg on the back of your door, the days passed busily.
The difference between the fear and bullying at Eton, to what we experienced at prep school, is that at least I didn’t have to face those demons alone. There was generally someone to share those negative experiences with.
This time round, it was my buddies and me together, taking flak in the trenches.
And, somehow, I found I thrived on our misadventures.
CHAPTER 19
I signed up as soon as I could for the karate and aikido clubs, and found that I loved the martial arts way – the focus, the camaraderie, and above all the acquiring of an art that requires the use of guile over power, technique over force.
And I stuck with it. That was the real key to getting good at martial arts: time and motivation – and I certainly had the motivation, thanks to the foghorn.
A few of my friends also signed up with me, and came along to the early classes. In actual fact they were invariably much better than me when we started – often stronger, fitter, and more