Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [24]
I had a hunger to push myself, and I found out that I could dig very deep when I needed to. I don’t really know where or how this hunger came about, but I had it. I call it the ‘fire’.
Maybe it was trying to seek an identity in this big new world. Maybe it was frustration from my younger years. I don’t really know; but I did know that I was beginning to be able to do stuff that no one else at school could do, and it felt good.
One of those things was climbing. Not just normal climbing. I developed a taste for climbing the highest school buildings and steeples, at night.
And I loved it.
I would explore all the forbidden areas of the school and grounds, and I knew I was faster and more agile than any of the security guards that patrolled the college.
I remember one night attempting an ascent of the school library dome, which stood about a hundred and twenty feet high on top of a huge classical library building.
The top dome was lead-lined and as smooth as marble, but with a classic line of weakness – the lightning conductor wire running up the dome’s side.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes, as a pupil at Eton, had wrestled with the problem of scaling this dome as well, and had finally conquered it by improvising a stepladder made with many small carpentry clamps he had ‘borrowed’ from the school’s woodwork shed.
I knew it would be possible to do it without such climbing ‘aids’ if only the lightning conductor held my weight.
The night of the first ascent was clear, and the sky bright with stars, and I moved nimbly from garden to garden, over walls, down passageways and across tree limbs to reach the rear foot of the building. I had one accomplice with me, my good friend Al.
A series of rooftops, then drainpipes, put us within fifteen feet of the library roof, at which point the dome started. But to get on to the roof itself, some sixty feet up, involved first climbing an overhanging, classical-looking narrow ledge.
Standing, balanced precariously on the narrow top of a drainpipe, you had to give a good leap up to grab hold of the narrow ledge, and then swing your whole body up and over.
It took some guts, and a cool head for heights.
Get it wrong and the fall was a long one, on to concrete.
In an attempt to make it harder, the school security officers had put barbed wire all around the lip of the roof to ensure such climbs were ‘impossible’. (This was probably installed after Ran Fiennes’s escapades on to the dome all those years earlier.) But in actual fact the barbed wire served to help me as a climber. It gave me something else to hold on to.
Once on to the roof, then came the crux of the climb.
Locating the base of the lightning conductor was the easy bit, the tough bit was then committing to it.
It held my weight; and it was a great sense of achievement clambering into the lead-lined small bell tower, silhouetted under the moonlight, and carving the initials BG alongside the RF of Ran Fiennes.
Small moments like that gave me an identity.
I wasn’t just yet another schoolboy, I was fully alive, fully me, using my skills to the max.
And in those moments I realized I simply loved adventure.
I guess I was discovering that what I was good at was a little off-the-wall, but at the same time recognizing a feeling in the pit of my stomach that said: Way to go, Bear, way to go.
My accomplice never made it past the barbed wire, but waited patiently for me at the bottom. He said it had been a thoroughly sickening experience to watch, which in my mind made it even more fun.
On the return journey, we safely crossed one college house garden and had silently traversed half of the next one.
We were squatting behind a bush in the middle of this housemaster’s lawn, waiting to do the final leg across. The tutor’s light was on, with him burning the midnight oil marking papers probably, when he decided it was time