Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [27]
Lesson two: tents don’t repair themselves, however tired you are, however much you wish they just would.
Inevitably, the next peg broke, and before we knew it we were lying in a wet puddle of canvas, drenched to the skin, shivering, and truly miserable.
The final key lesson learnt that night was that when it comes to camping, a stitch in time saves nine; and time spent preparing a good camp is never wasted.
The next day, we reached the top of Snowdon, wet, cold but exhilarated. My best memory was of lighting a pipe that I had borrowed off my grandfather, and smoking it with Watty, in a gale, behind the summit cairn, with the PT teacher joining in as well.
It is part of what I learnt from a young age to love about the mountains: they are great levellers.
For me to be able to smoke a pipe with a teacher was priceless in my book, and was a firm indicator that mountains, and the bonds you create with people in the wild, are great things to seek in life.
(Even better was the fact that the tobacco was home-made by Watty, and soaked in apple juice for aroma. This same apple juice was later brewed into cider by us, and it subsequently sent Chipper, one of the guys in our house, blind for twenty-four hours. Oops.)
If people ask me today what I love about climbing mountains, the real answer isn’t adrenalin or personal achievement. Mountains are all about experiencing a shared bond that is hard to find in normal life. I love that fact that mountains make everyone’s clothes and hair go messy; I love the fact that they demand that you give of yourself, that they make you fight and struggle. They also induce people to loosen up, to belly laugh at silly things, and to be able to sit and be content staring at a sunset or a log fire.
That sort of camaraderie creates wonderful bonds between people, and where there are bonds I have found that there is almost always strength.
Anyway, now for the second story: and to the subject of girls.
Or lack of them.
CHAPTER 24
Eton, for all its virtues, seriously lacked girls. (Well, apart from the kitchen girls who we camped out on the roof waiting for night after night.)
But beyond that, and the occasional foxy daughter of a teacher, it was a desert. (Talking of foxy daughters, I did desperately fancy the beautiful Lela, who was the daughter of the clarinet teacher. But she ended up marrying one of my best friends from Eton, Tom Amies – and everyone was very envious. Great couple. Anyway, we digress.)
As I said, apart from that … it was a desert.
All of us wrote to random girls that we vaguely knew or had maybe met once, but if we were honest, it was all in never-never land.
I did meet one quite nice girl who I discovered went to school relatively nearby to Eton. (Well, about thirty miles nearby, that is.)
I borrowed a friend’s very old, single-geared, rusty bicycle and headed off one Sunday afternoon to meet this girl. It took me hours and hours to find the school, and the bike became steadily more and more of an epic to ride, not only in terms of steering but also just to pedal, as the rusty cogs creaked and ground.
But finally I reached the school gates, pouring with sweat.
It was a convent school, I found out, run entirely by nuns.
Well, at least they should be quite mild-natured and easy to give the slip to, I thought.
That was my first mistake.
I met the girl as prearranged, and we wandered off down a pretty, country path through the local woods. I was just summoning up the courage to make a move when I heard this whistle, followed by this shriek, from somewhere behind us.
I turned to see a nun with an Alsatian, running towards us, shouting.
The young girl gave me a look of terror, and pleaded with me to run for my life – which I duly did. I managed to escape and had another monster cycle ride back to school, thinking: Flipping Nora, this girl business is proving harder work than I first imagined.
But I persevered.
One good way of meeting girls was to