Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [28]
Instead of playing other schools, it was designed to play local clubs. This mainly consisted of pub teams and their female supporters, and the concept was brilliant fun, made even better by the fact that we had bright pink sweaters and it was all considered a bit of a joke.
It was just my sort of team, and I signed up at once.
One custom, that we had, was that the first person on the team to go into bat had to drink a certain quantity of liquor that the team had begged, borrowed or stolen en route to the venue beforehand.
On this particular match I was in first; a super-sized can of cider was produced from the depths of someone’s cricket bag. I drank it down, walked in to bat, took my crease, and steadied myself.
The first ball of the day came thundering down and I took a giant swipe at it and hit a belter of a six. Brilliant, I thought. Now let’s do that again.
The second ball came, and attempting another monster shot, I missed it completely, spun around, fell over and landed on my stumps. Out!
As I returned to the pavilion, I noticed, sitting on the sideline, a beautiful girl in a flowing summer dress sipping a can of Coke and smiling at me. If my legs weren’t like jelly from the cider, they definitely were now.
We got chatting, and I discovered that she was called Tatiana, and that her brother was playing for the opposition. She had also found my batting saga quite amusing.
To top it all, she was aged twenty – two years older than me – and didn’t go to a convent school, but to a German university.
Now, there was a weekend out of school coming up the next day, and I had planned to head down home to the Isle of Wight with about ten school friends, all together. I boldly asked Tatiana if she might like to join us. (I was buzzing on adrenalin and cider, and couldn’t believe I had actually dared to invite her out.)
She accepted and, before I knew what was happening, we were at home in the Isle of Wight, my parents away, and with all my friends and this beautiful girl – who for some unknown reason couldn’t get enough of me.
This was indeed very new territory.
We had an amazing weekend, and I got to kiss Tatiana non-stop for thirty-six hours, and she even shared my bed for two whole nights.
Unbelievable.
Sadly she then returned to university in Germany, and that was the end of that. I guess she just moved on.
But the truth is that such good fortune didn’t come around very often at an all-boys’ school. When it did, you had to thank your lucky stars.
CHAPTER 25
Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.
I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.
But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.
As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.
But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.
Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.
The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.
The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.
I mean, what does a child know about faith?
It took a low point