Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [9]
It took a while to understand where this love of the wild came from, but in truth it probably developed from the intimacy found with my father on the shores of Northern Ireland and the will to escape a loving but bossy elder sister. (God bless her!)
I can joke about this nowadays with Lara, and through it all she still remains my closest ally and friend; but she is always the extrovert, wishing she could be on the stage or on the chat show couch, where I tend just to long for quiet times with my friends and family.
In short, Lara would be much better at being famous than me. She sums it up well, I think:
Until Bear was born I hated being the only child – I complained to Mum and Dad that I was lonely. It felt weird not having a brother or sister when all my friends had them. Bear’s arrival was so exciting (once I’d got over the disappointment of him being a boy, because I’d always wanted a sister!).
But the moment I set eyes on him, crying his eyes out in his crib, I thought: That’s my baby. I’m going to look after him. I picked him up, he stopped crying, and from then until he got too big, I dragged him around everywhere.
One of the redeeming factors of my early years in smoky London was that I got to join the Scouts aged six, and I loved it.
I remember my first day at the Scouts, walking in and seeing all these huge boys with neatly pressed shirts, covered in awards and badges. I was a tiny, skinny squirt in comparison, and I felt even smaller than I looked. But as soon as I heard the scoutmaster challenge us to cook a sausage with just one match, out on the pavement, I was hooked.
One match, one sausage … hmm. But it will never burn long enough, I thought.
Then I was shown how first to use the match to light a fire, then to cook the sausage. It was a eureka moment for me.
If anyone present during those Scout evenings had been told that one day I would hold the post of Chief Scout, and be the figurehead to twenty-eight million Scouts worldwide, they would have probably died of laughter. But what I lacked in stature and confidence, I always made up for with guts and determination, and those qualities are what really matter in both the game of life and in Scouting.
So I found great release in Scouting, and great camaraderie as well. It was like a family, and it didn’t matter what your background was.
If you were a Scout, you were a Scout, and that was what mattered.
I liked that, and my confidence grew.
CHAPTER 8
Soon my parents bought a small cottage in the Isle of Wight, and from the age of five to eight I spent the term times in London, which I dreaded, and school holidays on the island.
Dad’s job allowed for this because as an MP he got almost school-length holidays, and with a constituency situated en route between London and the Isle of Wight, he could do his Friday drive-through ‘clinic’ before heading down to the island. (It was probably not a model way to do his duties, but as far as I was concerned it worked great.)
All I wanted was to get to the island as quickly as possible. And for me it was heaven. Mum and Dad were continually building on to our small cottage, to try and make it ever slightly bigger, and soon this would become our main home.
Life on the island ranged from being wild, windy and wet in winter, to being more like a holiday camp in the summer, full of young people of my age, many of whom are still my closest friends today.
I felt, for the first time, liberated and free to explore and be myself.
The other great thing about the island was that my Grandpa Neville lived barely four hundred yards away from our house.
I remember him as one of the greatest examples of a man I have ever known, and I loved him dearly. He was gentle, kind, strong, faith-filled and fun-loving; and he loved huge bars of chocolate (despite always angrily refusing them, if given one as a treat). Without fail, they would be gone within minutes, once you walked