Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Part 2
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Part 3
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Part 4
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Part 5
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Epilogue
Picture Section
Index
About the Author
Also by Bear Grylls
Copyright
Bear Grylls’ prime-time TV adventure series are some of the most watched shows on the planet, reaching an estimated 1.2 billion viewers in over 200 countries. Bear has authored twelve books, including the international bestseller Mud, Sweat and Tears, which has been translated into thirteen languages and was voted the most influential book in China in 2012.
He originally served as a Trooper with 21 SAS, as part of the UK Reserve Special Forces, and subsequently led many record-breaking expeditions to the world’s extremes, raising millions of pounds for children’s charities. In recognition of this Bear was made an honorary Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy as well as a Colonel in the elite Royal Marines Commandos. In 2009, Bear took over as the youngest ever Chief Scout to the Scouting Association, acting as a figurehead to 30 million Scouts around the globe.
He lives with his wife, Shara, and their three sons, Jesse, Marmaduke and Huckleberry, on a Dutch barge in London and on a small remote island off the coast of Wales.
For more information on Bear Grylls and his books, see www.beargrylls.com
Bear Grylls is a man who has always sought the ultimate in adventure.
Growing up on the Isle of Wight, he was taught by his father to sail and climb at an early age. Inevitably, it wasn’t long before Bear was leading out-of-bounds night-climbing missions at school.
As a teenager, he found identity and purpose through both mountaineering and martial arts, which led the young adventurer to the foothills of the mighty Himalayas and a grandmaster’s karate training camp in Japan.
On returning home, he embarked upon the notoriously gruelling selection course for the British Special Forces to join 21 SAS – a journey that was to push him to the very limits of physical and mental endurance.
Then, in a horrific free-fall parachuting accident in Africa, Bear broke his back in three places. It was touch and go whether he would ever walk again. However, only eighteen months later and defying doctors’ expectations, Bear became one of the youngest ever climbers to scale Everest, aged only twenty-three.
But this was just the beginning of his many extraordinary adventures …
Known and admired by millions – whether from his global adventure TV series, as a bestselling author, or as Chief Scout to the Scouting Association – Bear Grylls has survived where few would dare to go.
Now, for the first time, Bear tells the story of his action-packed life. Gripping, moving and wildly exhilarating, Mud, Sweat and Tears is a must-read for adrenalin junkies and armchair adventurers alike.
The air temperature is minus twenty degrees. I wiggle my fingers but they’re still freezing cold. Old frostnip injuries never let you forget. I blame Everest for that.
‘You set, buddy?’ cameraman Simon asks me, smiling. His rig is all prepped and ready.
I smile back. I am unusually nervous.
Something doesn’t quite feel right.
But I don’t listen to the inner voice.
It is time to go to work.
The crew tell me that the crisp northern Canadian Rockies look spectacular this morning. I don’t really notice.
It is time to get into my secret space. A rare part of me that is focused, clear, brave, precise. It is the part of me I know the best, but visit the least.
I only like to use it sparingly. Like now.
Beneath me is three hundred feet of steep snow and ice. Steep but manageable.
I have done this sort of fast descent many, many times. Never be complacent, the voice says. The voice is always right.
A last deep breath. A look to Simon. A silent acknowledgement back.
Yet we have cut a vital corner. I know it. But I do nothing.
I leap.
I am instantly taken by the speed. Normally I love it. This time I am worried.
I never feel worried in the moment.
I know something is wrong.
I am soon travelling at over 40 m.p.h. Feet first down the mountain. The ice races past only inches from my head. This is my world.
I gain even more speed. The edge of the peak gets closer. Time to arrest the fall.
I flip nimbly on to my front and drive the ice axe into the snow. A cloud of white spray and ice soars into the air. I can feel the rapid deceleration as I grind the axe deep into the mountain with all my power.
It works like it always does. Like clockwork. Total confidence. One of those rare moments of lucidity.
It is fleeting. Then it is gone.
I am now static.
The world hangs still. Then – bang.
Simon, his heavy wooden sledge, plus solid metal camera housing, piles straight into my left thigh. He is doing in excess of 45 m.p.h. There is an instant explosion of pain and noise and white.
It is like a freight train. And I am thrown down the mountain like a doll.
Life stands still. I feel and see it all in slow motion.
Yet in that split second I have only one realization: a one-degree different course and the sledge’s impact would have been with my head. Without doubt, it would have been my last living thought.
Instead, I am in agony, writhing.
I am crying. They are tears of relief.
I am injured, but I am alive.
I see a helicopter but hear no sound. Then the hospital. I have been in a few since Man vs. Wild/Born Survivor: Bear Grylls began. I hate them.
I can see them all through closed eyes.
The dirty, bloodstained emergency room in Vietnam, after I severed half my finger off in the jungle. No bedside graces there.
Then the rockfall in the Yukon. Not to mention the way worse boulder-fall in Costa Rica. The mineshaft collapse in Montana or that saltwater croc in Oz. Or the sixteen-foot tiger that I landed on in the Pacific versus the snake-bite in Borneo.
Countless close shaves.
They all blur. All bad.
Yet all good. I am alive.
There are too many to hold grudges. Life is all about the living.
I am smiling.
The next day, I forget the crash. To me, it is past. Accidents happen, it was no one’s fault.
Lessons learnt.
Listen to the voice.
I move on.
‘Hey, Si, I’m cool. Just buy me a pina colada when we get out of here. Oh, and I’ll be sending you the evac, doc and physio bills.’
He reaches for my hand. I love this man.
We’ve lived some life out there.
I look down to the floor: at my ripped mountain salopettes, bloodstained jacket, smashed mini-cam and broken goggles.
I quietly wonder: when did all this craziness become my world?
‘The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation.’
Walter Smiles, my great-grandfather, had a very clear dream for his life. As he breathed in the fresh salty air of the northern Irish coast that he loved so dearly, he gazed out over the remote Copeland Islands of County Down. He vowed to himself that it would be here, at Portavo Point, on this wild, windswept cove, that one day he would return to live.
He dreamt of making his fortune, marrying his true love and building a house for his bride here, on this small cove overlooking this dramatic Irish coastline. It was a dream that would shape, and ultimately end, his life.
Walter came from a strong line of self-motivated, determined folk: not grand, not high society, but no-nonsense, family minded, go-getters. His grandfather had been Samuel Smiles who, in 1859, authored the original ‘motivational’ book titled Self-Help. It was a landmark work, and an instant best-seller, even outselling Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species when it was first launched.
Samuel’s book Self-Help also made plain the mantra that hard work and perseverance were the keys to personal progress. At a time in Victorian society where, as an Englishman, the world was your oyster if you had the get up and go to make things happen, his book Self-Help struck a chord. It became the ultimate Victorian ‘how to’ guide, empowering the everyday person to reach for the sky. And at its heart it said that nobility is not a birthright, but is defined by our actions. It laid bare the simple but unspoken secrets for living a meaningful, fulfilling life, and it defined a gentleman in terms of character not blood type.
Riches and rank have no necessary connection with genuine gentlemanly qualities.
The poor man with a rich spirit is in all ways superior to the rich man with a poor spirit.
To borrow St Paul’s words, the former is as ‘having nothing, yet possessing all things’, while the other, though possessing all things, has nothing.
Only the poor in spirit are really poor. He who has lost all, but retains his courage, cheerfulness, hope, virtue and self-respect, is still rich.
These were revolutionary words to Victorian, aristocratic, class-ridden England. To drive the point home (and no doubt prick a few hereditary aristocratic egos along the way), Samuel made the point again, that being a gentleman is something that has to be earned: ‘There is no free pass to greatness.’
Samuel Smiles ends his book with the following moving story of the ‘gentleman’ general:
The gentleman is characterised by his sacrifice of self, and preference of others, in the little daily occurrences of life … we may cite the anecdote of the gallant Sir Ralph Abercromby, of whom it is related, that, when mortally wounded in the battle of Aboukir, and, to ease his pain, a soldier’s blanket was placed under his head, from which he experienced considerable relief.
He asked what it was.
‘It’s only a soldier’s blanket,’ was the reply.
‘Whose blanket is it?’ said he, half lifting himself up.
‘Only one of the men’s.’
‘I wish to know the name of the man whose blanket this is.’
‘It is Duncan Roy’s, of the 42nd, Sir Ralph.’
‘Then see that Duncan Roy gets his blanket this very night.’
Even to ease his dying agony the general would not deprive the private soldier of his blanket for one night.
As Samuel wrote: ‘True courage and gentleness go hand in hand.’
It was in this family, belief system and heritage that Walter, my great-grandfather, grew up and dared to dream.
During the First World War, Great-grandpa Walter sought action wherever and whenever he could. He was noted as one of those ‘rare officers who found complete release in action’.
He obtained a pilot’s certificate but, realizing that action in the air was unlikely due to the lack of aircraft, he transferred as a sub-lieutenant to the Royal Naval Armoured Car Division, an early Special Forces organization formed by Winston Churchill.
Unlike the British officers on the Western Front, who were imprisoned in their trenches for months on end, he moved around many of the main theatres of war – and he was in his element. Even Walter’s CO noted in an official report: ‘The cheerful acceptance of danger and hardship by Lieutenant Smiles is very noteworthy.’
He was then seconded to the Czar’s Russian Imperial Army, to fight the Turks on the Caucasian front. And it was here that Walter was promoted swiftly: lieutenant in 1915, lieutenant commander in 1917 and commander in 1918. He was highly decorated during this time, receiving a DSO (1916) and Bar (1917), a ‘Mention in Despatches’ (1919), along with Russian and Romanian decorations.
The citation for his first DSO stated: ‘He was wounded on the 28th November, 1916, in Dobrudja. On coming out of hospital he volunteered to lead a flying squadron for special duty round Braila, and his gallantry on this occasion was the chief factor of success.’
On one occasion, when in action with a light armoured car, he got out twice to start it up under heavy fire. Being struck by a bullet he rolled into a ditch and fought on all day under attack. Despite the fact that Walter was wounded, within twenty-four hours he was back with his unit, chomping at the bit. As soon as he was on his feet, he was leading his vehicles into action again. Walter was proving himself both recklessly committed, and irrepressibly bold.
An extract from the Russian Journal in 1917 stated that Walter was ‘an immensely courageous officer and a splendid fellow’. And the Russian Army commander wrote to Walter’s commanding officer, saying: ‘The outstanding bravery and unqualified gallantry of Lieutenant Commander Smiles have written a fine page in British military annals, and give me the opportunity of requesting for him the decoration of the highest order, namely the St George of the 4th class.’ At the time this was the highest gallantry award given by the Russians to any officer.
To be honest, I grew up imagining that my great-grandfather, with a name like Walter, might have been a bit stuffy or serious. Then I discover, after a bit of digging, that in fact he was wild, charismatic and brave beyond the natural. I also love the fact that in the family portraits I have seen of Walter, he looks exactly like Jesse, my eldest son. That always makes me smile. Walter was a great man to be like. His medals are on our wall at home still today, and I never quite understood how brave a man my great-grandfather had been.
After the war, Walter returned to India, where he had been working previously. He was remembered as an employer who ‘mixed freely with the natives employed on his tea plantations, showing a strong concern with the struggles of the “lower” castes’. In 1930, he was knighted, Sir Walter Smiles.
It was on a ship sailing from India back to England that Walter met his wife-to-be, Margaret. Margaret was a very independent, middle-aged woman: heavily into playing bridge and polo, beautiful, feisty and intolerant of fools. The last thing she expected as she settled into her gin and tonic and a game of cards on the deck of the transport ship was to fall in love. But that was how she met Walter, and that’s how love often is. It comes unexpectedly and it can change your life.
Walter married Margaret soon after returning, and despite her ‘advancing’ years, she soon fell pregnant – to her absolute horror. It just wasn’t ‘right’ for a lady in her forties to give birth, or so she thought, and she went about doing everything she possibly could to make the pregnancy fail.
My grandmother, Patsie (who at this stage was the unborn child Margaret was carrying), recounts how her mother had: ‘promptly gone out and done the three worst things if you were pregnant. She went for a very aggressive ride on her horse, drank half a bottle of gin and then soaked for hours in a very hot bath.’
The plan failed (thank God), and in April 1921, Walter and Margaret’s only child, Patricia (or Patsie), my grandmother, was born.
On returning to Northern Ireland from India, Walter finally fulfilled his dream. He built Margaret a house on that very same point in County Down that he had stood so many years earlier.
With a diplomat’s mind and a sharp intellect, he then entered the world of politics, finally winning the Northern Irish seat of North Down in Ulster, where he served loyally.
But on Saturday, 30 January 1953, all that was about to change. Walter was hoping to fly back home from Parliament in London, to Ulster. But that night a storm was brewing, bringing with it some of the worst weather the UK had experienced for over a decade. His flight was duly cancelled, and instead he booked a seat on the night train to Stranraer.
The next day, the storm building menacingly, Walter boarded the car ferry, the Princess Victoria, for Larne, in Northern Ireland. The passengers were reassured that the vessel was fit to sail. Time was money, and the ferry duly left port.
What happened that night has affected the towns of Larne and Stranraer to this very day. Preventable accidents – where man has foolishly challenged nature and lost – do that to people.
Note to self: take heed.
Walter and Margaret’s house, on the shores of Donaghadee, was known simply as ‘Portavo Point’.
The lovingly built house commanded sweeping views over the coastline, where on a clear day you could see over the distant islands and out to sea.
It was, and still is, a magical place.
But not on that night.
On board the ferry, Walter watched the Scottish coastline fade as the steel, flat-hulled ship slid out into the jaws of the awaiting tempest. The crossing became progressively rougher and rougher as the weather deteriorated even further. Until, only a few miles from her Northern Irish destination, the Princess Victoria found herself in the middle of one of the most ferocious Irish Sea storms ever witnessed.
Initially the ferry rode it, but a weakness in the ferry stern doors would prove disastrous.
Slowly the doors started to ship in water. As the seawater poured in and the waves began to break over the freeboard, the ship began to lose her ability to manoeuvre or make headway.
The bilges, also, were struggling to cope. Leaking stern doors and an inability to clear excess water are a killer combination in any storm.
It was only a matter of time before the sea would overpower her.
Soon, swung broadside to the waves by the power of the wind, the Princess Victoria began to lurch and tilt under the weight of the incoming water. The captain ordered the lifeboats to be lowered.
A survivor told the Ulster High Court that Walter was heard giving out the instructions: ‘Carry on giving out life jackets to the women and children.’
Over the roar of the wind and storm, the captain and his crew ushered the panic-stricken passengers into the lifeboats.
No one was to know that they were lowering the women and children to their deaths.
As the lifeboats were launched, the passengers were trapped in that ‘dead man’s zone’ between the hull of the steel ferry and the breaking white water of the oncoming waves.
In the driving wind and rain this was a fatal place to be caught.
The lifeboats lurched, then pitched repeatedly under the violence of the breaking waves. They were unable to escape from the side of the ferry. The crew were powerless to make progress against the ferocity of the wind and waves, until eventually, one by one, almost every lifeboat had been capsized.
Survival time would now be reduced to minutes in the freezing Irish January sea.
The storm was winning and the speed with which the waves began to overpower the vessel now accelerated. The ferry was waging a losing battle against the elements; and both the captain and Walter knew it.
The Donaghadee lifeboat, the Sir Samuel Kelly, set out into the ferocious sea at approximately 1.40 p.m. on the Saturday, and managed to reach the stricken ferry.
Fighting gale force waves and wind, they managed to retrieve only thirty-three of the 165 passengers.
As a former pilot in the First World War, Walter had always preferred flying as a means of travel, rather than going by sea. Whenever he was in the Dakota, flying over to Northern Ireland, he always asked for the front seat, joking that if it crashed then he wanted to die first.
It was bitter irony it wasn’t a plane that was going to kill him, but the sea.
Everything he could possibly do to help had been done; every avenue exhausted. No lifeboats remained. Walter quietly retired to his cabin, to wait – to wait for the sea to deal her final blow.
The wait wasn’t long, but it must have felt like an eternity. The glass in Walter’s cabin porthole would have shattered into a thousand fragments as it succumbed to the relentless pressure of the water.
Walter, my great-grandfather, the captain of the Princess Victoria and 129 other crew and passengers were soon swallowed by the blackness.
Gone.
They were only a few miles from the Ulster coast, almost within sight of Walter and Margaret’s house at Portavo Point.
Standing at the bay window of the drawing room, watching as the coastguard flares lit up the sky, summoning the Donaghadee lifeboat crew to action stations, Margaret and her family could only wait anxiously, and pray.
Their prayers were never answered.
The Donaghadee lifeboat went to sea again at 7.00 a.m. on the Sunday morning, in eerie, post-storm, calm conditions – they found scattered bits of wreckage and took on board the bodies of eleven men, one woman and a child.
There was not one soul found alive, and all the remaining bodies were lost to the sea.
That very same day, Margaret, in shock, performed the grisly task of identifying bodies on the quayside of Donaghadee harbour.
Her beloved’s body was never found.
Margaret never recovered, and within a year, she died of a broken heart.
At a memorial service attended by over a thousand people in the parish church at Bangor, the Bishop of Down said in his address that Walter Smiles died, as he lived: ‘a good, brave, unselfish man who lived up to the command: “Look not every man to his own things, but every man, also, to the good of others.”’
Almost a hundred years earlier, to the day, Samuel Smiles had written the final pages of his book Self-Help. It included this moving tale of heroism as an example for the Victorian Englishman to follow. For the fate of my great-grandfather, Walter, it was poignant in the extreme.
The vessel was steaming along the African coast with 472 men and 166 women and children on board.
The men consisted principally of recruits who had been only a short time in the service.
At two o’clock in the morning, while all were asleep below, the ship struck with violence upon a hidden rock, which penetrated her bottom; and it was at once felt that she would go down.
The roll of the drums called the soldiers to arms on the upper deck, and the men mustered as if on parade.
The word was passed to ‘save the women and children’; and the helpless creatures were brought from below, mostly undressed, and handed silently into the boats.
When they had all left the ship’s side, the commander of the vessel thoughtlessly called out, ‘All those that can swim, jump overboard and make for the boats.’
But Captain Wright, of the 91st Highlanders, said, ‘No! If you do that, the boats with the women will be swamped.’ So the brave men stood motionless. Not a heart quailed; no one flinched from his duty.
‘There was not a murmur, nor a cry amongst them,’ said Captain Wright, a survivor, ‘until the vessel made her final plunge.’
Down went the ship, and down went the heroic band, firing a volley shot of joy as they sank beneath the waves.
Glory and honour to the gentle and the brave!
The examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal.
As a young man, Walter undoubtedly would have read and known those words from his grandfather’s book.
Poignant in the extreme.
Indeed, the examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal.
Margaret’s daughter, Patsie, my grandmother, was in the prime of her life when the Princess Victoria sank. The media descended on the tragedy with reportage full of heroism and sacrifice.
Somehow the headlines dulled Patsie’s pain. For a while.
In a rush of grief-induced media frenzy, Patsie found herself winning a by-election to take over her father’s Ulster seat in Parliament.
The glamorous, beautiful daughter takes over her heroic father’s political seat. It was a script made for a film.
But life isn’t celluloid, and the glamour of Westminster would exact a dreadful toll on Northern Ireland’s youngest-ever female MP.
Patsie had married Neville Ford, my grandfather: a gentle giant of a man, and one of seven brothers and sisters.
Neville’s father had been the Dean of York and Headmaster of Harrow School. His brother Richard, a young sporting prodigy, had died suddenly and unexpectedly a day before his sixteenth birthday whilst a pupil at Eton; and one of Neville’s other brothers, Christopher, had been tragically killed in Anzio during the Second World War.
But Neville survived, and he shone.
Voted the best looking man at Oxford, he was blessed with not only good looks, but also a fantastic sporting eye. He played top-level county cricket and was feted in the newspapers as a huge ‘hitter of sixes’, with innings becoming of his six foot three frame. But marrying the love of his life, Patsie, was where his heart lay.
He was as content as any man can hope to be, living with his bride in rural Cheshire. He took up a job with Wiggins Teape, the paper manufacturers, and together he and Patsie began to raise a small family in the countryside.
For Patsie to follow so publicly in her father’s footsteps was a decision that troubled Neville, however. He knew that it would change all their lives drastically. But he consented all the same.
The glamour of Westminster was intoxicating for his young wife, and the Westminster corridors were equally intoxicated by the bright and beautiful Patsie.
Neville waited and watched patiently from their home in Cheshire. But in vain.
It wasn’t long before Patsie became romantically involved with a Member of Parliament. The MP vowed to leave his wife, if Patsie left Neville. It was a clichéd, empty promise. But the tentacles of power had firmly grasped the young Patsie. She chose to leave Neville.
It was a decision that she regretted until her dying day.
Sure enough, the MP never left his wife. Yet by now Patsie had burnt her bridges and life moves ever on.
But the damage, that would affect our family, was done; and for Neville and Patsie’s two young daughters (Sally, my mother, and her sister, Mary-Rose), their world was turning.
For Neville it was beyond heart-breaking.
Patsie was soon wooed by another politician, Nigel Fisher, and this time she married him. But from early on in their marriage, Patsie’s new husband, Nigel, was unfaithful.
Yet she stayed with him and bore the burden, with the flawed conviction that somehow this was God’s punishment to her for leaving Neville, the one man who had ever truly loved her.
Patsie raised Sally and Mary-Rose, and she went on to achieve so much with her life, including founding one of Northern Ireland’s most successful charities: the Women’s Caring Trust, that still today helps communities come together through music, the arts and even climbing. (Climbing has always been in the family blood!)
Granny Patsie was loved by many and had that great strength of character that her father and grandfather had always shown. But somehow that regret from her early life never really left her.
She wrote a very poignant but beautiful letter on life to Lara, my sister, when she was born, that ended like this:
Savour the moments of sheer happiness like a precious jewel – they come unexpectedly and with an intoxicating thrill.
But there will also be moments, of course, when everything is black – perhaps someone you love dearly may hurt or disappoint you and everything may seem too difficult or utterly pointless. But remember, always, that everything passes and nothing stays the same … and every day brings a new beginning, and nothing, however awful, is completely without hope.
Kindness is one of the most important things in life and can mean so much. Try never to hurt those you love. We all make mistakes, and sometimes, terrible ones, but try not to hurt anyone for the sake of your own selfishness.
Try always to think ahead and not backwards, but don’t ever try to block out the past, because that is part of you and has made you what you are. But try, oh try, to learn a little from it.
It wasn’t until the final years of her life, that Neville and Patsie became almost ‘reunited’.
Neville now lived a few hundred yards from the house that I grew up in as a teenager on the Isle of Wight, and Patsie in her old age would spend long summers living with us there as well.
The two of them would take walks together and sit on the bench overlooking the sea. But Neville always struggled to let her in close again, despite her warmth and tenderness to him.
Neville had held fifty years of pain after losing her, and such pain is hard to ignore. As a young man I would often watch her slip her fingers into his giant hand, and it was beautiful to see.
I learnt two very strong lessons from them: the grass isn’t always greener elsewhere, and true love is worth fighting for.
During the first few years of my life, all school holidays were spent at Portavo Point, in Donaghadee, on the Northern Irish coast – the same house where my great-grandfather Walter had lived, and so near to where he ultimately died.
I loved that place.
The wind off the sea and the smell of salt water penetrated every corner of the house. The taps creaked when you turned them and the beds were so old and high that I could only reach into mine by climbing up the bedstead.
I remember the smell of the old Yamaha outboard engine in our ancient wooden boat that my father would carry down to the shore to take us out in on calm days. I remember walks through the woods with bluebells in full bloom. I especially loved hiding and running amongst the trees, getting my father to try and find me.
I remember being pushed by my elder sister, Lara, on a skateboard down the driveway and crashing into the fence; or lying in a bed beside Granny Patsie, both of us ill with measles, quarantined to the garden shed to keep us away from everyone else.
I remember swimming in the cold sea and eating boiled eggs every day for breakfast.
In essence, it was the place where I found my love of the sea and of the wild.
But I didn’t know it at the time.
Conversely, the school term times would be spent in London where my father worked as a politician. (It was a strange, or not so strange, irony that my mother married a future MP, after witnessing the dangerous power of politics first-hand growing up, with Patsie as her mother.)
When my parents married, Dad was working as a wine importer, having left the Royal Marine Commandos where he had served as an officer for three years. He then went on to run a small wine bar in London before finally seeking election as a local councillor and subsequently as a Member of Parliament for Chertsey, just south of London.
More importantly, my father was, above all, a good man: kind, gentle, fun, loyal and loved by many. But, growing up, I remember those times spent in London as quite lonely for me.
Dad was working very hard, and often late into the evenings, and Mum, as his assistant, worked beside him. I struggled, missing just having time together as a family – calm and unhurried.
Looking back, I craved some peaceful time with my parents. And it is probably why I behaved so badly at school.
I remember once biting a boy so hard that I drew blood, and then watching as the teachers rang my father to say they didn’t know what to do with me. My father said he knew what to do with me, though, and came down to the school at once.
With a chair placed in the middle of the gym, and all the children sitting cross-legged on the floor around him, he whacked me until my bum was black and blue.
The next day, I slipped my mother’s hand in a busy London street and ran away, only to be picked up by the police some hours later. I wanted attention, I guess.
My mother was forever having to lock me away in my bedroom for trouble-making, but she would then get concerned that I might run out of oxygen, so had a carpenter make some air-holes in the door.
They say that necessity is the mother of all invention, and I soon worked out that, with a bent-over coat hanger, I could undo the latch through the air-holes and escape. It was my first foray into the world of adapting and improvising, and those skills have served me well over the years.
At the same time, I was also developing a love of the physical. Mum would take me every week to a small gymnasium for budding gymnasts, run by the unforgettable Mr Sturgess.
The classes were held in a dusty old double garage behind a block of flats in Westminster.
Mr Sturgess ran the classes with iron, ex-military discipline. We each had ‘spots’ on the floor, denoting where we should stand rigidly to attention, awaiting our next task. And he pushed us hard. It felt like Mr Sturgess had forgotten that we were only aged six – but as kids, we loved it.
It made us feel special.
We would line up in rows beneath a metal bar, some seven feet off the ground, then one by one we would say: ‘Up, please, Mr Sturgess,’ and he would lift us up and leave us hanging, as he continued down the line.
The rules were simple: you were not allowed to ask permission to drop off until the whole row was up and hanging, like dead pheasants in a game larder. And even then you had to request: ‘Down, please, Mr Sturgess.’ If you buckled and dropped off prematurely, you were sent back in shame to your spot.
I found I loved these sessions and took great pride in determining to be the last man hanging. Mum would say that she couldn’t bear to watch as my little skinny body hung there, my face purple and contorted in blind determination to stick it out until the bitter end.
One by one the other boys would drop off the bar, and I would be left hanging there, battling to endure until the point where even Mr Sturgess would decide it was time to call it.
I would then scuttle back to my mark, grinning from ear to ear.
‘Down, please, Mr Sturgess,’ became a family phrase for us, as an example of hard physical exercise, strict discipline and foolhardy determination. All of which would serve me well in later military days.
So my training was pretty well rounded. Climbing. Hanging. Escaping.
I loved them all.
Mum, still to this day, says that growing up I seemed destined to be a mix of Robin Hood, Harry Houdini, John the Baptist and an assassin.
I took it as a great compliment.
My favourite times from that era were Tuesdays after school, when I would go to my Granny Patsie’s flat for tea, and to spend the night.
I remember the smell there as a mix of Silk Cut cigarettes and the baked beans and fish fingers she cooked me for tea. But I loved it. It was the only place away from home that I wasn’t ever homesick.
When my parents were away, I would often be sent to spend the night in the house of an older lady who I didn’t know, and who didn’t seem to know me, either. (I assume it was a friendly neighbour or acquaintance, or at least hope it was.)
I hated it.
I remember the smell of the old leather photo frame containing a picture of my mum and dad that I would cling to in the strange bed. I was too young to understand that my parents would be coming back soon.
But it taught me another big lesson: don’t leave your children if they don’t want you to.
Life, and their childhood, is so short and fragile.
Through all these times and formative young years, Lara, my sister, was a rock to me. My mother had suffered three miscarriages after having Lara, and eight years on she was convinced that she wasn’t going to be able to have more children. But Mum got pregnant, and she tells me she spent nine months in bed to make sure she didn’t miscarry.
It worked. Mum saved me.
The end result, though, was that she was probably pleased to get me out, and that Lara finally got herself a precious baby brother; or in effect, her own baby. So Lara ended up doing everything for me, and I adored her for it.
Whilst Mum was a busy ‘working’ mother, helping my father in his constituency duties and beyond, Lara became my surrogate mum. She fed me almost every supper I ate – from when I was a baby up to about five years old. She changed my nappies, she taught me to speak, then to walk (which, with so much attention from her, of course happened ridiculously early). She taught me how to get dressed, and to brush my teeth.
In essence, she got me to do all the things that either she had been too scared to do herself, or that just simply intrigued her, such as eating raw bacon or riding a tricycle down a steep hill with no brakes.
I was the best rag doll of a baby brother that she could have ever dreamt of.
It is why we have always been so close. To her, I am still her little baby brother. And I love her for that. But, and this is the big but, growing up with Lara, there was never a moment’s peace. Even from day one, as a newborn babe in the hospital’s maternity ward, I was paraded around, shown off to anyone and everyone – I was my sister’s new ‘toy’. And it never stopped.
It makes me smile now, but I am sure it is why in later life that I craved the peace and solitude that mountains and the sea bring. I didn’t want to perform for anyone, I just wanted space to grow and find myself amongst all the madness.
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.
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 away.
He lived to ninety-three and did his daily exercises religiously. You would hear him in his bedroom mumbling: ‘Knee-beeend, touch tooes, reach up high, and breathe …’ He said it was the key to good health. (Not sure where the chocolate or buttered toast fitted into the regime but hey, you gotta live life as well.)
Grandpa Neville died, seated on a bench at the end of our road, near the sea. I miss him still today: his long, whiskery eyebrows, his huge hands and hugs, his warmth, his prayers, his stories, but above all his shining example of how to live and how to die.
My Uncle Andrew summed Neville up beautifully:
Neville remained a schoolboy at heart; thus he had a wonderful rapport with the young. Enthusiasm, Encouragement and Love were his watchwords.
He was an usher at Winston Churchill’s funeral and moved easily amongst royalty, but was equally at ease in any company. He lived up to Kipling’s: ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch.’
He was both a perfect sportsman and a perfect gentleman. I never heard him speak ill of anyone; I never saw him perform an unkind act. He was in all respects a wonderful man.
Granny Patsie was also a huge part of my upbringing on the island: a remarkable lady with an extraordinary life behind her.
She was kind, warm, yet fragile. But to us she was simply Granny. As she got older, she struggled, with tender vulnerability, against depression. Maybe it was, in part, due to guilt over her infidelity to Neville, when she was younger.
As an antidote, though, she developed a penchant for buying expensive, but almost entirely pointless objects, in the conviction that they were great investments.
Among these, Granny bought a fully decked-out, antique, gypsy caravan, and a shop next to the village fish and chippie, two hundred yards up the road from our home. The problem was that the caravan rotted without proper upkeep, and the shop was turned into her own personal antiques/junk shop.
It was, of course, a disaster.
Add to that the fact that the shop needed manning (often by various members of our family, including Nigel, who for most of the time sat fast asleep in a deckchair outside the shop, with a newspaper over his head), and you get the idea that life was both unprofitable and characterful. But above all, it was always fun.
(Nigel was Granny’s loveable rogue of a second husband, who actually also had been a very successful politician in his time. He had won an MC (Military Cross) during the Second World War, and went on to hold a junior ministerial post in government in later life. To me, though, he was a kindly, gentle grandfather-figure, loved by us all.)
So growing up at home was always eventful, although it was also definitely chaotic. But that was typical of my parents – especially my mother, who, even by her own wacky standards, was, and remains, pretty off beat … in the best sense of the word.
In fact I tend to sum my family up with the quote: ‘Families are like fudge – mostly sweet with a few nuts!’
The good side of this meant that, as a family, we were endlessly moving around and meeting streams of interesting characters from all over the world, who gravitated to Mum – this was all just part of life. Whether we were camping in an old van, travelling to listen to some American motivational speaker, or helping Mum in her new business of selling blenders and water filters.
Meals were eaten at varying times of the day and night, pork chops were pulled out of a bin with the immortal words: ‘These are absolutely fine.’ (Even if Dad had thrown them out the day before, as they had turned silvery.)
It seemed that the sole aim of my mother was to fatten her family up as much as possible. This actually has pushed me the other way in later life and given me a probably ‘unhealthy’ obsession with being healthy. (Although I do probably have my mother to thank for my cast-iron stomach that has helped me so much filming my survival shows over the years. God bless those pork chops after all.)
Everyone around us tended just to see the fun side of Mum’s wackiness, but the down side of it was that for us as a family it was, at times, quite draining. It meant that she was always right, despite some of her ideas or beliefs definitely bordering on the wacko.
We would often catch her wandering around the garden with a copper rod, assuring us that she needed ‘earthing’ against the excessive electricity in the house. (Considering that we never had the heating on, and mainly burnt candles instead of switching on lights, this kind of led us to suspect something wasn’t entirely normal about our mother.)
But that was Mum for you; and with only the rare exceptions, my childhood was blessed with love and fun, both of which have remained driving forces for me in my life with my own family.
My mother and father had met when Mum was twenty-one and Dad was twenty-nine. Theirs was a pretty crazy love affair, involving endless break-ups and reunions, until eventually they eloped to Barbados and got married.
Their relationship remained one full of love, although in many ways, Mum was a product of her parents’ divorce. She had a deep-rooted fear of being left, and that often made her overly protective of Dad.