Bear Grylls Quote

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 whom 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 rust 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. , 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 toward 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: But I persevered.