During my time at Eton, I led regular nighttime adventures, and word spread. I even thought about charging to take people on trips.
I remember one where we tried to cross the whole town of Eton in the old sewers. I had found an old grill under a bridge that led into these four-foot-high old brick pipes, running under the streets.
It took a little nerve to probe into these in the pitch black with no idea where the hell they were leading you; and they stank.
I took a pack of playing cards and a flashlight, and I would jam cards into the brickwork every ten paces to mark my way. Eventually I found a manhole cover that lifted up, and it brought us out in the little lane right outside the headmaster’s private house.
I loved that. “All crap flows from here,” I remember us joking at that time.

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 age 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.

For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.

I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve.

At Hampton I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labour, but learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour’s own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done brings. At that institution I got my first taste of what it meant to live a life of unselfishness, my first knowledge of the fact that the happiest individuals are those who do the most to make others useful and happy.

It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.

what I remember most of all is that I was happy — I no longer feared the school bell at the end of the day, I knew where I’d be living the next month, and no one’s romantic decisions affected my life. And out of that happiness came so many of the opportunities I’ve had for the past twelve years.

I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing.

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and then foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

Segregation shaped me; education liberated me.

I knew that adventures, true love, and a whole new way of life awaited me on the other side of comfort zone.

This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions.

What I found, in my extended attempts to complete by informal means my stunted education, was that, plugging along with only ordinary will but with the fundamental organizing ethos as my guide, my ability to serve everything I loved was enhanced far beyond my deserts. Large gains came in places that seemed unlikely as I started out, sometimes making me like the only one without a blindfold in a high-stakes game of pin the tail on the donkey. For instance, I was productively led into psychology, where I had no plans to go, creating large advantages that deserve a story on another day.

I look back now and can see how much my father also found his own freedom in the adventures we did together, whether it was galloping along a beach in the Isle of Wight with me behind him, or climbing on the steep hills and cliffs around the island’s coast.
It was at times like these that I found a real intimacy with him.
It was also where I learned to recognize that tightening sensation, deep in the pit of my stomach, as being a great thing to follow in life. Some call it fear.
I remember the joy of climbing with him in the wintertime. It was always an adventure and often turned into much more than just a climb. Dad would determine that not only did we have to climb a sheer hundred-and-fifty-foot chalk cliff, but also that German paratroopers held the high ground. We therefore had to climb the cliff silently and unseen, and then grenade the German fire position once at the summit.
In reality this meant lobbing clumps of manure toward a deserted bench on the cliff tops. Brilliant.
What a great way to spend a wet and windy winter’s day when you are age eight (or twenty-eight, for that matter).
I loved returning from the cliff climbs totally caked in mud, out of breath, having scared ourselves a little. I learned to love that feeling of the wind and rain blowing hard on my face. It made me feel like a man, when in reality I was a little boy.
We also used to talk about Mount Everest, as we walked across the fields toward the cliffs. I loved to pretend that some of our climbs were on the summit face of Everest itself.
We would move together cautiously across the white chalk faces, imagining they were really ice. I had this utter confidence that I could climb Everest if he were beside me.
I had no idea what Everest would really involve but I loved the dream together.
These were powerful, magical times. Bonding. Intimate. Fun. And I miss them a lot even today. How good it would feel to get the chance to do that with him just once more.
I think that is why I find it often