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Standing, balanced precariously on the narrow top of a drainpipe, you had to give a good leap up to grab hold of the narrow ledge, and then swing your whole body up and over.
It took some guts, and a cool head for heights.
Get it wrong and the fall was a long one, onto concrete.
In an attempt to make it harder, the school security officers had put barbed wire all around the lip of the roof to ensure such climbs were “impossible.” (This was probably installed after Ran Fiennes’s escapades onto the dome all those years earlier.) But in actual fact the barbed wire served to help me as a climber. It gave me something else to hold on to.
Once on the roof, then came the crux of the climb.
Locating the base of the lightning conductor was the easy bit, the tough bit was then committing to it.
It held my weight; and it was a great sense of achievement clambering into the lead-lined small bell tower, silhouetted under the moonlight, and carving the initials BG alongside the RF of Ran Fiennes.
Small moments like that gave me an identity.
I wasn’t just yet another schoolboy, I was fully alive, fully me, using my skills to the max.
And in those moments I realized I simply loved adventure.
I guess I was discovering that what I was good at was a little off-the-wall, but at the same time recognizing a feeling in the pit of my stomach that said: Way to go, Bear, way to go.
My accomplice never made it past the barbed wire, but waited patiently for me at the bottom. He said it had been a thoroughly sickening experience to watch, which in my mind made it even more fun.
On the return journey, we safely crossed one college house garden and had silently traversed half of the next one.
We were squatting behind a bush in the middle of this housemaster’s lawn, waiting to do the final leg across. The tutor’s light was on, with him burning the midnight oil marking papers probably, when he decided it was time to let his dog out for a pee. The dog smelled us instantly, went bananas, and the tutor started running toward the commotion.
Decision time.
“Run,” I whispered, and we broke cover together and legged it toward the far side of the garden.
Unfortunately, the tutor in question also happened to be the school cross-country instructor, so he was no slouch.
He gave chase at once, sprinting after us across the fifty-meter dash. A ten-foot wall was the final obstacle and both of us, powered by adrenaline, leapt up it in one bound. The tutor was a runner but not a climber, and we narrowly avoided his grip and sprinted off into the night.
Up a final drainpipe, back into my open bedroom window, and it was mission accomplished.
I couldn’t stop smiling all through the next day.
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