Читать книгу English: A Story of Marmite, Queuing and Weather - Ben Fogle, Ben Fogle - Страница 12

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too:

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …

Rudyard Kipling, ‘If’

‘Success is overrated. We all crave it despite daily evidence that our real genius lies in exactly the opposite direction. Incompetence is what we are good at.’

Stephen Pile, The Book of Heroic Failures

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes, but for me there is one hero who defines Englishness. He’s not a lantern-jawed explorer or a brave soldier but a builder and plasterer from Gloucester, Michael Edwards. I have come to meet him in a small coffee shop on Stroud High Street.

With a rucksack slung over one shoulder, the now clean-shaven Edwards is still instantly recognizable. Nearly thirty years ago, he became an unlikely national hero when he finished last in the 70m and 90m ski jump at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada.

Eddie looks thinner than I remember him, but then maybe it was all the padding he had to wear during those jumps. Without his moustache he looks slightly younger. He is fit and healthy-looking as he takes off a small day pack and apologises (English tick) for being a little late.

I’m actually quite star-struck; you see, I really am a child of the Vancouver games. It hit the sweet spot during my adolescence and Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, as he became known, was the hero of the day. I can still remember sitting on Mum and Dad’s bed watching with bated breath as he took to the ski jump. The whole nation held its breath. We never expected him to do well, but as with the weather, we were forever hopeful. Eddie offered us the exoticism of snow and winter and cold combined with his ‘bloke next door’ derring-do. He was a cross between Shackleton and Benny Hill.

That winter he gave the nation hope. A one-man army batting above his weight. A nation weighed down with sporting failure could only ascend.

‘I’ve just been on a cruise,’ he said, explaining his tan. I asked him what he thought it was that made him stand out from the crowd. ‘Being the underdog,’ he replied, ‘they liked the pluckiness’.

I wonder whether he felt fairly portrayed by the press. Was he, is he, the hapless, clueless builder? He smiles and winks. I can only assume from his demeanour that he played the game well: an 80s Joey Essex.

The English are always better when disarmed. We are not as generous with the bravado and arrogance of winners. We prefer modesty and understatement. It is a peculiarity of the English and Eddie is the benchmark. He doesn’t have the presence that some great people carry with them but he exudes an eccentric swagger. He is certainly brave, but in many ways Eddie is the perfect example of the Englishman. Slightly wonky-toothed. Plucky. Bold. Eccentric. Hapless. Failing. Odd. He is a jar of Marmite and the weather in one. Cloudy with a chance of Marmite showers. He has that English charm. A walking apology.

We sit largely unnoticed as we sip our tea (English tick) in Stroud Costa Coffee. Me and this goliath of Englishness.

Eddie the Eagle defines a unique type of heroism that defies the norm and is English to the core: his oversized milk-bottle glasses and helmet tied with string were the exact opposite of the typical profile of the Winter Olympics competitor. Yet perhaps for that reason, he captured the world’s imagination with his nerve and fearless attitude. Above all, his fame was not based on success but failure. Eddie the Eagle was for a time the most famous failure in England. As a sporting and academic failure myself, for a time he gave me hope: he was the little guy taking on the world in a series of terrifying jumps.

Edwards had a dream from childhood about being an Olympian. As a teenager he became obsessed with downhill skiing after going on a school skiing trip. He achieved some success despite having no money – he was self-educated, working class and about as different from the British Olympic establishment as you could get. Defeated by money, he remained determined to wear the British Olympic tracksuit. Effectively shunned by the Olympic movement, he had a brainwave and decided to enter the ski jump; he had never jumped before, but Britain had no competitors. So, if he achieved the qualifying distance, he would be a shoo-in for the team in Calgary in 1988. He qualified … just. But if he thought he’d won over the establishment he was wrong; they continued to oppose his participation in the Games, considering him a national embarrassment. Happily, the huge worldwide television audience, me included, thought differently and he became a global sporting phenomenon.

Despite his last-place finishes in both the 70m and 90m competitions, cheering the plucky underdog became a national pastime. Edwards epitomized everything we English love about an amateur hero: he simply played the game, with no care about whether he won or lost.

When he came home, his face was everywhere and his earnings were huge. Over time, the bookings fell away – and this is what I love about his story. He went back to his plastering job, which he still does part time today.

Edwards tried to qualify for the next three Winter Olympics, but failed – thanks to a rule specifically designed to keep amateurs like him out – often hurting himself in the process. Over the course of his career, he fractured his skull twice and broke his jaw, collarbone, ribs, knee, fingers, thumbs, toes, back and neck. ‘I think the only bones I haven’t broken are my shoulder, hip and thigh,’ he says.

He retired at the age of thirty-four in 1998. In a further twist to his amazing story, a trust he’d set up to hold and manage his earnings failed and he was declared bankrupt in 1992. Again, a huge setback only spurred him on. He was fascinated by the legal process and decided to retrain as a lawyer. He went back to school, gained his qualifications – starting with GCSEs – and finally obtained a law degree from De Montfort University in 2003, fifteen years after the Calgary Winter Olympics.

He says he has always believed that with ‘resistance and tenacity you can achieve anything’. ‘We are a resilient nation,’ he says, ‘but we are moving towards the US mentality’ of success marked by medals rather than just participating and doing your best. The last few Olympic Games, the Tour de France, golf and now the America’s Cup have all transformed the English sporting reputation from hapless failure to hero and the Eddies of this world have been replaced by bleached-toothed sporting machines.

Eddie is still very much in demand. A regular on the speaking circuit, he has even had a Hollywood film made about his life. As we say farewell I wonder whether this kind of English sporting hero has become an endangered species in a country that has pulled up its socks when it comes to sport. In my mind, though, Eddie will remain my own sporting hero, taking on the establishment and winning.

In many ways, Eddie the Eagle was merely following the centuries-old recipe created by our rich history of explorers who specialized in that plucky derring-do, have-a-go attitude. As a tiny island nation we have produced some of the world’s greatest explorers and adventurers; but what defines many of the great English expeditions is failure. We take on a challenge knowing that it is doomed to fail but press on regardless. Shackleton, Scott, Fawcett, Mallory … the long list of heroic failures seems to define a unique kind of Englishness. Is that dogged determination in the face of adversity part of the romance, the danger and exhilaration of treading the fine line between success and failure? A little like our sport and even our weather, we appear to have an inevitable resignation to being doomed to failure.

This admiration of failure goes hand in hand with the fact that we have never been particularly good at celebrating success. I’m not sure if it’s pessimism, guilt or jealousy, but we have a strange relationship with high achievement. We often describe it as tall-poppy syndrome, the phenomenon whereby we will root for individuals until their stem – success – becomes too tall, and then we cut them down to size.

As an island nation, more used to looking to the horizon to ward off invaders, England took a surprisingly long time to use her maritime expertise to explore the world beyond our borders. Portugal and Spain were pioneers in undertaking voyages in the so-called Age of Discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They established vast and enviably wealthy empires, prompting England – in a race against France and the Netherlands – to sail forth to claim colonies and set up trade networks of their own in the Americas and in Asia. Then, in the sixteenth century, along came Sir Francis Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher and Anthony Jenkinson, and the English adventurer was born, ushering in an era of investigation around the globe which has had a lasting effect on the society in which we live today. Explorers raised anchor and set off with an ambitious to-do list. They were determined to discover new lands, to further scientific enquiry, to bring home new mineral and agricultural resources, to map the world in greater detail – and to make a name (and fortune) for themselves. The dangers were real; the adventure exhilarating. Such hazardous missions were open to all social classes. A roll call of the best-known explorers shows that few survived to reminisce about their forays in pipe and slippers. They leave a colourful legacy of heroes, perilous challenges and mysteries …

Arguably our earliest pioneer was Captain James Cook. He was born in 1728 in a small village near Middlesbrough, the son of a farm worker. One of the few naval captains to rise through the ranks, Cook’s achievements are pretty impressive. Between 1763 and 1767 he was responsible for charting the complex coastline of Newfoundland aboard HMS Grenville. On an expedition commissioned by the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, he commanded HMS Endeavour to witness the transit of Venus across the sun – a rare event visible only in the southern hemisphere – sailing to Tahiti via Cape Horn. Once the astronomer, Charles Green, had made his observations they sailed on to New Zealand and then became the first Europeans to navigate the length of Australia’s east coast. Cook claimed the region for Britain and named it New South Wales.

In 1772, a year after his return home, Cook set out on a second voyage to look for the southern continent. They nearly succeeded but had to return before discovering it because of the extreme cold. For his final voyage, he set out to discover the fabled North-West Passage, which the world’s navigators and cartographers presumed was the link between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. He was unsuccessful and ended up landing on Hawaii, where he was stabbed by an islander and died on 14 February 1779. Despite a lifetime of success, his untimely death seems to me to mark the beginning of the era of heroic failures.

While Cook circumnavigated the globe, nearly a century later a new generation of explorers would begin a new land grab for some of the last unexplored corners of the planet, the polar regions.

I took on my own ocean in 2005 when I teamed up with the double Olympic gold rowing champion James Cracknell to row the Atlantic. Ocean-rowing is a peculiarly English occupation that has escalated in popularity over the last decade. Goodness knows why. Rowing a tiny 21ft boat made of plywood and stuck together with glue nearly 3,500 miles across the Atlantic has to count as the most miserable seven weeks of my life.

What makes it so English? Well, the slowness and monotony have an appeal a little like that of cricket; the challenge itself is both eccentric and utterly pointless; and it is far from glamorous or sexy. In many ways, ocean-rowing epitomizes so many English traits. There’s a certain ‘because-it’s-there’ feeling to the whole enterprise.

So why did I choose to do it? Well, I think my Englishness played a part.

Growing up, I relished the stories of those great earlier explorers and pioneers. A particular favourite was Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who was born in 1868 in Plymouth, Devon. He led two expeditions to the Antarctic. On the Discovery expedition in 1901–4 he broke a new southern record by reaching latitude 82°S and discovered the Polar Plateau. Then in 1910 he set off for the Terra Nova Expedition, which was to end infamously in tragedy. He reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912 a month after Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition. They perished on the return journey having missed a meeting point with the dog teams. Temperatures suddenly dropped to -40°C as they trudged northwards.

In a farewell letter to Sir Edgar Speyer, treasurer of the fund raised to finance the expedition, and dated 16 March 1912, Scott wondered whether he had missed the meeting point and fought the growing suspicion that he had in fact been abandoned by the dog teams: ‘We very nearly came through, and it’s a pity to have missed it, but lately I have felt that we have overshot our mark. No-one is to blame and I hope no attempt will be made to suggest that we had lacked support.’

On the same day, one of his companions, Laurence Oates, who had become frostbitten and who had gangrene, voluntarily left the tent and walked to his death. Scott wrote down Oates’s last words, some of the most famous ever recorded: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ If ever there was an English way of dying, surely that was it?

I was always taken by the tragic tale of Captain Scott, so perhaps it is no surprise that when I finally got a chance to take part in a race to the South Pole, once again James Cracknell and I teamed up for an escapade which I recounted in The Accidental Adventurer. In a gratifyingly English outcome, we were pipped to the finish by the Norwegian team, by the tiny margin of four hours. Heroic failures to the last.

Born around the same time as Scott was another plucky Englishman, George Herbert Leigh Mallory. He took part in three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s. First was the 1921 reconnaissance expedition, which reached 22,500 feet (6,900m) on the North Col. In the second, a year later, the team including Mallory got to 27,320 feet (8,320m) but could not summit. But it was his 1924 summit attempt with climbing partner Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine that is most deeply shrouded in mystery. Both men disappeared as they attempted to become the first to stand on top of the world. They were last seen about 245 vertical metres from the summit. The fate of the climbers remained a mystery until 1 May 1999, when a research expedition sponsored by the BBC to find the climbers’ bodies came across Mallory’s corpse at 26,755 feet (8,155m). Irvine’s body remains somewhere up there. Did they reach the top? The subject remains one of intense speculation and continuing research. Whatever the answer, Mallory and Irvine only added to the public’s enduring love of the heroic failure.

When you’re going into the unknown, it’s quite possible that you’ll disappear and, if you’re English, the odds are that bit shorter. Perhaps one of the greatest explorer mysteries is that of Lieutenant Colonel Percival ‘Percy’ Harrison Fawcett, born in 1867 in Torquay, Devon.

His upbringing was about as English as you could get. He was educated at Newton Abbot Proprietary College; in 1886, he joined the Royal Artillery and was stationed in Ceylon (as it then was). He studied mapmaking and surveying and joined the Royal Geographical Society. Military life bored him and after a spell working undercover for the British Secret Service in North Africa, he received a commission from the RGS to use his surveying skills to settle a border dispute between Bolivia and Brazil. He arrived in La Paz in June 1907, aged thirty-nine. Fantastic stories started to trickle back to London. He claimed to have shot a giant 62ft anaconda, as well as many other animals unknown to zoologists – including a ‘cat-like’ dog and a giant poisonous Apazauca spider. He made seven expeditions through the jungle and his adventures became the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. After volunteering to serve in the First World War he returned to South America with his eldest son, Jack, in 1925. Before the war, he’d heard local legends about a lost city called ‘Z’, somewhere in the Brazilian jungle. It became an obsession. He was convinced the city existed in the Mato Grosso region and he, his son and Jack’s best friend, the heroically named Raleigh Rimell, plunged into the jungle. They were never seen again. Percy left instructions with his wife that, if they should disappear, no one should come after them; but ever since hundreds of expeditions have taken place with the sole purpose of locating this true English heroic failure.

It continues to surprise me the astonishing rate at which we have generated great adventurers compared to the size of our nation. Take a look at the current generation of great English explorers: Colonel John Blashford-Snell, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Sir Chris Bonington, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and Dame Ellen MacArthur, to name just a few. We are celebrated for our explorers, but I think somehow we tend to celebrate those who have a go and fail spectacularly rather than those who easily come out on top.

A. A. Gill wrote in his book The Angry Island: Hunting the English:

For the English, real character is built not by winners, but by losers. Anyone can be a good winner … It is in losing that the individual really discovers what they’re made of, and it was in coming a good second that the kernel of the truth in the lesson of sport lay, because winning a game of muddied oafs or flannelled fools is transiently unimportant, but being able to cope with failure and disappointment, to turn around the headlong impetus of adrenalin, effort, expectation and hope, and still shake hands with your opponent and pick up the bat or the boot the next day – that’s the proving and honing and the toughening of character.