Moffatt Jerry Moffatt - Revelations

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-906148-40-9
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

When Jerry Moffatt burst onto the scene as a brash 17-year-old, rock climbing had never seen anyone like him before. Fiercely ambitious, even as a boy Moffatt was focused on one thing: being the best in the world. This is the story of his meteoric rise to stardom, and how he overcame injury to stay at the top for over two decades. Top sport climber, brilliant competitor and a pioneer in the new game of bouldering, Moffatt's story is that of climbing itself in the last thirty years. Yet Jerry Moffatt is more than a dedicated athlete. Travelling the world to fulfil his dreams, his story is a compelling and often hilarious account of the climbing community with all its glories, dangers and foibles, as well as the story of a true sporting legend. Grand Prize Winner - Banff Mountain Book Festival 2009.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moffatt, Jerry

Leseproben

ONE

First Steps

Miss Pyper had sent me out of class. I had been naughty again and told to stand in the corridor. The sun was slanting through the windows, and I remember there was a wooden chest where we put all the toys we brought to school. From inside the class I heard the other children reciting something. I wanted to be in there too, reciting what they were, but I knew I wouldn’t understand it. I rarely did. I looked down at the parquet floor, with its crisscross wooden tiles, and began to tiptoe up and down the corridor, looking down at my feet at right-angles to each other, trying to avoid standing on the lines between the tiles.

‘I wish she wouldn’t send me out,’ I thought. ‘I wish I wasn’t naughty. I wish I understood.’ But I just didn’t.

I grew up just outside the city of Leicester, in a little village called Bushby. It was out in the countryside and we lived in a big converted farmhouse, mum, dad, Simon my elder brother, Toby, my younger brother, and me. Farmland, woods and streams surrounded the village and I loved wandering through it. I went to Duncairn Kindergarten from the age of four to the age of eight. Every Christmas, Easter and summer, the school sent a report to my parents on my progress. I still have these, and they make fascinating reading.

‘He is still very much a baby in his approach. A live wire!’ reported the first, from Christmas, 1967. Things never seemed to improve much beyond that.

‘I still can’t report much progress. We must hope that he will soon show some interest in “learning”. He is always happy and smiling and is a great favourite with the other children.’

Sometimes there were signs of hope: ‘It is at last possible to see progress although he finds it hard to retain what he is taught.’

But my restless energy often got in the way: ‘A good term in many ways but his behaviour is often uncontrollable.’

At times my teacher seemed to despair of me: ‘Jeremy is now pathetically anxious to succeed. His progress is still very uneven. He seems to remember for a time, then one finds that earlier work is forgotten.’

I was popular and I did well in games and art class. Best of all, I had a good time. But my reports showed a worrying lack of progress. Miss Pyper tried hard to get me to learn, but the school’s final opinion of me in Easter 1971 didn’t offer much hope:

‘With all the efforts that have been made to help, it is disappointing that he has not achieved a higher standard. We wish him well and hope that a complete change will have the desired effect.’

After Duncairn I went to a prep school called Stoneygate. This was a traditional, all-boys school. Before I went, I remember my mum dressing me up. I had to wear a grey blazer and shorts, a white shirt and a red tie. I had a pair of black leather shoes, and I was told to rub them until they shone. I was dropped off outside the school and went into a large hall for assembly. The children sat very quietly in rows, and they all seemed very well behaved. I felt intimidated by these boys, especially the older ones, but there was one really exciting thing about this school. My big brother, Simon, was there. Simon is fifteen months older than me, and I really looked up to him. He was good at sports too, but was also really clever, just the way all children want to be.

I enjoyed my time at Stoneygate but it was more academic than my first school and, as I went through my first year, I struggled in all my subjects. I didn’t seem to be doing well in any of them. I tried in class, and worked hard when I got home, but still never seemed to understand what the teachers were telling me. At the end of the first year we did exams. I came last in the class. The teachers called my parents in and it was decided that I would do the first year again to see if I could pick it up the second time around. After that year went by I repeated the exams. This time I was extremely relieved to come second to last. Someone had done worse than me. That was a great relief. During the summer that followed, I was at home one day, and heard my mum and dad talking. They called me down and told me that they had had a word with the school.

‘The school thinks it would be better if you left,’ my mum told me.

I was devastated. I didn’t want to leave. That was mine and Simon’s school. I wanted to stay there with him.

‘We know it’s not because you have been naughty, and your dad and I both know you have worked hard and done your best, but we think it would be best if you moved to the local school here.’

Stoneygate was a school for high-achievers, but I was falling so far short of the standard. There was no way I could have carried on. I was sent to the state school in the village, which was just a short walk from where I lived. The village school wasn’t as academic and I moved up through the years with all the other boys until I was eleven years old. But I still wasn’t doing well in class, constantly wondering what was wrong with me. How come all these other people were learning things and I wasn’t? I can remember being in science class, with the teacher chattering away, and just wondering, ‘What is this gobbledygook?’ I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. I would sit at the back of class, and show off to girls and try to make them laugh.

In those years I failed repeatedly at exams and continually came last in class. I was desperate to do well, but was left with the feeling that there was something wrong with me. I wasn’t very old, but I could still see my chances disappearing. I was aware of what it meant to have no exams, and I felt I was shut out of what everyone else had. Years later, when I became a climber, I would think that climbing was all I ever wanted to do. But then I think back to those times and I know that if I could have waved a wand and changed anything, I would have asked to be normal, to have the abilities and opportunities that everyone else had. I didn’t want to be shut out of class.

To make up for this I threw myself into sport and games. In classes, it just didn’t seem possible to do any better than I was doing. But on the pitch or on race tracks, if I pushed myself really hard, then I could do better. I remember thinking, okay, you people might be smarter than me, but you’re not going to beat me in this race, or you’re not going to catch me when I have the ball. And they wouldn’t.

I was lucky to have very supportive parents. My father was a company secretary and my mother was a nurse, and later on did a lot of work for the terminally ill. They both had good careers, and both had a really top education. My father went to King’s College Canterbury and my mother to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. At the time these were two of the best schools in the country, so they both really valued education, and wanted me to do well academically too. My mum remembers thinking that I would be the bright child in the family, as I began to communicate and draw at a very early age, but through my years at Duncairn, and then at Stoneygate, their concerns about my progress grew and grew.

During my time at school my parents had tests done on me to find out why I wasn’t learning. They knew I wasn’t stupid. I was articulate and good with people, and they knew I was working, but still, by the age of eleven, I could only just about read, and my writing was very poor. Numbers were a complete mystery. Near the end of my time at the village school, an expert told my mum that I had dyslexia. This was only starting to be diagnosed in children at the time, and I think it was a relief to my parents finally to have some sort of explanation.

I always felt I had a big chink in my armour because of my poor academic performance. I had a sense there was something wrong with me, of not being normal. Inferior. The diagnosis didn’t mean that much to me, and I was still left wondering about myself. Maybe I was simply thick. But I felt I just had a very bad memory for certain things. For academic things. If you asked me how many fingers fitted onto the crux hold of a route I did in 1979, I could tell you. If you wanted to know what size of nut goes into the crack at the top of Profit of Doom on Curbar Edge, I could tell you. I could still tell you every hand and foot movement of a hundred and fifty feet of overhanging limestone in the south of France from 1987. But things like that aren’t how people judge intelligence.

Bruce Lee said that knowledge is the ability to remember things, which I think is true. My mum is very well read, and it seems like she has the ability to remember everything she reads. Some people go through school and they remember everything they are taught. They never have to revise and they sail through exams. These are the people who are seen as the smart people. But really, often they are just lucky enough to have a very good memory for what they are being taught. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are smarter than people who don’t – or can’t – remember those things.

Once I was diagnosed with dyslexia, my parents looked into how they could help me. They heard about a school called Eddington, just outside Glastonbury in Somerset, a long way from our home. It was going to be a special school for dyslexics, the first one in the country. They applied for a place for me and I was accepted as the first pupil. That September my mum drove me the two hundred miles to Glastonbury. It was a boarding school, and as she dropped me off and said goodbye, she started to cry. She later told me that she cried all the way home.

But I loved it at Eddington. At the village school there...