My toughest journey of all? Turning back from the brink of suicide

He’s explored the world’s most dangerous places for TV. Now he tells of his teenage descent into drugs, crime . . . and despair

FROM Kyrgyzstan to the Tropic of Cancer, his BBC exploits have shone a light on some of the world’s most forgotten corners. But Simon Reeve’s own journey from troubled teenager to TV star has been every bit as turbulent as his on-screen adventures – as he explains in his compelling new autobiography…

ICLIMBED the footbridge, hopped over the railings and stood teetering like a diver on a high board, with the traffic streaming out of London beneath me. It was windy, noisy. I was serious, but scared. The bridge spanning the Western Avenue in London had been a feature of my l i fe for as l ong as I could remember. Occasionally, we used to troop up there as a family to watch fireworks over Central London.

Now I was 17, I had dropped out of school and my life was in chaos: no qualifications, no girlfriend, no prospects. I had thought for weeks about using a kitchen knife on myself, about taking handfuls of pills. I thought about stepping in front of a train or a Tube.

Then I thought about falling in front of a lorry. I looked down at one just as the horn sounded. Had the driver seen me? I will never know. It jerked me out of my moment. I started to fear the pain of dying more than I feared life. Shaking with fear, I gripped tightly and shuffled back to safety. I was choosing life. There was no single moment of disaster that led me to the bridge that night. I grew up in Acton in West London in a loving family where we fought because we didn’t know how to communicate.

As a teenager, I graduated from bunking bus fares to petty vandalism to riding in stolen cars. We would steal petrol from cars and start fires. We would nick fireworks from shops, then take them apart to make larger devices.

I remember unscrewing t he bottom of a CCTV camera at Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre, packing an explosive device inside and then watching it blow up before racing off, laughing. It was a stupid, destructive thrill.

A few minutes later, I had just lit another firework around the back of the shopping centre when a policeman came storming out of an exit looking for us.

I tried to kick the rocket away, but it l aunched and spiralled through the air towards him.

The poor guy tried to leap out of the way, but it hit him in the leg sickeningly hard, and he went down screaming. I still feel guilty. I hope to God he was all right.

By the age of 13, I was getting into fights with local kids and going to school with a huge Rambo knife. I even bought a replica pistol that fired blanks. I once pulled it out when a group of us got into a fight with an older group of travellers in a local park.

They scattered immediately. I had an incredible rush of adrenaline, but when I got home, I hid it under my bedroom floorboards and left it there.

Long after I had left home, my poor mum Cindy found it while redecorating. ‘ Simon,’ she said calmly, ‘do you have any idea what it was like for me to find a gun underneath the floorboards?’

I was never a gang member or a really bad lad. The truth is, I was a silly little boy, struggling with growing up, forced to wear glasses after I was hit in the eye with a brick during a fight. I was gangly and awkward. Things were difficult at home. I was desperate for a girlfriend. There’s a photo somewhere of me, slumped and slurring in the corner of a classroom. Once, I fell asleep drunk in the school library and someone painted my glasses with Tipp-Ex. When I woke up I thought I had gone blind. I became severely depressed. I skulked in my room, drinking Special Brew and ignoring my worried family.

I went for counselling for almost three years from the age of 14. But the counsellors and their centre in South Acton were woefully underfunded. The building itself was dilapidated concrete, with a dark interior, and grim, grey, empty, dank rooms, like something out of Orwell’s 1984. My spirits sank every time I stepped inside.

One of my teachers could see I was falling behind. Far from chastising me, she wanted to know what was wrong. I didn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t begin to articulate it. She reached out, extending a hand of friendship.

‘I can see you’re in a bad way. I know things aren’t easy for you at home,’ she said.

‘I’ve met your father. I know he

My life was in chaos: no girlfriend and no prospects

Mum found my gun, which I’d kept under the floorboards

I climbed a mountain in the dark – I felt so brave

can be very…’ she paused meaningfully, ‘… difficult.’

I started to blub. But now I was shocked she could see through me. I was also angry with her for talking about my dad Alan behind his back. He wasn’t the only one in the family at fault. Dad wasn’t the easiest person to get along with and ours was a tense and sometimes violent relationship.

But it wasn’t just my father. We all fought. Mum turned the kitchen table over. I had a fiery temper and put my foot through a door and my fist into a wall. The house bore the scars. A few times it was so violent the police were called.

Now I’m an adult, I blame Dad less. I feel sorry for him. I just t hink he l acked t he skill s of compromise and resolution. We fought because we didn’t know how to communicate.

My final months at school are a bit of a blur. I was getting drunk and stoned on dope, but far from making me seem cool, it made me feel even more pathetic. I wasn’t preparing for the exams. The thought of sitting down to take tests terrified me, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.

University never entered my head. While Dad was a maths teacher, my ambition was to get a job as a delivery driver and even that seemed unlikely. Nothing could convince me I had a future. Decid- ing not to die was a turning point, of course, but there was no euphoria. I went home, crept indoors, slipped into bed and cried.

But with my dad’s help, I passed my driving test, and I signed on for Income Support. I explained to the woman in the DSS office that I was pretty low and had no idea what to do next, and she gave me simple advice that guided me then, and still does to this day.

‘If it’s difficult for you, take things step by step,’ she said.

And that was when an idea popped into my head – a simple thought that, perhaps more than anything, connects my adult self with that troubled teen. I decided to go on a journey. I bought a cheap train ticket to Scotland, inspired, I think, by the movie Highlander. Then I hired a tiny red Peugeot and drove to Glencoe, and wearing only jeans, a pair of trainers and an old Adidas cagoule, I started climbing.

‘ Step by step,’ I muttered to myself. If I can reach that tree over there I’ll stop and turn back, I thought. Then when I reached the tree I saw an outcrop of rocks.

‘I’ll just get to them,’ I said out loud. It started to get dark, and a hiker warned me sternly to be careful, but on and on I went, finally setting my sights on a high ridge on the mountainside.

I reached it in darkness, and I stood there feeling euphoric and a tiny bit brave. I stared at the stars, lost in the moment and delighting in a sense of achievement. I’d completed a journey.

Back in London, I managed to get a job as a newspaper post boy, worked hard and started helping investigative journalists. Soon I became one of them, and when I quit a few years later, it was to write a book about the then-recent 1993 World Trade Center bombing and its aftermath. The book I wrote, The New Jackals, came out in 1998, and at first nobody bought it.

But when 9/11 happened, I had written the only book in the world about Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and it all became very weird very quickly. Within a few hours, I was being shuttled between the studios of American news channels in London. To my surprise, my brief TV appearances led to my own BBC series. Someone suggested that I should infiltrate Al Qaeda for TV – even I thought that was a mad notion. A far better one was Meet The Stans, a journey through the forgotten countries to the north of Afghanistan. It was the start of many journeys to come.

There have been many times since I was a desperate teenager when I have started to feel there was no hope, no way out.

But as I have aged, my experiences and, I think, adventures, have helped me to find comfort and solutions. As a tool for dealing with the lows, I stick to my mantra. I put one foot in front of the other and take a step. I do something – anything.

In moments of darkness, when I have stared into an abyss while going through the end of relationships and depression, for me at least, activity is achievement. Activity or movement, any movement, rewards me, lifting me up out of the rabbit hole.

As I have aged, acceptance has also helped. Depressive thoughts will probably always be with me. The negative voices can be hushed, ignored, sometimes even laughed at. But doubtless they will always be at least an occasional background whisper. Like grief, my answer is to face them and take them with me.

So many of us are taught to think of everything as black or white, happy or sad, depression or normality. Life has taught me so often that instead everything is just shades of grey. Every life and every journey shares tragedy with happiness and light with shade. Even a simple moment of joy. Because, like life, even a moment ends.

Step By Step, by Simon Reeve, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until September 2. Order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640 – p&p is free on orders over £15. An Audience With Simon Reeve will be at theatres around the UK from September 17 – visit simonreeve.co.uk.