Hilary King wakes up in the middle of the night, terrified that her son is in danger.
Since her son, George King, is given to scaling Europe’s tallest buildings without any safety equipment, her anxiety is perhaps understandable.
The 21-year-old, a so-called free climber, came to public attention after climbing the Shard in London in July 2019, for which he was jailed for six months.
“What he does is terrifying and I have woken up in the middle of the night and hoped he is all right,” his mother, 56, said.
“I get a feeling, and I am usually right, that he is climbing something. He usually keeps it from me which I think is the right thing,” she said.
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“The thing is, I am very proud of George, of whatever he does. He has never followed a conventional path,” she added.
Inspiration for King’s ascent on the Shard, which at 310m is western Europe’s tallest building, came aged 13 on a school art trip.
“I remember seeing the Shard for the first time and my destiny was just written there,” he said.
King, who was privately educated and is from Oxfordshire, said his climbing makes him feel alive but at the same time close to death.
“It grounds you to the purity of the moment,” he said. “You can’t think about what is happening tomorrow, you can’t think about what happened yesterday, all you can possibly think about is the next step, and the next step.
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“All the emotions, the endorphins, the serotonin, the dopamine, fire at once to optimise your survival. There is nothing you can think about but that single moment, and that is beautiful.
“Even last week, I was waking up in gut-wrenching sweats of anxiety, thinking am I going to go to prison again? What’s my mum going to think? What is my family going to think?
“Am I going to fall? Am I going to die? Am I going to get injured? Am I going to get stuck halfway and is it going to start raining? Then am I going to feel like a failure and I can’t get down and is the fire engine going to come?”
At first, his mother had no idea what he was doing. “It all came as quite a surprise. He told me first, and then he said he was going to tell the family and I said that was a good idea,” she said.
Since telling his family about his projects, King has conquered some of London’s tallest buildings, including the 117m-tall Stratosphere Tower, in Stratford, this week.
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His mother, who had to endure three months away from her son when he was residing in HMP Pentonville, London, said: “Nobody wants their child to go to prison and your imagination runs wild.
“He would ring home whenever he could to assure me he was completely fine, but I wouldn’t know whether he was or not.
“It was awful having him sent away but people would say to me, of all the people who will survive in prison it is George, and of course he was fine.”
She has encouraged her son’s career, which has seen him appear this year on Adrenaline Addicts, a Channel 4 online programme of short videos on extreme sports.
King was filmed exploring the world of bare-knuckle boxing and base jumping.
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There are plans for hour-long episodes to be broadcast on television.
“All I can do is support him and I know that is difficult for some people to understand,” Mrs King, who works in property, added.
“He plans really hard. I see him at home watching his weight, working out. I can’t fault him really.
“Likewise, he is putting himself in danger, but you could have a son who puts himself in danger on a motorcycle,” she said.
Each evening before a climb, King listens to Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar, and plays it again on the morning of an ascent.
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“When I go to climb a building, I will reach an immense emotional high,” he said.
“I am literally hanging with my fingertips to a building, death is seconds away, one millimetre, half steps and I am dead.
“There is a voice in the back of your head which says, ‘These could be your last moments on earth’.”
