Introduction: Recognising the Thread
Reading my teenage diaries and reflecting on childhood, I am increasingly persuaded that what adults called my wilfulness was often something else entirely.
My father used the word against me as a child – as a label. My mother discussed it with me in my teens. I was hyperactive – I was taken to see a child psychologist because my behaviour worried my parents. I was energetic, argumentative, demanding and easily bored. I questioned everything. I challenged explanations. I wanted reasons.
Looking back from the age of sixty-four, I can see that the same qualities that caused friction in childhood later became assets and issues in adulthood.
The wilful child did not disappear.
He learned skills.
He learned discipline.
He learned how to direct himself.
But the essential nature underneath remained surprisingly unchanged.
Exuberance: The Engine That Never Stopped
My strongest childhood memory is not rebellion but excitement.
Every morning felt like standing at the top of a giant waterslide, shouting with delight before launching myself into the day. I woke eager. Curious. Restless. Ready for something to happen. Even if it was 4:30 a.m.
Adults often interpreted this as difficult behaviour.
Perhaps it was.
The problem was that the world around me often moved more slowly than my mind.
I was bored a great deal as a child. Not because there was nothing to do, but because I did everything in a hurry and was looking for the next challenge. When I could not find it, I let people know.
Swimming became an outlet partly because my parents hoped it would tire me out. Instead, it gave direction to the very energy they were trying to contain. And it gave me even more energy, of course!
That same exuberance recurs throughout the teenage diaries. It is there in swimming training, in reading, in art, with Geography, History, and Shakespeare, in space exploration, in girls, in films, and in maps and charts.
At sixty-four, the subjects have changed. Veteran trees have replaced space colonies. Coaching swimmers has replaced racing. Novels have replaced school essays. I create relief prints and ink drawings. I read volumes and watch stories unfold on TV, back-to-back.
The energy feels remarkably familiar. The 4:30 ams are not unusual.
The Need to Understand
I have never been interested in accepting things simply because someone said they were true.
Even as a child, I wanted to know how people knew.
I wanted evidence.
I wanted explanations.
I wanted to draw my own conclusions.
There was curiosity, certainly, but it was not passive curiosity. It was active and probing. I wanted to understand things deeply enough to believe them for myself.
“Because it is.”
“Because I say so.”
Neither response satisfied me.
This often looked like stubbornness.
Sometimes it was stubbornness.
But underneath was a determination to understand the mechanism beneath the claim.
That tendency is evident throughout my adult life.
As a historian, I ask how we know something happened.
As a tree surveyor, I measure rather than assume.
As a coach, I want to understand why a swimmer succeeds or struggles.
As a councillor, I want evidence before accepting assertions.
The questions have become more sophisticated.
The impulse behind them has not changed.
The Problem with Authority
Authority and I have always had a complicated relationship.
I was raised in institutions built around hierarchy.
Parents.
Teachers.
Prefects.
Housemasters.
Headmasters.
Chapel.
Rules.
Boarding schools in the 1970s expected obedience. They functioned through routine and conformity. Hundreds of boys moved according to bells and timetables.
I complied often enough.
I learned the rules.
I understood the hierarchy.
But internally, I was evaluating it.
I was asking whether the rules made sense.
Whether the authority deserved obedience.
Whether assumptions were justified.
My refusal to be confirmed was perhaps one early example. Daily prayers and compulsory Chapel could enforce participation, but they could not manufacture conviction.
This did not make me a revolutionary.
I was rarely leading a rebellion.
Instead, I was conducting a private audit of the world around me.
Authority was never automatically wrong.
It simply had to justify itself.
Attention, Neediness and Being Seen
There is another side to this story, which is less flattering.
Part of my behaviour was undoubtedly attention-seeking.
I was the third of four children.
I could occupy myself, and often did, but I also wanted recognition. I wanted engagement. I wanted adults to respond.
When I announced I was bored, perhaps I was not merely reporting a state of mind.
Perhaps I was asking to be noticed.
Looking back, I can see neediness mixed with curiosity.
I wanted answers.
I wanted a conversation.
I wanted participation.
The tragedy was that some of the adults around me were not equipped to provide those things.
My father was blunt. Practical. Often emotionally distant.
My mother offered understanding and interpretation, but frequently had to explain away absences and disappointments.
As a child, I probably experienced much of this as frustration.
As an adult, I can recognise it as a search for connection.
The Teachers Who Opened Doors
Most authority figures wanted compliance.
A few wanted thoughts.
The teachers I remember best are not those who enforced rules most effectively but those who encouraged intellectual exploration.
One English teacher stands out.
He encouraged debate.
He taught us to examine newspapers critically.
He showed us that different publications could report the same event in entirely different ways.
He delighted in language.
He allowed me to invent words while simultaneously insisting I learn the proper ones.
He loved books both physically and intellectually. He would hold one up, inhale its scent, and admire it like a freshly baked loaf.
What I remember now is not simply what he taught.
It is what he permitted.
He gave curiosity legitimacy.
He suggested that questioning was not a flaw to be corrected but a strength to be directed.
I suspect he understood something about me that many others did not.
Boarding School: Constraint and Formation
It is tempting to view boarding school solely as a force that constrained me.
Certainly, it tried.
The routines, punishments, hierarchies and expectations often felt restrictive.
Yet that is only half the story.
The institutions that frustrated me also gave me tools.
Discipline.
Persistence.
Organisation.
Endurance.
The ability to complete tasks regardless of mood.
Without those structures, the waterslide child might have remained a bundle of scattered energy.
Without the child, the institutions might have produced a dutiful conformist.
What emerged instead was a compromise.
The diaries show someone learning how to direct enthusiasm rather than merely experience it.
That process would continue for decades.
From Arguing with Systems to Building Them
The biggest transformation occurred in adulthood.
As a child, I argued.
As an adolescent, I resisted.
As an adult, I began building.
The challenge became less about opposing systems and more about creating my own.
This became especially apparent in working life.
I repeatedly found myself wanting independence.
Wanting autonomy.
Wanting control over my methods and priorities.
The question gradually shifted from:
“Why must I do things your way?”
to:
“How shall I organise things my way?”
That distinction matters.
Opposition is reactive.
Creation is generative.
The adult version of wilfulness became self-direction.
Instead of merely challenging frameworks, I started constructing them.
As a producer, educator, historian, coach, councillor and writer, I have repeatedly created structures that reflect my own values and methods.
The impulse is recognisably the same.
The expression is more mature.
Conclusion: The Waterslide Is Still There
What surprises me most is not how much I have changed but how much I have remained the same.
The child woke, bursting with excitement.
The schoolboy who questioned everything.
The teenager who resisted easy answers.
The adult who prefers evidence to assertion.
The councillor who challenges assumptions.
The tree surveyor who measures.
The historian who asks how we know.
The coach who seeks understanding.
The novelist who explores possibilities.
They are all versions of the same person.
The word wilful was never entirely wrong.
But it was incomplete.
What adults often saw as stubbornness was frequently curiosity.
What looked like defiance was often a desire to understand.
What appeared to be resistance was often an attempt to think independently.
The great achievement of adulthood has not been overcoming those qualities.
I have been learning how to use them.
The wilful child became the skilful adult.
And somewhere inside him, still waking early and eager for whatever comes next, the boy at the top of the waterslide is waiting for another ride.
Leave a Reply