Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

Been back at Henley today to run a Personal Development workshop for a corporate intake, and it’s taken it out me, so I am struggling to get the Day Ten posting out. Still, determined not to miss a day, and a walk with the dog in the dark this evening in the strong southerly blow has helped. That mild winter wind, gusting up from the Atlantic (even to Oxfordshire) and bringing the promise of rain, takes me back to times in my own adolescence in Deal, a seaside town in Kent, walking at night along its windy streets leading to the seafront with the same wind blowing and the noise of the waves on the shingle, where the wind in the wires of the fishing boats and yachts drawn up there all get amplified.

But the adolescent memory is tomorrow’s writing task. From my Day Five list, I need to write here about a childhood memory instead, though I am curious how ‘child’ ends and ‘adolescent’ begins, and according to whom?  A memory that stands out is one that I was hesitant at first place here. It’s a well reviewed memory, very personal (and anyone who has lost a parent at a the same age will know how personal) and one that I’ve since worked through for myself the primary meaning of the event and my reaction to it. I’ve decided to include it in part because it really does feel like a defining moment in terms of identity, in part because it has ultimately helped me illustrate to myself the model of reflection I mentioned in Day Two’s posting, and in part just because the narrative remains (apparently) still crystal clear today.

I was 10. My parents had separated when I was 3 and my mother had raised us on her own in a very loving environment in Deal. My father and her divorced, he moved to London from Dublin and as we (me, my older brother and sister) got older we would spend the odd weekend with him on trips to London. As the youngest, I probably wasn’t sent up to London very often, but I seem to remember being placed on a train to London, on my own, to be met at the other end. This, I guess would be unthinkable these days, and back then there were no mobile phones!  One sunny morning, a Sunday, my mother went out to meet some friends for a drink at a pub on the seafront, leaving us alone to watch TV.  After she had been gone for a while, there was a knock at the front door. I think my brother answered. It was a policeman and a policewoman, and they were looking for my mother. I was quite excited, we had never had the police at our door before. We told her where she had gone and they said they would pop up to find her. It was quite warm outside, but I don’t think it was summer.

About 15 minutes later my mother came back, looking very pale. At first she didn’t say anything to us, just staying very quiet in the kitchen, where she had already started making our lunch before she had left. We asked her what the police had wanted, but she refused to tell us at first. I think she wanted us to eat. Maybe she thought we would be too upset after she had given us the news, or maybe she just needed the activity and the space to gather her own thoughts. Eventually, she came in to where I was sitting with my brother, crouched down, and told us what the police had come to tell her, that Daddy had died, in London. I’m sure there was more, and I’m sure we must have asked questions, and I’m sure she will have tried to answer them, keeping any details that were not our business away from us, but I can’t be sure. I do recall not crying.  Not then. I actually did not have a strong connection with him, and he was a rather distant figure for me, though he had been promising to spend more time with me as well as with my siblings. He was, I’m told, a very charming man.

This is, even now, a defining point for me in my understanding of who I am. Its significance at the time was limited, but has become much more pronounced and inter-woven in my adult life, and I for many years I can see how it echoed around me and how it controlled, or at least influenced, many of my choices.

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Reflections

I see a lot of the managers on the MBA programme show reluctance or resistance to playing their thoughts or feelings about themselves in public.  I do like to push back on that, a bit, but I can understand it, too because we do need to maintain an appropriate distance between others and those parts of ourselves that we haven’t quite sorted out yet.

  The paradox is that the only way you can prove that reflective practice really does work is by doing it, but you mustn’t force anyone to do it, for the reluctant reflector that would only prove their point. Nevertheless at some point you have to take the plunge if you want to get on with the rest of your life!