In the end, being too young for the chair was never about age alone. It was about the long apprenticeship in believing I had the right to sit where my work had taken me. It was about learning that client perception could not be allowed to define professional truth, and that deception, whether deliberate or convenient, had to be met with something steadier than my need to be approved of.
There are some chairs you grow into and some you are pushed into before your feet have properly found the floor. I do not mean that literally, although in those early days of being taken seriously as an accountant, it sometimes felt almost as literal as that, sitting across from people who had already decided what I could or could not know before I had opened my mouth.
The chair itself was never the point, of course. It was what people believed the chair represented, and whether they believed I had earned the right to sit in it. In business, as in schoolyards and sporting sheds and committees and country towns, there are places where a person is allowed to stand and places where a person is expected to wait until invited.
I had spent much of my life trying to earn the invitation. From the farm to the bus, from the outlying school to the bigger one twenty miles away, from representative jumpers to workrooms and meeting tables, the pattern had changed its clothes but not its nature. You could do the work, make the runs, pass the exams, carry the responsibility, and still find someone looking over your shoulder for the person they had expected instead.
That was part of the problem with being young in a profession that people associated with age, grey hair, and a certain slow confidence. Accountants were supposed to look as though they had been born with a leather briefcase in one hand and a quiet warning in the other. They were meant to have the air of someone who had seen everything twice, knew where the bodies were buried, and had a filing cabinet full of reasons why enthusiasm should be treated with suspicion.
I did not have that look. I may have had the qualifications, the capacity, the work ethic, and the stubborn need to prove myself, but I did not have the years on my face that some people needed before they would trust the words coming out of my mouth. It was an odd thing to be judged for youth when I had never felt young in the usual sense, having carried responsibility and self-consciousness like extra baggage from well before adulthood.
Colin Waller sits in my memory because he represented more than one client or one conversation. He belongs to that period when I was learning that authority was not simply a matter of knowing something, and that competence did not always announce itself loudly enough for people already committed to doubting it. Client perception could become its own kind of weather, and you either learned to stand in it or you spent your life waiting for it to clear.
It was not only that clients wanted answers. They wanted reassurance, and often they wanted reassurance from someone who looked like their idea of authority. A young face could make a client nervous, not because the advice was wrong, but because they could not separate the advice from the person delivering it.
There was a certain deception in that, although not always a malicious one. People deceived themselves into believing that age and wisdom were the same thing, just as they sometimes believed that confidence and accuracy were close relatives. I learned early that a man could speak absolute rubbish with a deep enough voice and a slow enough nod, and many in the room would lean toward him as though he had just carried down tablets from the mountain.
The reverse was also true, and that was harder to swallow. A younger person could have done the work, read the law, understood the numbers, seen the issue clearly, and still be treated as though he had brought a school project to an adult meeting. It was not enough to be right; you had to look right, sound right, and occupy the chair as though no one had ever questioned your right to be there.
I did not always manage that gracefully. There were times when I over-prepared, over-explained, and tried to build a fortress of facts high enough that no one could see the boy they assumed was still standing behind it. If I look back honestly, I can see that some of my authority was earned and some of it was armoured.
That is one of the uncomfortable truths of a life spent striving. You begin by trying to prove you belong, but over time the proof itself becomes part of the disguise. You are no longer simply doing the work because the work matters; you are doing it because some old part of you is still trying to silence the person who once decided you were from too far out, too small a school, too odd a background, or too young for the chair.
Colin Waller came into that landscape of perception and uncertainty. I do not need to turn him into a villain for the memory to matter, because most of the people who shape us are not villains at all. They are simply people carrying their own expectations, fears, assumptions and self-interest into a room where we happen to be sitting.
Client relationships are rarely as clean as the brochures suggest. On paper, the accountant advises, the client listens, the facts are gathered, the returns are lodged, the accounts are prepared, and everyone goes home with a sense of order. In real life, the facts arrive bent, delayed, softened, withheld, or dressed up for the occasion, and the accountant has to decide how much of the story is mistake, how much is embarrassment, and how much is deliberate deception.
That is where the personal conflict begins. You want to help, because helping is part of the job and, in my case, part of the identity I had built around usefulness. You also have to protect yourself, the client, the profession, and sometimes the truth itself, which can make you feel less like a helper and more like a policeman in a cardigan.
There is no comfortable way to tell a client that the story does not hold together. There is no easy tone that makes suspicion sound kind, or caution sound trusting, or professional distance sound warm. You sit there weighing not only the numbers but the person in front of you, and somewhere inside you the old need to be liked starts arguing with the newer duty to be firm.
That was the kind of conflict Colin brought to the surface for me. It was not simply about a file, a transaction, or whatever set of circumstances sat on the desk at the time. It was about whether I could occupy the chair properly when the person opposite me did not fully accept my authority, or perhaps hoped that I would not yet know how to use it.
There are clients who test boundaries without appearing to test them. They do it with a laugh, a missing document, a casual explanation that arrives too easily, or a little pressure wrapped in friendliness. They make you feel unreasonable for asking the next question, as though the real offence is not what they may have done but your failure to accept the version placed in front of you.
I was not naturally built for confrontation, despite what some people may have assumed from the outside. I could argue a point, and I could hold a line when I had to, but inside I often carried more conflict than I showed. The mask of competence did not mean the absence of doubt; it often meant the doubt had been sent to the back room and told not to make a noise.
That was another inheritance from being outside the circle. When you have spent years learning to read rooms before entering them, you become alert to shifts in tone, small dismissals, and the moment when another person thinks they have found your weak spot. It is useful in business, but it is exhausting in life, because you are rarely just in the room you are in.
With Colin, or with what he came to represent, the issue was not merely whether I was believed. It was whether I believed myself enough to keep asking questions when the atmosphere told me to stop. That is a different kind of authority from the kind printed on a business card.
Looking back, I can see how much of my professional life was spent learning the difference between confidence and certainty. Certainty is often brittle, because it needs the world to stay still and agree with it. Confidence, at its best, allows room for doubt but does not surrender to it.
I was still learning that distinction. I had knowledge, but I was still learning how to carry it without either apologising for it or swinging it around like a stick. I had authority, but I was still learning that real authority did not always need to raise its voice.
That did not come naturally. A boy from out on a grazing property, out of voice reach of the nearest neighbour, does not automatically grow into a man who assumes his voice will carry in a boardroom, a client meeting, or any other place where older men have already settled themselves comfortably. The habit of feeling slightly outside does not disappear just because the chair has your name on it.
The irony is that clients often see only the surface. They see the office, the files, the letters, the tax law, the capacity to deal with complexity, and they assume that the person providing the advice must feel as solid as the advice sounds. They do not see the private argument between the professional self and the older, quieter self still wondering whether he has permission to be there.
There were times when deception from a client felt almost personal, even when I knew it was not. If someone withheld information, reshaped a story, or tried to lead me toward a convenient conclusion, I could feel more than professional irritation. I could feel that old sting of being treated as someone who could be fooled, someone not quite inside the adult conversation.
That is not the cleanest admission, but it is the truthful one. Professional judgement should be calm, objective, and detached, and on the surface I tried to make it so. Beneath that, however, the work sometimes touched older wounds, because being underestimated had followed me for so long that I could recognise its footsteps before it reached the door.
Colin Waller became one of those moments where I had to decide whether I was there to be approved of or to do the job properly. That sounds simple when written down, but it is rarely simple when the client is in front of you and the relationship has value. Fees matter, goodwill matters, reputation matters, and so does the uneasy knowledge that saying no can turn admiration into resentment very quickly.
There is a peculiar loneliness in professional firmness. People praise integrity in the abstract, but they are not always as fond of it when it interrupts their preferred outcome. The same person who wants a strong adviser in theory may want a compliant one in practice, especially when the truth becomes inconvenient.
I had to learn that being trusted did not always mean being liked. Sometimes trust required me to disappoint a client, slow something down, ask for more evidence, or refuse to accept a version of events that had been polished too smooth. That was difficult for someone who had spent so much of his life trying to earn his place by being useful.
Usefulness had been my passport for years. In sport, I could be useful by making runs, taking wickets, tackling, riding, competing, representing, and helping the team or town or school claim something beyond itself. In work, I could be useful by solving problems, carrying burdens, making sense of mess, and taking responsibility that others were happy enough to leave on my desk.
But usefulness has a shadow. If you are only valued when you are useful, then any boundary feels dangerous. Saying no feels like placing your belonging at risk, and asking hard questions can feel like stepping outside the warmth of approval into weather you know too well.
That was the personal conflict under the professional one. I did not simply want to be right; I wanted to remain accepted while being right. I wanted the authority of the chair without the emotional cost of using it, which is probably what many of us want before experience teaches us that the two cannot always be separated.
There was also the matter of age. Being told, or made to feel, that I was too young for the chair was not only a comment about years. It was a comment about legitimacy, and legitimacy had been the word I had been chasing under different names since childhood.
At school, legitimacy came through marks or sport. In the wider district, it came through representation or recognition. In business, it came through clients, results, responsibility and the slow accumulation of proof that I could be trusted with serious matters.
Yet legitimacy given by others is a slippery thing. You can spend your life collecting it and still find it evaporates when one person looks at you with doubt, dismissal or calculation in their eyes. That is why inner authority matters, although it took me longer than it should have to understand that.
Inner authority does not mean arrogance. It does not mean believing you are always right or refusing to listen. It means knowing that your right to ask, assess, challenge and decide does not disappear because someone else would prefer you to be smaller.
I suspect Colin taught me that, even if not by intention. Some people teach us by encouraging us, and others teach us by requiring us to find a strength we would rather not have needed. I have had both kinds of teachers, although the second group seldom realises it and probably would not appreciate the compliment.
The difficulty with deception is that it changes the air in a room. Once you sense that a person may not be dealing plainly with you, every word becomes heavier and every silence asks to be interpreted. You begin to listen not only to what is said but to what is avoided, and that kind of listening can wear a person down.
In accounting, people imagine the truth lives in the documents. Sometimes it does, but just as often the documents are only the last place the truth has passed through on its way to becoming something else. Figures can be accurate and still incomplete, and a set of accounts can balance beautifully while the story behind them leans hard to one side.
That is where professional authority becomes moral authority, whether you asked for that burden or not. You are no longer merely adding up numbers or applying legislation; you are deciding how close to the line you are willing to stand and who you are willing to stand beside. That can sound dramatic, but in practice it often arrives quietly, disguised as a meeting, a question, a missing receipt, or a client who believes charm will do the work of evidence.
I learned over time that charm is not the same as honesty. I also learned that discomfort is not always a sign that you are wrong; sometimes it is the body recognising a conflict before the mind has finished assembling the reasons. Those lessons did not come from textbooks, although the textbooks were easier to read.
The chair, then, became symbolic. It was the place where I had to sit while others projected their hopes, doubts, evasions and expectations onto me. It was also the place where I had to face my own need to be respected, my resentment at being underestimated, and my fear that perhaps I was still the boy from too far out being measured against standards that shifted whenever he got close.
That fear is not something I am proud of, but pride has a way of making a memoir dishonest if it is allowed to drive. The truth is that much of my achievement carried fear underneath it. Fear of being left out, fear of being found wanting, fear of losing the one thing that made me useful enough to be kept in the room.
When a client challenged my authority, whether openly or subtly, they were not only challenging the accountant in front of them. They were waking up the child who had once learned that belonging was conditional and temporary. That child could be stubborn, defensive, over-prepared and determined not to be humiliated, which made him useful in a fight but not always peaceful afterwards.
I can smile at some of it now, although not all. There is a dry humour in the idea that a man can spend years being told he is bright, capable and responsible, then sit in front of someone who doubts him because his face has not yet collected enough lines. Had I known then what the lines would cost, I might have offered to lend them a few in advance.
Age did come, as it tends to do without being asked. The strange thing is that when the grey hair, the history, and the professional scars finally arrive, you realise they were never the whole answer. People may accept the chair more readily, but the old questions can still sit quietly underneath it.
Retirement, or the approach of it, has made me think about that more than I expected. If work gave me a chair, and clients gave me a reason to occupy it, then what happens when the chair is no longer needed in the same way? What remains when authority is not reinforced by appointments, files, phone calls and people wanting answers before the next deadline?
That is one of the quieter disturbances of stepping away from full-time work. You discover how much of your identity has been built around being consulted. The phone rings less, the urgent emails thin out, and suddenly the old ache of being out of voice reach finds a new form.
It is not that I want to spend the rest of my life arguing tax points or testing client stories against the available evidence. There are days when the thought of never again having to untangle someone else’s carefully arranged confusion feels like liberation. Yet there is also a grief in losing the role that proved, day after day, that my voice had use.
Perhaps that is why Colin Waller still matters in the story. He reminds me of a stage in life when I was fighting to be heard, not loudly, but persistently. He reminds me that authority is not handed over once and for all, but claimed in small, uncomfortable moments when we decide not to shrink.
He also reminds me that the search for belonging can take strange forms. Sometimes we think we are seeking affection, when really we are seeking recognition. Sometimes we think we want people to like us, when what we truly need is for them to stop treating us as though we are not quite real until someone else confirms it.
In the end, being too young for the chair was never about age alone. It was about the long apprenticeship in believing I had the right to sit where my work had taken me. It was about learning that client perception could not be allowed to define professional truth, and that deception, whether deliberate or convenient, had to be met with something steadier than my need to be approved of.
I do not pretend I always got that balance right. There were times I was too sharp, too cautious, too eager to prove a point, or too slow to trust my own discomfort. There were also times when I held the line because the line needed holding, and because some part of me understood that authority without conflict is rarely authority at all.
The chair did not make me belong. No chair could do that, not in an office, a meeting room, a committee, a sporting club, or any of the other places where I tried to earn my place through effort. But it did teach me something about the sound of my own voice, and about the need to use it even when others would rather I remained just beyond range.
That may be the closest thing to peace I can take from it. I was not always welcomed into the circle, and I was not always trusted as quickly as I might have deserved. Still, there were moments when I sat where I had to sit, asked what had to be asked, and discovered that being heard was not the same as being liked, but it was sometimes more necessary.
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