Growing Up Outside the World

Reflections on freedom, isolation, and a childhood in the Welsh countryside.

I remember waking up on cold winter mornings to find ice on the inside of the windows. Our little cottage in the hills of mid-Wales had single-glazed windows, no electricity, no telephone, and only one heated room.

That room was the living room, where a large Aga burned throughout the winter, day and night, fuelled by a mixture of wood and coal. It also provided our hot water. My father would carry the coal up from the nearest place he could park the car, sometimes a couple of miles away, as the track leading to our house became impassable during the winter months.

In the evenings, the house was almost completely dark, apart from the light of one or two little paraffin lamps. We would sit together as a family, playing cards, talking, and finding ways to entertain ourselves. There was no television, no internet, no connection to the outside world. In many ways, it felt as though the rest of the world didn't exist.

As a young boy, I loved it.

I grew up with three siblings, two older sisters and a younger brother. We were incredibly close, partly because we were the only children around. During the summer months, we would disappear into the surrounding countryside for hours, climbing trees, building huts, following rivers and exploring the hills without giving much thought to when we might return home.

There was a little stream running through our garden, where we would build small water turbines with our father. We grew our own vegetables, chopped our own firewood, and lived a life that, looking back, sounds almost like something from another century.

And in many ways, it was idyllic.

But there was another side to it.

We were isolated, not only geographically but socially. As a young boy, I wasn't particularly aware of what I was missing. I had my siblings, the countryside, and an enormous amount of freedom. For my older sisters, who were at different stages of their lives, I think that isolation was much harder.

We also didn't go to school.

I've often thought about what that meant for us, and what it continues to mean for me today.

When I hear people talking about their experiences at school, particularly those who had a miserable time, I sometimes feel incredibly fortunate. The idea of spending so much of my childhood sitting in classrooms, rather than exploring the countryside, seems almost unimaginable.

But there's another side to that freedom. School isn't just about education. It's about friendships, arguments, learning to fit in, finding your place amongst people outside your family, and discovering who you are in relation to the wider world.

Those are experiences I largely missed.

And I wonder how much that has shaped the person I've become.

Even now, I often have a feeling of being slightly outside things. I can be surrounded by wonderful people, enjoying myself, and still have this underlying sense that I don't quite belong.

Music has helped enormously with that. The kora has given me a way of connecting with people all over the world. When I'm teaching or performing, I'm in a place where I feel comfortable and confident. I know what I'm doing, and people come together through a shared love of the instrument.

But sometimes I wonder whether that confidence is partly because I have something to offer. I know I can play the kora. It's something I've spent almost my entire life learning to do.

Outside that environment, finding the same sense of belonging can be much more difficult.

There's another part of my childhood that I've been thinking about recently.

Although we were homeschooled, it wasn't done through any official arrangement. As children, we were told that if we ever encountered someone who asked why we weren't at school, we should simply say that we had the day off.

It's a strange thing to think about now.

As a child, you don't necessarily question these things. You accept the world your parents have created for you as normal. But looking back, I realise that there was always this underlying sense that we might be found out.

That somehow, the way we were living wasn't quite allowed.

I've wondered whether that feeling has stayed with me into adulthood. This sense that one day somebody might discover that I'm not quite who they think I am, or that I don't really belong where I've ended up.

I suppose you could call it imposter syndrome, something many people experience. But for me, I can trace at least some of that feeling back to those early years.

Being dyslexic has added another layer to it. I've often felt insecure about things that other people seem to find straightforward, particularly reading and writing, and there's sometimes a fear of being exposed as somehow less capable than the people around me.

It's curious, really, because I've been fortunate enough to travel the world, perform in extraordinary places, and spend my life doing something I love. Yet some of those feelings from childhood are still there.

The idealism behind it all

Looking back, I think my parents were both quite idealistic people. They wanted to create a different kind of life, away from the pressures and expectations of conventional society. And in many ways, they succeeded. They gave us a childhood filled with freedom, nature and experiences that most children could only dream of.

But I also wonder how much thought went into what would happen next.

How would this life be sustained financially? What would happen when we grew older and needed to find our own way in the world? How would we learn to navigate a society we'd spent so much of our childhood living outside of?

I'm not sure those questions were ever fully considered.

And perhaps that's one of the difficulties with idealism. It's possible to create something beautiful in the present without thinking enough about what it might mean for the future.

In the end, that life did come to an end, partly because it simply wasn't financially sustainable. The practical realities of maintaining the house and supporting a family eventually caught up with the dream.

I don't think my parents set out to make our lives difficult. Quite the opposite. I think they genuinely believed they were giving us something special, and in many ways they were.

But I do sometimes wonder whether, in trying to give us freedom from society, they underestimated how difficult it might be for us to find our place within it later on.

Looking back

I don't want to paint my upbringing as either wonderful or terrible, because it was neither. Or perhaps, at different moments, it was a bit of both.

There are things about that childhood I wouldn't exchange for anything. The freedom, the closeness to nature, the time spent with my siblings, and the feeling that the world was an enormous playground waiting to be explored.

But there were difficulties too, and some of them have taken years to recognise.

I think it's possible to feel incredibly grateful for an experience while also acknowledging the ways it may have made life harder.

Perhaps that's one of the things I'm hoping to explore through writing these stories. How our earliest experiences shape us, often in ways we don't fully understand until much later.

And how, even after travelling halfway around the world, a part of us is still that little child waking up in a freezing cottage in the Welsh hills.