I have never meekly submitted to authority, accepting it without question. Where I respect a leader, I will be an avid supporter, but I will never be a 'yes' man.
At secondary school, in the sixth form (equivalent to one's 12th or 13th year level) I was the only boy not to be made a prefect. Perhaps I should have been. Sometimes you need to set a thief in order to catch a thief!
As a non-prefect, I remained in the senior study of Clive house. This was a single level, wooden building set in its own grounds, and we set to work on carefully cutting out a section of floor which we could then use as a trapdoor. We excavated a large dungeon and in there we brewed our own wines. I used my chemistry knowledge to test it was pure ethyl alcohol and therefore safe for human consumption. We rigged up electric lighting in our dungeon and passed many a pleasant evening in the cellar, sometimes with carefully vetted guests.
One fine bit of mischief was very carefully plotted. About a mile from our boarding school, which was set in some hundred acres of grounds, was a teenage girls' boarding school run by nuns, which also occupied spacious grounds.
One early November evening, immediately after supper, a few of us put dark clothing over our uniforms and broke out of school grounds.
We ran to the girls' school armed with giant fire-crackers, and non-filter tipped cigarettes. We dispersed all around the area of the main school buildings and quickly lit cigarettes from one already lit ( to avoid match flare) then put the unlit end of the cigarette over a fire-cracker's fuse, and hid the device. Each of us rigged about 4 of them, then dashed back to senior study, hid our dark clothing, and sat at our desks, controlling our breathing, just before a prefect arrived to take the roll call and supervise prep.
3 minutes later, one of us remarked, diffidently, about hearing an explosion in the distance. Then came another. The prefect also heard them, of course, and more to the point, heard them in our presence.
At the girls' school, nuns were rushing about, from explosion to explosion, and being convinced they had spotted the perpetrators. Some weeks later, a girl from that school described how a huge crowd of nasty boys had invaded the school and had thrown firework crackers all over the place. I sympathised, whilst struggling to keep a concerned expression.
I'm certain the school authorities KNEW I had to have been part of it, but we had a cast iron alibi.

This is an extract from my semi-written autobiography.