This is not a book about Derek, and I will not attempt here to express in words everything he has since become to me. Only he and I can ever fully understand what we have meant to one another. For more than 50 years, we have shared joy and sadness, adventure and routine, anxiety and contentment, and, above all, love. He remains the rock on which my life is built. Back then, however, he was just a good-looking colleague who, despite his shyness, seemed curiously undeterred by the fact that, the first few times he asked me out, I turned him down brusquely.
There were other men on the scene back then - including, initially, Trevor. But eventually, many months after our first meeting, I agreed, half-heartedly, to a date with Derek. We had known each other for the best part of a year by then, but, even so, it felt awkward to be alone together. We ate at the old Swiss Cottage in west London, and talked largely of music, about which Derek was both passionate and knowledgeable. My main impression was still of his shyness, and of the way he fluttered his eyelashes, rather as a woman does.
A week or so later we went out again, to explore another of his passions: the Thames. Derek had spent his favourite wartime days on the river, along with a close-knit group of about half-a-dozen friends known, collectively, as the River Boys. They had all been working for the Ministry of Defence - at Dollis Hill - on the production of crystal oscillators, which were needed for all sorts of vital military signals work. But they could do so only when they had the necessary quartz, which was in short supply. When they had some, they would work around the clock, pausing only for occasional snatches of sleep on the on-site camp beds. When the quartz ran out, they would disappear for a week or two to mess about on the river, until the next consignment made it across the Atlantic from, I think, Brazil. Derek had spent some of the happiest times of his life on these excursions, and so it seemed natural to him to introduce me to the joys of the river.
I turned up for our day out in my most glamorous dress and white high heels, under the impression that we were going to be on a grand pleasure boat. It turned out that our vessel was a dilapidated punt, whose sides barely poked out of the water. After an hour of uncomfortable punting, the heavens opened, and by the time we returned to dry land I was bedraggled and shivering - at which point Derek finally succeeded in impressing me by producing an enormous towel from the tennis bag that he invariably carried around with him. Perhaps, I reasoned, such a well-prepared man was worth getting to know better.
Our courtship was long-drawn-out. I remember many happy days on the river - which was, we discovered, a better place than most for a couple to get a bit of privacy. I remember some surprisingly good-natured get-togethers with my mother - who found Derek annoyingly vague but concluded, grudgingly, that on balance he wasn’t as bad as some of the other men I had been involved with. And I remember that for a long time our relationship veered between delightful highs and apparently terminal lows. I had, for some reason, decided to take up knitting, and during the good spells I spent many of my leisure hours knitting him a sweater. Then, during the “off” phases, the knitting would stop - while at particularly low points I would even start unpicking the work that I had already done.
At some point, after several years, the subject of marriage came up. I can’t remember exactly how it arose; only that I didn’t welcome the idea. In retrospect, this seems strange. It seems obvious to me now that marriage to a man like Derek was the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. It didn’t then.
There were, I think, two reasons. One was that he had not been what I was expecting. I had imagined that the love of my life would be slicker and more polished - more obviously sophisticated; more like my father. So it took time to accept that, although he was not a good communicator, Derek was none the less a deep thinker, with a profound intellectual curiosity that matched my own. (He was always making journeys to Hammersmith public library, where you could borrow both books and long-playing records.) What I ultimately realised was that he was, simply, a good man: gentle, solid, dependable, honest, unselfish and upright - more like Uncle than my father, though much cleverer and, indeed, probably cleverer than me. As such, he was a thoroughly suitable choice as a lifetime’s partner. But it took time for all this to sink in.
The other problem was that - in the early stages of our courtship - I was still in the process of unravelling the mental knots of my childhood through my visits to the Tavistock Clinic. In some hard-to-define way, I felt that I was not fit to marry. Marriage was for normal, happy people - whereas I, I had decided, was too damaged; too much of a victim; too eaten up by resentment; too traumatised by exile.
So the idea of marriage was put to one side, and we carried on, knitting, unpicking and reknitting our relationship without really going anywhere. We saw little of each other at work - we were at opposite ends of the site - and lots of each other outside work. The obstacles preventing us from going further seemed as baffling and elusive as the obstacles that prevented my career from going any further.
Then, in the late summer of 1959, my mother went on a trip to Vienna. At the last minute, I decided to join her. We made the grim train journey across Europe, weighed down with baggage and expectation, before finally emerging in the glorious historic city from which we had escaped 20 years earlier. I looked around at its gracious avenues, ancient walls, grand palaces and elegant squares. And I realised in an instant that, lovely as it all was, it meant absolutely nothing to me. It may look strange in print, but at that moment I felt the weight of my past vanish from my shoulders. It was not that I ceased to be conscious of the traumas of my childhood. It was just that the psychological “ghosts” that had been haunting me suddenly seemed small and manageable - scarcely more than a figment of my imagination. I could not deny my past, or make it go away. But, if I chose to be, I could from now on be as unscarred and “normal” as any other English child of the war years.
I telephoned Derek there and then - no easy matter in those days - and told him that I was ready to marry him. We married six weeks later.
The ceremony took place at Willesden Registry Office, on 14 November 1959. Derek had initially wanted a church wedding, but I felt that, for a non-believer like me, that would be hypocritical. (A few years earlier, my urge to belong had prompted me to enrol for Confirmation classes in the Church of England, but by the end of the course I had realised that I lacked the faith to go through with it.) So instead we booked the last registry office session of a Saturday morning, so that it would feel a bit less like being on a conveyor belt, and then held a small party - for about 40 people - at a hotel in Hampstead. Most of the guests were colleagues, although my mother was there, and Auntie and Uncle, and my aunt Ilse (who had come over from Munich and was shocked by the London smog), but not my father - who had sent a very small cheque which we spent on a very small clock. Derek’s parents were there, but many of his family stayed away, disapproving of his marrying a German. Uncle gave me away.
My mother made me a beautiful wedding dress of cream brocade. The top tier of the cake went to my sister in Australia.
We spent a very short honeymoon in a very grand hotel in Egham, Surrey (chosen because the hotel, Great Fosters, had a four-poster bed). The brevity was linked to the grandness: we ran out of money.
Then we began a new life.
In many respects it was much the same as our old life. For the first eight months, we lived in that same tiny bedsit in Walm Lane - an experience I’d recommend for any newly married couple, because it forces you (eventually) to get on. We wanted to buy a place of our own, but each time we saved up what we thought was enough for a deposit we found that house prices had gone up.
But there was one significant change: I stopped working at the Post Office. It wasn’t absolutely obligatory to do so, but the general assumption in those days was that if two people working in the same organisation married, one of them - usually the woman - would leave. (In fact, there was a couple at the Post
Office who had broken that convention - and their example alone was enough to turn me against the idea. If they ate lunch together in the canteen, people would gossip about how they were more interested in their marriage than in being good colleagues; if they didn’t, people would gossip about how they must have had a row. The thought of my marriage being subjected to such daily public scrutiny horrified me.)
There was no particular reason why it should have been I rather than Derek who left. He was an Experimental Officer, whereas I was by now a Scientific Officer, which made us roughly equal in status. But given the frustrations I had encountered each time I attempted to progress up the Post Office hierarchy, it made sense for me to try somewhere new.
So: I handed in my resignation, cashed in the small pension I had accumulated (which paid for the wedding and the honeymoon) and looked for something else. Before long, I found another job, at a company called Computer Developments Limited (CDL) in Kenton, near Harrow. This was a subsidiary of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT, which was later absorbed by International Computers Limited - ICL - and, later still, by Fujitsu) and of GEC. It was run by John Wensley, who had been Bill Cameron’s boss at GEC Hirst. It was, in those days, a small, young, energetic outfit that was really quite exciting to work for. There were about 35 employees, most of them young and bright, and compared with the Post Office their way of working was thrillingly informal. Everyone used to take their breaks together in the canteen, and staff from different departments would exchange ideas freely. People worked with urgency and enthusiasm, and the long days were shaped by objectives rather than routine. This was, I suppose, my first experience of the difference between the staid public sector and the dynamic private sector.
I was part of the company’s software group, which provided software for Computer Developments’ computers. My particular responsibility - and that of the handful of group members who worked under me - was for software-testing a new computer, called the 1301, that the company was designing and building in Coventry. Essentially, the object of the software was to check that the hardware (which had unbuffered peripherals, for those of you who understand such terminology) was working properly. This didn’t involve making radical new conceptual breakthroughs, but for a mathematician with limited technical experience it was quite exciting.
We worked hard - I have many grim memories of snatching a few hours’ sleep in cheap Coventry hotel rooms after working half the night on the computer because other people were using it by day - but I felt that I was learning things. I loved those early computers - huge, whirring things that filled an entire room, and I loved the pure, abstract beauty (not unlike musical beauty) of the logic that underlay their design. The process of designing the 1301 had, it was said, included making a huge “logic diagram” of its workings on the floor of CDL’s 50ft-by-15ft meeting-room. Volunteers representing electrical pulses were recruited to walk between the various “gates” (jargon for the electronic devices that compute the value of two-valued signals), just as was supposed to happen in the machine itself. If someone tried to go through a gate that wasn’t open, or if two people ended up trying to stand on the same point at the same time, then there was a problem that needed to be addressed. It was, in short, a triumph of pure reason, and a labour of many people’s love. I used to sit down at the controls to begin a session with the same kind of thrill that one might feel on taking the controls of a shiny new racing-car. I also liked my colleagues, several of whom turned into friends. And, as an extra bonus, I was earning much more than I had at Dollis Hill.
We tried to live just on Derek’s salary, putting mine towards buying furniture and saving for that elusive first home. But house prices still grew faster than our savings, and bit by bit we moved our sights away from central London. By the time we found somewhere we could afford, we had reached Chesham, a market town in Buckinghamshire, in the heart of the Chiltern Hills. More precisely, we had reached a hamlet called Ley Hill, a few miles outside Chesham, where we bought a dilapidated brick-and-flint cottage - then being rented by a friendly young couple with a baby - on the edge of some woods. It cost us £4,765 and was called Moss Cottage.
Life here required considerable adjustments. Not only were there holes in the floorboards and leaking pipes to be fixed (by Derek, with admirable patience but limited competence), but we soon realised that we were possibly the only urban incomers in a very rural and isolated settlement. The locals weren’t unfriendly, but it was clear that they regarded us with a faintly contemptuous bemusement which it took time to wear down. It didn’t help when we held a small house-warming party for a few of our London friends, only for our chimney to catch fire. By the time the conflagration had been extinguished, our reputation as inept townies was firmly set. This had its advantages: I remember one neighbour volunteering (in vain) to put down some unwanted kittens with her bare hands, while another, a frail and harmless old lady, helped deal with a rat in our garden by beating it to death with a stick. Conversely, when some gypsies settled on the edge of Ley Hill for a few summer weeks, ours was the only household that would give them drinking-water. This made us unpopular with some villagers, but with my background there was no question of compromise. I said: “I’m not refusing drinking-water to anyone.” In an odd sort of way, we seemed to be more respected after this.
Our lifestyle was basic. Our furniture consisted initially of a bed, two deckchairs, a stool and - for Derek - a baby grand piano. But our lives were full enough for any discomforts to seem unimportant. We both commuted to work, although not together. I worked longer hours than Derek, and generally got a lift from a colleague who lived nearby. In the evenings, we were quite content with one another’s company. Sometimes, though, I would linger in the garden on my return, to listen to Derek playing the piano. He played beautifully, but was still too shy to play in front of me.
This was a happy time: the kind of innocent, peaceful post-war idyll to which many middle-class couples then aspired. But, inevitably, there came a time - perhaps two years into our marriage - when we (or at least I) began to wonder what happened next.
Newly married and saving for our first home, I could scarce believe that I should be paid so well in industry. It was a happy period – but I still smoked.
It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with our relationship; it was more a feeling that, somehow, I was once again limiting myself in order to fit in with other people’s preconceptions. Working wives were rare and often viewed with suspicion, not least in rural Buckinghamshire, and so I had got into the habit of playing down the career aspect of my life, reducing my employment at Computer Developments to four days a week so that my earnings would not outstrip Derek’s and ostentatiously spending the remaining day on chores such as laundry, so that his traditional male role as head of the household should not be threatened. (He had, to be fair, never expressed any insecurities on such matters, but I didn’t want to take any chances.)
At work, meanwhile, that same sense of arbitrary limits that had frustrated me at the Post Office was beginning to frustrate me at Computer Developments Limited. I had done well as a programmer: one short piece of code I wrote - a “bootstrap” programme that allowed the computer to pull in more complicated programmes - earned CDL hundreds of thousands of pounds. As my confidence grew, however, I found myself increasingly interested not just in software development but also in the marketing side of our operations. It fascinated me to think: “If a computer can do x, what use could somebody make of that function? And how could our company exploit that?” Strictly speaking, however, this was not what I was employed for, and it soon became clear that there were people in the company who did not welcome intrusions on their territory. Perhaps my gender had something to do with it, but the real problem was a more broadly territorial mind-set. I had my place, and I should stay in it.
The turning-point was a meeting at which I was supposed to be talking about the technical aspects of some project. The
discussion came round to something more marketing-related - about pricing, I think - and I began to make a suggestion. One of the senior men cut me short: “That’s nothing to do with you. You’re technical.” And that was the end of my contribution.
It sounds a small thing, but the more I thought about it, the bigger it became. It wasn’t just the fact that he had said it. It was the fact that I didn’t know how to deal with it, and that no one else had piped up to say “Hang on, let’s just hear what she’s got to say.” Women everywhere, in all walks of business, will have had similar experiences. It wasn’t, in this instance, a gender thing; but the sense of dumb frustration was the same. How could they know that what I had to say wasn’t worth listening to, if they wouldn’t even let me say it?
I brooded on this for the rest of the day, and on my journey home, and for much of the evening. Finally, after talking things through with Derek, I reached a conclusion: it was time to move on.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to work there anymore. There was something else.
I had had an idea.
7: New Beginnings
I RESIGNED the following morning. I gave three months’ notice - much more than I had to - partly out of a sense of duty but also from a certain nervousness about the future. The idea that had seemed so irresistible the night before seemed flimsier once my resignation had been accepted.
I had decided to start my own company, selling software. That’s an uncontroversial sentence, written nearly 50 years later. At the time, it sounded mad.
Drawbacks included the following. I had no capital to speak of. I had no experience of running a company. I had no employees, no office, no customers, and no reason to believe that there were any companies out there with any interest in buying my product. Nobody sold software in those days. In so far as it existed, it was given away free. Only the most forward-thinking and well-resourced organisations invested at all in what would now be called information technology, and those that did so would generally have been outraged at the suggestion that, having forked out a hefty sum for a new computer, they should also be asked to pay for the code to make it do what it was supposed to do. They expected that to be thrown in for nothing, as the manual is for a new car.
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 7