Janet Pratt and her colleague Judith Waterman taught him to ride a bicycle - but not, unfortunately, to brake. Derek tried to play rudimentary tennis with him. Occasionally, the chaotic results of these experiments would be heart-warming rather than heart-breaking.
But we could never really tell what Giles was feeling, or whether or not we were doing the right thing for him - especially in those early years, when the challenges of autism were new to us. So it was a relief to know that for at least some of the time he was in more expert hands than ours. And it was also fairly crucial to our survival that there were extended periods in most weeks in which, while never forgetting Giles, we could give at least a reasonable part of our brains to our work.
Quite how we did so, or how I combined all this heartache with running Freelance Programmers, is no longer clear to me. The records show that the company continued to expand, steadily and rapidly, both financially and in terms of our workforce. I invited Ann Leach to take on a more managerial role, effectively overseeing our panel of freelancers. She had a knack both for accurately estimating the work that any given project would require and for understanding the different strengths, weaknesses and working styles of our programmers. This allowed us to make the very most of our flexible workforce, and gave us a huge advantage over potential rivals. We reckoned that our programmers were forty per cent more productive than programmers in traditional companies, which made it easy for us to offer competitive prices. Meanwhile, my policy of targeting big, blue-chip clients had begun to pay off, as we were able to point to a growing number of high-profile satisfied customers. Contracts began to pour in: from Bird’s Eye, from Esso, from Littlewoods, from Stewart & Lloyds (later absorbed into British Steel), from Wallasey Buses, from Hille (the furniture people, in Watford), from Griffin & George (the scientific educationalists), from British Insulated Callender’s Cables (BICC - later part of Balfour Beatty). The names may mean little today, but at the time they were instantly recognisable as some of the biggest beasts of British business. Their presence among our clients proved that we must have something serious to offer; we had, in effect, been accepted by the establishment. We had even been hired by the Government, whose Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment (AUWE) commissioned us to do some work on a command-and-control system.
But I remember such landmarks only dimly, through a grey fog of misery. My memories of that period are dominated by Giles. I suppose, to an extent, some of these projects would sometimes run themselves - for limited periods, at least. At other times, I would immerse myself in work to forget my pain. But I don’t remember neglecting either my company or my son. I suppose that, like Derek, I just muddled on, driving myself to physical and emotional exhaustion every day with the combined challenges of work and family and then, somehow, dragging myself up to do it all over again the following morning.
I cannot deny that, at times, our marriage seemed near to collapsing under the strain. We were both so miserable that neither of us was able to give the other the emotional support he or she craved. But nor did either of us relish the prospect of dealing with this ordeal alone. So we stuck grimly together, argued a lot about what was best for Giles, and, a long time later, realised that the roots of our relationship had been stronger than we had feared. We were lucky. All too many marriages never recover from the blow of discovering that a child has special needs.
Nor can I deny that, at times, work was a relief from the trials of parenting. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with Giles, or to think about him. It was just that it was refreshing to immerse myself in problems to which I could usually find a satisfactory solution - in contrast to the terrifying and heartbreakingly intractable problem of how to give my son a tolerable life.
I also found a level of emotional support in Freelance Programmers that might have been harder to find in a traditional workplace. The more established we became, the more we developed a trusted elite of top programmers and managers. Some of these - names like Jean Fox, Suzette Harold, Alison Newell, Mary Smith, Rosie Symons and Penny Tutt spring to mind - would become influential senior figures in the company over a period of many years. Some of them, as we got to know one another better, became friends.
There was one colleague in particular who became very close. Pamela Woodman was a bright, attractive woman who had been working for the Commercial Union insurance company but had had to leave because she was expecting her first child. She was unmarried - which was considered scandalous at the time - and anxious to carry on working. She was also highly qualified and motivated, and seemed to offer to the company skills that complemented mine. I hired her on the spot, and before long had been so impressed by her that I suggested that she might want to become a partner in the company. She declined, preferring the security of a salary. But she had the same ferocious commitment to her work that I had. She bought a house nearby, in Great Missenden, so that she could be on the spot, and she insisted on working right up until the final week of her pregnancy. I could hardly have asked for anyone more amenable with whom to share my workload, and from early on she was not just a colleague but a friend. Derek in due course became godfather to her daughter, Fiona Jane, and we soon got into the habit of having our most productive business discussions on long walks around Ley Hill common, with our children in pushchairs or, later, toddling along beside us. I got used to sharing my worries with her, both about work and about Giles, while she in turn used to pick my brains about computers in general and Freelance Programmers in particular.
We even took a brief holiday together, to Bournemouth: me, Derek, Pamela and our children. The first thing we did when we arrived was go and look at the sea. Giles walked straight into the waves, and Derek was only just quick enough to rescue him. The two of them were thus both soaked to the skin when we checked in to our hotel - and Pamela and I roared with laughter at what might, without her, have been rather a dispiriting incident.
It was lovely to be working with someone with whom I felt so at home, and I remember wondering if the men who ran conventional companies were able to enjoy proper, warm human relationships with their colleagues in the same way. Not only was I able to share some of my workload with Pamela, who was a properly trained manager with great organisational skills, but I could also share some of the emotional burden that came with the work. I have always been a worrier, and the bigger the company grew the more things I found to worry about. And always, of course, beyond those worries, there was that terrible unceasing background anxiety about Giles: about what was happening to him at that moment, about what was about to happen to him, and about what would happen to him in the long run. Pamela had a practical, solution-finding approach to life that I found hugely reassuring on the various occasions when I shared this load of anxiety with her.
We made such a good team that, over the next few years, Pamela’s role in the company grew and grew. By early 1969 we had established what we called a “dual management system”, whereby she was more or less entirely responsible for the day-to-day running of the established part of the business, while I focused on expansion, evolution and new business.
But although I was happy to share the responsibilities of internal management, and happy to accept that Pamela knew more than I did about commercial systems, the core responsibility of the enterprise - devising, proposing and refining computerisation strategies that we could perform for our clients - remained mine. In a sense, this was creative work: not programming, not sales, not even - quite - marketing, but, rather, a kind of visualisation: looking at what companies did and what they wanted and imagining software solutions that had never been dreamed of before.
In terms of sales, I used to set myself very simple, quantifiable targets, such as making two new contacts every week and maintaining my existing contacts. That meant following up every lead, asking for introductions, writing to people, networking tirelessly, keeping half an eye always open for new opportunities. I made myself go to lots of
conferences and receptions - whenever Derek was free to keep an eye on Giles. We had experienced another flurry of new business after featuring on the BBC television programme Tomorrow’s World in March 1966, on the eve of the general election (Pat Lovelace, my then secretary, had previously worked for the show’s producer), and it was clear to me that we would continue to grow only if we continued to make ourselves visible. I remember a small item in a newspaper around that time that referred to me as “the ubiquitous Steve Shirley” - a dig that I decided to take as a compliment.
But most of my time, for several years, went on proposals. We developed a system of pink folders. Each folder represented a project and would pass between various members of our network. I would explain the basic background of the initial discussion and what the client wanted, then someone else (usually Pam Elderkin) would assess the technical implications, and someone else (often Penny Tutt) would go through our database of programmers and find out who was suitable and who was available. And then it would all come back to me and I would spend ages writing it all up into a very detailed proposal (which would then have to be neatly typed up, since there was no word-processing then). It was exhausting but enjoyable. A typical proposal would take me five hours to write, so I used to do them in the evening, when I could work without interruption.
I remember spending a holiday in Norfolk around this time. We had rented a bungalow in the countryside, with rolling fields just outside, where Giles could watch the combine harvesters at work through the windows. Every day, packages would arrive in the post from the office, containing pink folders which needed to be converted into proper proposals. Every evening, I would work far into the night, working out and writing out detailed explanations of the systems that we would create. When I eventually dragged myself out of bed the following lunchtime, I would post my finished work back to the office on my way to the beach, where Derek and Giles would already have been for several hours.
Perhaps that sounds rather a grim, obsessive way to have lived, but I have no doubt that Freelance Programmers could not have succeeded without that kind of commitment. For all the advantages of our new kind of workforce - more flexible than a traditional firm yet with a depth and breadth of expertise and support unavailable to solo freelancers - the company remained a fragile organism, with little to hold it together beyond the personality at its centre: me.
Indeed, if I had to offer a single, simple explanation for my company’s survival and ultimate success, it would be just this: my hard work. For reasons that I don’t entirely understand, but which I imagine are rooted in my childhood, I never slackened off for single day during that first decade of Freelance Programmers’ existence. Yes, the core idea of the business was a good one; yes, I had a talent for programming; and, yes, I was lucky in my timing. But there were, increasingly, other software-producing companies appearing, including a few that mimicked our approach of using freelance home-based programmers. Any one of these could have taken our business; and there were, in any case, lots of other things that our clients could have spent their money on. (According to one study, in 1974 there were 80 software companies in the UK - and a mere 4,500 computers.)
What saw us through was the fact that I stuck with the idea and made it work. All those days when I worked for 12 hours rather than eight, all those weeks when I worked seven days rather than five-and-a-half, all those years when I worked through my holidays - if you add them all up over a decade, the compounded advantage is considerable. There were, as I say, others who could have succeeded instead of us. If we came out on top, it was because we gave time and energy to the challenge that our rivals were simply not prepared to give.
I don’t doubt that Giles’s condition had something to do with this. A whole houseful of happy children - which was what we had originally planned to have - might have been a hard distraction to ignore had they and their friends all been clamouring for my attention. Instead, the pain at home may have sharpened my hunger to ensure that one aspect of my life, at least, worked out well. Perhaps more significantly, that irreducible core of pain at the centre of my life may have given me a toughness - a relative indifference to such minor inconveniences as exhaustion or workplace stress - that I would not otherwise have had. I was used to shutting off my feelings - a skill I had first developed in my own childhood. And I knew that, whatever else happened to me, I somehow needed to make sure that Giles would always be provided for. That meant that, at all costs, Freelance Programmers had to succeed.
10: Survival Of The Fittest
BY 1970, things were looking up. That, at least, is what I told myself as the old decade ended. Giles seemed contented at The Walnuts and was reasonably settled in his routines at home. Derek, while continuing his weekday commute to Dollis Hill, was gaining confidence as a hands-on father. And I was learning to switch roles, from mother to businesswoman and back, abruptly and completely; by which I mean that, whichever role I was currently in, I would banish the other from my mind. Between us, we had reached a degree of acceptance of Giles’s condition, and we felt that we were now achieving a balance between giving him the care that we wanted to give him and allowing him to receive the expert care that his condition demanded.
We had also moved house. This had been prompted by the break-up of Renate’s marriage and her subsequent return - along with her adopted daughter Clare - to England. We all felt that we might benefit from joining forces for a while, but there was no room in Moss Cottage for two extra people. So we put it up for sale, found a buyer quickly and moved for a year into a large rented house in Amersham, in Longfield Drive. This proved a big improvement: not just because it was more convenient but because extended family life seemed to suit Giles. He must have been six by then, and he and Clare, who was about 18 months old, developed a special rapport. He appeared to like the routines of a toddler’s life, while she had a way of demanding a relationship with him - hugging him relentlessly with no thought for his indifference, or bouncing up and down in the bath as if she was taunting him with love - that occasionally provoked a hint of a response. Both of them were fascinated by the railway line beyond the garden fence, and would rush down to the end of a garden whenever a train went by. Many a tantrum was interrupted in this way, usually never to be resumed.
It was a big house, with one rather smart sitting-room that we rarely used. At Renate’s suggestion, we designated this “The Good Room”, kept it locked and only went in there as a special reward, when everyone was behaving in a gentle, civilized way. Sometimes it went for weeks without being entered. Eventually, however, we found that we were able to spend a surprising number of relatively extended periods in there, just sitting quietly and reading or listening to music.
Then, after about a year, we moved into a house of our own - the Old Schoolhouse - also in Amersham. Renate and Clare came with us, and Clare in due course began to go to school, and to bring back friends to play. Giles was sometimes able to sit with them at mealtimes. Life was chaotic, but it felt like the benign chaos of big family rather than the cold, negative chaos of a life ruled by one relentlessly destructive child. Renate, who had a lifelong rapport with troubled children, was very good with Giles. Most evenings, she would more or less sit on him and read him a story, undeterred by his obvious lack of interest; and eventually this became one more piece of positive routine.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these were happy times - it was hard to observe Clare’s “ordinary” childhood without feeling occasional heart-piercing stabs of jealousy. But they were times that had happiness in them, and I was grateful for that.
My company, meanwhile, was thriving, with annual revenues of around £50,000. We were getting interesting assignments - everything from big pay and personnel systems to stock control for ice-cream vans - and with each successfully completed project it became easier to persuade the next client that we were a serious, grown-up business with a worthwhile product to sell.
; I had a delightful new PA, Penny Tutt, whom I had first met years earlier when we were buying Moss Cottage: hers had been the young family renting it; and, since they had not moved far, we had stayed in touch over the years and become friends. She was not a programmer, or indeed a computer expert of any kind; but she had a common sense, feet-on-the-ground understanding of life’s basics that would become crucial to the company’s long-term stability, and she would soon move into a more senior administrative role.
There could be no doubt by this stage that we were a proper company rather than a cottage industry. We had hardly any employees in the conventional, full-time, office-based sense. But we had all sorts of people working for us: freelance, part-time, full-time, home-based, office-based . . . Altogether, we used around 100 freelance programmers and analysts on a regular basis, all working from home, with a growing number of managers and administrators either working from home or, in a few cases, based in our headquarters in Chesham. We had even had to rent new premises to accommodate this last group, across the road at No 7 Station Road. (We gave our address as 7-16 Station Road, which sounded more impressive than it was.)
For simplicity’s sake, we referred to all these people as “staff” or “the workforce” - terms that I shall use in this book. They were not, however, employees in the conventional sense.
All of us were women, apart from John Stevens. (Jim Hawkins had moved on by then.) And the media had cottoned on to the idea that we could be written about as an amazing feminist success story. Women’s liberation was becoming fashionable - Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was published in 1970 - and the notion of an all-woman company had begun to seem less like an abomination than a rather jolly encapsulation of the spirit of the Swinging Sixties (which, as anyone who was there will tell you, took place largely in the early Seventies).
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 12