It’s a Small, Small World

In late 1983, I was living and working in Oldham, Lancs. My degree was in Computer Science, but after I’d graduated, I’d taken the first job that I could find (working for a shady US finance company), and that was what had taken me to Oldham. The job rapidly failed to live up to expectations, and so I started looking around for something that was a better fit.  British Aerospace has a factory about 3 miles away in Chadderton, and so I was very excited when I got called for an interview.

On the day of my interview, it turned out to be an all-day affair.  I was being considered for two different positions, and so I met with multiple people from each group in the morning, then we had lunch in one of the six different canteens (which one you could eat in, depended on whether you were on the shop floor or salaried, and if the latter, what your grade was). After lunch, I had a long lunch with the two group heads, and then after that, I was scheduled for a meeting with the overall big cheese, the head of the department.

Picture the scene. Exhausted from a full day of interviews, and now I’m led into the corner office, where the big boss is seated behind an impressive mahogany desk. I wait patiently while he finishes reading my CV, puts it down on the desk in front of him, adjusts his glasses, interlocks his fingers and leans back in his chair. This is how it went:

Joe: “It says here that you’re from Chesterfield. Whereabouts?”

Me: “Actually, I’m from outside of Chesterfield… I’m from Clay Cross”

Joe: “I know Clay Cross. Whereabouts?”

Me: “When I say Clay Cross, I’m actually from Pilsley”

Joe: “I know Pilsley. Whereabouts?”

Me: “Actually, I’m from Lower Pilsley”

Joe: “I know Lower Pilsley. Whereabouts?”

At this point, I should explain the following to readers that are not familiar with the corner of North-East Derbsyhire that I grew up in. Chesterfield is the largest town in Derbyshire, with a population of 104,000. Clay Cross is a smaller town, about 5 miles south, and which has a population of 9,500. Pilsley is a former mining village, about 3 miles east of Clay Cross, and has a population of just under 3,500. It has two distinct residential areas, Pilsley (sometimes known as Upper Pilsley) and Lower Pilsley. Each village used to have their own mine, their own pubs, their own schools and churches, and the village centres are just over a mile apart. For us to get drill down to me being from Lower Pilsley, we’re now looking at a village made up of about 1000 people and two main thoroughfares, Rupert Street and Locko Road.  I grew up on Seanor Lane, which branches off Rupert Street. Okay, so now I’ve set the scene, let’s get back to my interview.

Me:  “I grew up on Seanor Lane”

Joe: I know it well, because I grew up on Rupert Street”

Me: “Whereabouts?”

Joe: “By the bus stop. My mum still lives there”

Me: “My aunt and uncle, and my two cousins used to live by the bus stop. Fred, Madge, Freddy & Alwyn Bilbie”

Joe: ”We lived next door to them, and I used to play with Freddy & Alwyn when I was growing up”

After catching up on how my Aunt and my cousins were doing (they’d moved to live in Rhyl not long after I was born, but we used to go and visit them every summer), Joe asked me about my family. He didn’t remember my brothers, but when I told him that my dad was Bill Ford, his face lit up.  My dad ran the local Fine Fare supermarket, which was in Clay Cross. He’d owned a small corner store of his own in the 1950s, until he was put out of business when supermarkets came along. Resigned to the fact that he couldn’t beat them, he went to work for the company that put him out of business (Shentalls), and they were then later acquired by Fine Fare. The thing is that he continued to run the supermarket as if it was just a bigger corner store, and it turned out that Joe’s mum was one of my dad’s biggest fans. 

After spending most of the interview talking about where we grew up, and the people that we both knew and remembered, there wasn’t that much time left to talk about IT. It was probably about 4 0’clock when I left, and Joe had told me that I would be hearing them in a few days. Later that night, I was sitting at home, telling my wife all about how the day of interviews had gone, when the phone rang. It was my dad.

Dad: “Congratulations on your new job!”

Me: “Dad, it was just the interview today… I don’t know whether I’ve got the job or not yet”

Dad: “You didn’t hear me. Congratulations on your new job!”

Me: “Dad… no, it was just the interview today… it went very well, but I won’t know for another week or so”

Dad: “Your interview with Joe finished around 4 o’clock this afternoon, didn’t it?”

Me: “Yes, but how do you know that??”

Dad; “Because as you were leaving Joe’s office, he called his mum to tell her that he’d just interviewed my lad Robert, and that he would be offering him a job.  After that, his mum was so excited that she caught the next bus to Clay Cross, and came into the shop to tell me the good news”.

Sure enough, a few days later, an offer of employment from British Aerospace plopped through the letterbox, with a nice letter signed by Joe. The salary was 50% more than what I was making at the time, so I remember whooping very loudly, and literally dancing for joy.

Which just goes to show, it really is a small, small world!