Far Horizons

PROLOGUE

The summer of twenty-twenty was to a great degree a busted flush. Just when you wanted to enjoy beautiful weather in the Spring, the dreaded Coronavirus had forced the whole population into retreat behind their own defensive positions. The barriers were up, all activity had ceased and the nation obediently settled down to sweat it out. Then a lovely summer came, and some relaxations accompanied this. But the threat, which was of nature and duration still unknown, had not gone away, and the current fear was of a resurgence. There was a faint hope that the warm weather might put paid to this awful plague, but there were no grounds for being optimistic about this, other than by reference to inflenza which it seems did withdraw before warm weather. There was no scientific evidence to support this hope though. As the year wore on, controls were gradually relaxed and life started to return to something like how it was before all this took root. But there were differences. People were reluctant to use public transport, go to cinemas, theatres, concert halls. They had also, in many cases discovered that working from home was generally a good idea. Think of the extra time you would have if you didn’t have to commute for several hours every day. The appeal was obvious and it seemed likely to stick too. There was also the ever-present fear of a resurgence, a second peak, or even a third. Though there were instances like the re-shutting down of Leicester, generally the virus did not reappear in earnest and a summer of sorts was enjoyed, however restrained it had to be. Overseas travel was inevitably largely governed by the state of the pandemic in other countries, and the record was patchy. The result was that travel for business and for pleasure remained severely curtailed.

With the final act of leaving the EU, Great Britain had taken the plunge and left without the Europeans making any concessions. To have treated the UK as a defeated nation sparked up a strong reaction in even the calmest souls. The rest of the world, particularly the old Commonwealth countries and the anglophone world were generously supportive. After all, this offered them opportunities as well, and they jumped at the chances they had been offered. In this climate, and following the experiences encountered during the lockdown in the advancement of electronic communication, this moment offered opportunity to those companies that could get ahead of the game and stay there in ways that would support and enhance efforts to expand into new markets. After the storm, there was an increased interest in supporting innovative and advanced small companies, and banks had appeared to have learned that they were fundamentally there to give support to growing companies, and not just to fill their own pockets with other people’s money. Though the country had recently experienced one of the worst ever catastrophes, a silver lining glowed just the same, if initially somewhat weakly, and it would doubtless pay to look for it.

CHAPTER ONE

Derick Bilston was only five foot five inches tall. He was irretrievably unhappy about this but was resigned to the possible fact that this would not change, and he must pass through this life as what he firmly believed would be regarded as a midget. He felt that he was an outsider, which may have resulted from his diminutive stature, or it may have been because in relation to some of his acquaintances of similar age, he was indeed an outsider. Derick was just at the end of his fifteenth year, and a bright boy. He was as near useless at any sport as it is possible to be, and he had no regrets about this, save for a certain dismay over the lack of popularity to which it gave rise. He must clearly excel at something, and his active mind kept searching for this elusive quality.

He knew it must be there but what was it? He did find that he could tie most of his co-pupils up in knots in an argument, but he was careful about deploying this great virtue, because the likelihood was ever present that the discussion in hand would end in an unwarranted blow to his head. He didn’t like being hurt, and it happened too often. This added substantially to his sense of not fitting in. On those fairly rare occasions when he found that he was interested in something which he was being taught, he concentrated hard and intelligently without difficulty. When the reverse occurred, he would pay almost no attention and would err on the disruptive side. This combination of characteristics did not greatly endear him to the teaching staff at Macclesfield Academy. In fact, the general opinion was that the place might be a lot better off without him. This was however, to ignore those moments of extreme concentration which most decidedly did occur from time to time.

Derick was utterly intrigued by the web and all forms of information technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics, and was a keen and well informed mathematician. These were subjects which strained the capabilities of most of the staff, therefore didn’t get the attention which such topics required. However, Derick grew rapidly more and more absorbed by mathematics and its close association with the computer disciplines, so that by now he was something of a child prodigy and a budding expert. Once his interest was engaged, he learnt extremely quickly and thoroughly. Herein lay the skill and aptitude which he always knew must be there. He had now found it and was not about to let it go.

Derick lived in the back of Macclesfield, in a rather run-down part of the town. His father Stanley was a careful and unambitious man who worked as the mechanical brains cum foreman cum everything on the workshop side in a small engineering works which survived by being able to make pieces at very short notice for manufacturing machinery which had broken down and had thereby halted production. This was a small but fruitful market, because the effect of such a cessation in production was sufficiently prohibitive to warrant a good price for the services of C. Stevens Ltd., and a reliable support system for its seven employees. They were never short of work and their quality was high. Mr Stevens, Cecil, had invested modestly but shrewdly in modern computer numerically controlled plant, and his son Jason was the resident expert in programming these wonders.

Stan Bilston had first met Cecil Stevens when they had both been serving their apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce in Derby. Both were sons of engineers and were therefore accustomed from early childhood to things having to be right. There was no latitude between right and wrong in the eyes of their two fathers, who had worked on the aero engine side of Royce’s in Derby many years before. The fathers had grown up in the glare of engineering perfection and had passed this view of life to their children. They had also found strings to pull at Royce’s to get their sons onto the company apprentice scheme. This was a much-respected prize and highly regarded start for a young man. The knowledge and experience gained at Royce’s would stand Stan and Cecil in good stead anywhere in the world where engineering flourished.

Cecil married a girl who worked in the accounts department at Rolls-Royce called Mary Milligan, and very soon they had their son Jason, while Stan eventually married Ethel, who came from his hometown of Macclesfield. The two men having discussed their future options over many a pint of Derby’s best, and some late night mugs of coffee, decided that together they could and probably should set up a small high quality specialised machine shop in their native Macclesfield. Stan, the more cautious of the two did not want to be concerned with the business side of the proposed business, but he was enthusiastic about setting and maintaining engineering standards and running the machine shop. He just didn’t want to get involved in selling and dealing with money. He had no ambition either to be the owner but felt strongly that he could find a thoroughly fulfilling and satisfying way of working by supporting Cecil in his new company. Ethel and Stan very soon had their only child, Derick, and together the two young men started what became Stevens’s Engineering. They kept the original name for the first years, which was Schofield’s Machine Shop, because there was already a business of that name which was well known, whose owner wished to retire, and for a very small annual payment the two newcomers took over his business. It had seemed a good idea to have a base load of work which had been done by the original company to provide financial cover while they developed their own business in rather more lucrative areas of activity. This proved to have been a good way to get the business going and the two of them became permanently good friends and colleagues. It bothered Stan not a jot that he was not a co-owner. Once the business was established, they changed its name to Stevens’s. Stan always referred to Cecil as the Boss and the arrangement had worked well since its inception. Whilst Jason was interested in the business and had been trained in electronics and machine shop practice, Derick, who was a lot younger, showed no interest in things mechanical. His interests lay elsewhere in what would ultimately be highly technical and advanced electronics and information technology.

Derick’s family’s home was a mid-terrace house which had once served the silk and textile industries in their nineteenth century heyday. Their abode was in Newton Street, Macclesfield. It was now a small survivor of better times and provided housing for those of limited means. Derick’s mother Ethel worked as a cleaner, looking after half a dozen small firms ranging from solicitors’ offices to launderettes in which she was responsible for cleanliness and general tidiness. She was a proud and thorough worker and her home reflected this in so far as such a thing was possible. It wasn’t easy to keep the place ship shape with a large husband who was dirty and oily when he returned from work every day, and a restless teenager who never tidied his room and left stuff all over the place.

There was no family car, but Stanley Bilston was and had always been a keen motorbike man. He had an Indian built Royal Enfield with a lightweight sidecar in which the family travelled on those rare occasions when opportunities arose. Derick had resolved that as soon as he could, he would have a car. He was embarrassed by the fact that his father could not afford one and was determined to correct this perceived slight as soon as possible.

Derick’s family were Derbyshire through and through. Whilst Stanley’s father had broken family tradition and been an apprentice at Rolls-Royce in Derby, his grandfather had been a keeper at a large pheasant and partridge shoot at Pot Shrigley. Ethel had rather luckily through a school friend’s family found her way into the Macclesfield branch of one of the nation’s prime department stores as a trainee shop assistant. Her father and mother had kept a small general store in Macclesfield, which no longer existed. Ethel’s grandparents, the Sturmeys, had been the butler and housekeeper of a large grand country house on a vast estate in the middle of nowhere about ten miles out of Macclesfield, which, there being no family to inherit, had sunk into disrepair and had subsequently passed through the hands of a number of families with ambitions but no money. Its final fate had been as a boarded-up derelict, having failed first as a hotel, then as a conversion into flats which had never been completed, followed by a swan song as a failed care home. The carcase of this once magnificent creation was now known only as Old Dale Park.

Derick, on his weekend bicycle rides, would go up and ride around Old Dale Park and dream of the life which must have taken place there. His imagination filled in the huge gaps in his knowledge, but he was well prompted by what his mother had told him of the days when her grandparents had worked there for the Pitt-Curnow family. Sir Ralph Pitt-Curnow had been such a kind man in his mother’s belief, and Lady Sylvia could do no wrong. On a special corner shelf in the sitting room in Newton Street there stood to this day a beautifully decorated but simple pale blue and white Chinese pot, which held pride of place. It had been given by Lady Sylvia when Sir Ralph died back in 1985, to the Sturmeys, because she was moving out of the big house into a much smaller one a half mile away. Lady Sylvia died very soon after the move. The Pitt-Curnow pot was treated with great care and reverence, legend having it that it could be worth a few tens, even perhaps hundreds, of pounds. The presence of this trophy was the main reason why the Bilstons didn’t have a cat. They had seen on the Antiques Roadshow what a cat could do, albeit unwittingly.

Derick had on occasion gone with his father to see the Stevens works, but he was little interested in the mechanical side of things. He was bored by bell cranks and push rods, but the electronics under Jason Stevens’s charge intrigued him. Derick managed to persuade Cecil Stevens to allow him to come to the works in the holidays and get taught by Jason about the CNC operations and the programming of the computers. Derick was only too happy to help out with such menial chores as the day’s work demanded from time to time. For his schoolwork, he had a laptop computer, which had belonged to another boy who had sold it to Derick’s parents when he had upgraded his machine. Derick had earlier been given another cast-off when he was ten years old, so he was not daunted by using such things. He only wished he could have something more up-to-date and more powerful. But that would come. He had been thinking, and he now felt sure he could devise a scheme whereby he sold something costing very little to his school fellows, in exchange for the possibility that the purchasing boy might win some sort of prize. He was thinking along the lines of a kind of lottery which would pay out some of the takings, but not all, so that he could make what was left over. He was aware that a scheme like that might never get off the ground, or if it did, it might not make a great deal of money. But something was better than nothing. And he wouldn’t have to sweat for it like delivering newspapers for a pittance. On reflection, he thought most boys would be able to spend about one pound, maybe two, a week. If he could get say one hundred boys to join this scheme, and if he set the prize at for example ten quid, he would make between ninety and one hundred and eighty pounds a week. Something like that ought to work. Maybe the numbers would need to be massaged a bit, maybe not. Ten quid for one quid wasn’t bad after all. And there were a hell of a lot more boys than one or two hundred. Suppose he could get four hundred to play this, that would start to make him serious money. His mind spread its tentacles into the remote corners of his fertile brain and ideas began to form. How about adding for example horses to this? Or almost anything that you could bet on. Football for example. He very sensibly wanted nothing to do with drugs. Dangerous, and you needed funding to buy your stock. No thanks, but just betting on all kinds of things had no buying cost, it could all be profit if you played your cards right. He thought a bit more and concluded that the way to get it off the ground was to be generous with the prizes from the start. That might reduce your profit, but it would give you a better chance of getting going. You could also employ some other boys to sell for you for a small fee. The same point applied, don’t be too greedy, at this stage build the thing up. What was to stop him doing this outside the school eventually? Grown-ups had more money and lots of them liked a flutter.

Derick resolved to give his idea a go. Make the prize bigger to start with, you have to suck in your customers. And recruit a few people to sell, give them a small percentage of what they sell and see how it goes. It went.

After a term of this, doing one lottery a week, paying the prize on Friday so the winner had cash for the weekend, he started making a bob or two. It was working. He set his mind to having a sales force of five other boys, not more, and certainly he didn’t want noisy extrovert boys. He was after the quiet considerate ones, the sort who liked maths and science, not the boisterous show-offs who you couldn’t trust. Yes, five would be enough. Later he would direct this sales force to go for grown-ups at the weekend, but this was getting to the point where prizes might have to be both more numerous and bigger. He felt sure that there was a size and a market where he could make decent money without the whole thing getting out of hand. He made the simple assumption that the law would not be at all interested in his exploits, and that proved to be the case.

As fifteen morphed barely noticed into sixteen, Derick found that he was learning fast and well about the commercial computing world from Jason Stevens. Jason was not just interested in CNC and its connected computer technology. He was particularly keen to learn and to impart to Derick all he could about IT generally, as well as robotics and AI. Derick proved a fast and thorough learner; these subjects clearly suited his brain and he indulged in the subject as only a committed and driven boy can. He slept and dreamed about his newfound pleasure, he thought of little else. The money, not large sums, but enough to feel that he had done something worthwhile, allowed him to invest in an up-to-date and much more powerful computing system. He spent hours shut in his room. He studied learned books, he even joined a computer club in Macclesfield, The Second Macclesfield Probus Club, which occupied him for one evening every week. There he met members and instructors who took him to their hearts; they seemed to want to encourage and to help. This for Derick was a new experience. Gone was the boy who felt diminished by his size, who felt an outsider because of his dislike of games and of general rowdiness. He was accepted, liked, even. This was a new experience, and very heaven compared to school. Undeniably, school was tolerable and he still did quite well, but now he felt a real person and the beginnings of adulthood.

Then came coronavirus. The businesses that occupied his father and mother closed for the duration. School shut down. Derick was confined to the tiny space of the house in Newton Street, as were his parents. He was wise enough to know that it would help if he stayed out of the way for much of the time. This, however, was no hardship to him at all. He spent the entire day and much of the night at his powerful new computer. On the internet he found all kinds of instructional sites and drank to the lees all that he could cram into the glass of his mind. His knowledge grew apace, driven by that extraordinary stimulus, the teenage boy’s mind once the dog had seen the rabbit. Had he been a musician he would have rivalled Mozart. Gradually it dawned on this boy wonder that there were opportunities within his new areas of interest. He had observed the way that the world in general had descended voraciously on computers and related activities to satisfy every need that could no longer be met by getting in the car and going shopping. He had marvelled at the rise of click and collect and the efficiency of Amazon. There must be many other areas where this new power could be harnessed to good and profitable effect. With the rise in working from home, he thought there must be an opportunity there. If you don’t have to go to an office and can do things by electronic means without even getting dressed, there must be room for a service to enhance that new feature. Like a dating agency, there must be a need to match an employee in Penzance with a business in Newcastle, Neuchatel, or Nanking, and distance will no longer