Mike was my team leader for several years at Rolls‑Royce. He was maybe three feet tall and walked with sticks, moving with the deliberate care of someone who had learned to negotiate the world differently. I used to carry him — up stairs, down stairs, across awkward thresholds in old buildings that had never imagined someone like him. It never felt like an act of kindness. It felt like part of the job, part of the friendship, part of the rhythm of working with Mike.
The remarkable thing — the thing everyone noticed — was how quickly his disability vanished. Ten minutes in his company and you stopped seeing it. You saw the wit, the mischief, the intelligence, the warmth. His disability never defined him; it was simply part of the scenery he refused to let matter.
He drove a converted yellow DAF. To brake, he leaned on a lever to his left; to accelerate, a lever on his right. And he drove like a demon — especially on motorways1. You’d see this small figure in a bright yellow car, hands on the levers, utterly in command, overtaking with the confidence of someone who had long ago decided that the world would not limit him.
Rolls‑Royce recruited him in an era before Diversity, Equity and Inclusion became a “thing”. There were no frameworks, no targets, no mandatory training, no committees. What existed instead was something older and, in its way, purer: meritocracy. If you were bright, you were hired. If you could think, you were valued. If you could solve problems, you were promoted. The organisation bent itself around ability, not around categories.
Mike was recruited because he was brilliant. Rolls‑Royce didn’t need a policy to recognise that.
We never spoke about the cause of his disability. I often wondered, but it never felt like a question that belonged in the space between us. What he did tell me, once, was that his mother had insisted he attend a normal school. No special provision. No segregation. No lowered expectations. She believed he should be in the world as it was, not in a version of it softened for him. And he said — very simply — that it had made him who he was.
Working with him was fun. Not polite fun, not careful fun — real fun. He had a way of turning the ordinary into the mischievous, the technical into the human, the difficult into the interesting. He made the work lighter. He made the team sharper. He made the days better.
I carried him because sometimes he needed carrying. He carried me in ways I didn’t recognise until much later.