"Archer, Jeffrey - twelve red herrings)txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Archer Jeffrey)

there Jeremy had gone on to King's College, London, where he read Law,
graduating with first-class honours.

My own father was a self-made man from the Yorkshire Dales who had
insisted I leave school the moment I passed my O levels.

Tll teach you more about the real world in a month than you'd
learn from any of those university types in a lifetime," he used to
say. I accepted this philosophy without question, and left school a
few weeks after my sixteenth birthday. The next morning I joined
Cooper's as an apprentice, and spent my first three years at the depot
under the watchful eye of Buster Jackson, the works manager, who taught
me how to take the company's vehicles apart and, more importantly, how
to put them back together again.

After graduating from the workshop, I spent two years in the
invoicing department, learning how to calculate charges and collect bad
debts. A few weeks after my twenty-first birthday I passed the test
for my heavy goods vehicles licence, and for the next three years I
zig-zagged across the north of England, delivering everything from
poultry to pineapples to our far-flung customers. Jeremy spent the
same period reading for a master's degree in Napoleonic Law at the
Sorbonne.

When Buster Jackson retired I was moved back to the depot in Leeds
to take over as works manager. Jeremy was in Hamburg, writing a
doctoral thesis on international trade barriers. By the time he had
finally left the world of academia and taken up his first real job, as
a partner with a large firm of commercial solicitors in
the City, I had been earning a working wage for eight years.

Although I was impressed by Jeremy at the seminar, I sensed,
behind that surface affability, a powerful combination of ambition and
intellectual snobbery that my father would have mistrusted.

I felt he'd only agreed to give the lecture on the off-chance
that, at some time in the future, we might be responsible for spreading
some butter on his bread. I now realise that, even at our first
meeting, he suspected that in my case it might be honey.

It didn't help my opinion of the man that he had a couple of
inches on me in height, and a couple less around the waist. Not to
mention the fact that the most attractive woman on the course that
weekend ended up in his bed on the Saturday night.

We met up on the Sunday morning to play squash, when he ran me
ragged, without even appearing to raise a sweat. "We must get together
again," he said as we walked to the showers.

"If you're really thinking of expanding into Europe, you might