10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [78]
Evan, tall, thin and with a birdlike head on a long neck, had taken over a department that had formerly acted mainly as a convenience for racing’s owners and trainers, and in five years had fertilized it with imagination and invention into an agency major by any standard.
In his last three months, in addition to our ordinary busy work, he took me to meet personally all the underwriters he fixed deals with on the telephone, so that in the end I could wander around the “boxes” at Lloyds, knowing and being known in the syndicates and speaking their language.
He taught me scams. “Beware the friendship scam,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Two friends conspire,” he told me, amused. “One friend has a horse with something fatally wrong, a kidney ailment, say. OK? Instead of calling in a vet, Friend A sends his sick fellow to the sales. Friend B buys the sick animal at auction, insuring his purchase onwards from the fall of the hammer. Fall-of-the-hammer insurance was introduced to cover accidents like a million-dollar colt stumbling on its way out of the sale ring and breaking a leg. Fall-of-the-hammer insurance comes into effect before a vet’s inspection, see? So Friend B buys and insures a dud horse from the fall of the hammer. Friend A acts all innocent ... ‘Would never have sold such a horse if I’d known ...’ Friend B humanely kills his dud and collects the insurance. Friends A and B split the proceeds.” He laughed. “You’ve a nose for crooks, Ben. You’ll do all right.”
During that same three months my father became the front man in an ongoing fish war, discussing at international high level who could take how many fish of such and such a species of such and such a size out of any particular area of the world’s oceans. With wit and understanding, and by going to sea himself in freezing, salt-crusted, net-festooned seasickness factories, he learned the gripes and the legitimate arguments of men who lived close to Davy Jones and his ever-ready locker.
The press took notice. Headlines appeared: “Juliard Hooks Agreement,” and “Juliard in Japan.”
People in insurance began to say, “This Juliard person—no relation of yours, I suppose?”
“My father.”
“Seems to be doing a good job for my fish and chips.”
Fish and chips—the potatoes in agriculture—put my father on the map.
A television station sent a cameraman to sea with him: the cameraman, though sick the whole time, shot fearsomely memorable footage of my father hanging half-overboard in oilskins above the breaking waves and grinning.
Schoolchildren recognized pictures of “the Fish Minister” instantly: his Cabinet colleagues didn’t like it.
One of the top tabloids dug up the five-year-old stunning photograph of my father in mid-jump from the burning constituency offices and printed it big in a center-page spread extolling virility and presence of mind and the “hands-on” policy out on the deep blue sea.
Even the prime minister didn’t much like that. George Juliard as a relative newcomer with a normally quiet department in his charge was fine. George Juliard on the fast track upwards in public acclaim was a threat.
“One mustn’t make a minister a cult, ” the prime minister said in a television interview: but others talked of “leadership qualities” and “getting things done,” and Polly advised Dearest George to damp it down a bit and not let his success antagonize his colleagues.
My father therefore paid lavish tribute to the army of civil servants behind his fish-war solutions. “Without their help ...” and so on and so on. He did a lot of modest groveling in Cabinet.
Towards the end of the long winter freeze the racing papers—frantic for something to fill their pages after weeks of near stagnation—gave a lot of space to the news that Sir Vivian Durridge, at seventy-four, had decided to retire from training.
The article, full of sonorous clichés like “long and distinguished career,” detailed his winners of the Derby (four) and