for when a tape was filled. Then I would briefly hurry downstairs to the room that Amelia and the secretaries were using as a temporary office and hand it over to be transcribed. This happened a couple of times, and always on my return I’d find Lang sitting exactly where I’d left him. At first I thought this was a testament to his powers of concentration. Only gradually did I realize it was because he had nothing else to do.
I took him carefully through his early years, focusing not so much on the facts and dates (McAra had assembled those dutifully enough) as on the impressions and physical objects of his childhood: the semidetached home on a housing estate in Leicester; the personalities of his father (a builder) and his mother (a teacher); the quiet, apolitical values of the English provinces in the sixties, where the only sounds to be heard on a Sunday were church bells and the chimes of ice cream vans; the muddy Saturday morning games of football at the local park and the long summer afternoons of cricket down by the river; his father’s Austin Atlantic and his own first Raleigh bike; the comics—the Eagle and the Victor —and the radio comedies— I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again and The Navy Lark ; the 1966 World Cup Final and Z Cars and Ready, Steady, Go!; The Guns of Navarone and Carry On, Doctor at the local movie theater; Millie singing “My Boy Lollipop” and Beatles singles played at forty-five RPM on his mother’s Dansette Capri record player.
Sitting there in Rhinehart’s study, the minutiae of English life nearly half a century earlier seemed as remote as bric-a-brac in a Victorian trompe l’oeil—and, you might have thought, about as relevant. But there was cunning in my method, and Lang, with his genius for empathy, grasped it at once, for this was not just his childhood we were itemizing but mine and that of every boy who was born in England in the nineteen fifties and who grew to maturity in the seventies.
“What we need to do,” I told him, “is to persuade the reader to identify emotionally with Adam Lang. To see beyond the remote figure in the bombproof car. To recognize in him the same things they recognize in themselves. Because if I know nothing else about this business, I know this: once you have the readers’ sympathy, they’ll follow you anywhere.”
“I get it,” he said, nodding emphatically. “I think that’s brilliant.”
And so we swapped memories for hour after hour, and I will not say we began to concoct a childhood for Lang, exactly—I was always careful not to depart from the known historical record—but we certainly pooled our experiences to such an extent that a few of my memories inevitably became blended into his. You may find this shocking. I was shocked myself, the first time I heard one of my clients on television weepily describing a poignant moment from his past that was actually from my past. But there it is. People who succeed in life are rarely reflective. Their gaze is always on the future: that’s why they succeed. It’s not in their nature to remember what they were feeling, or wearing, or who was with them, or the scent of freshly cut grass in the churchyard on the day they were married, or the tightness with which their first baby squeezed their finger. That’s why they need ghosts—to flesh them out, as it were.
As it transpired, I collaborated with Lang for only a short while, but I can honestly say I never had a more responsive client. We decided that his first memory would be when he tried to run away from home at the age of three and he heard the sound of his father’s footsteps coming up behind him and felt the hardness of his muscled arms as he scooped him back to the house. We remembered his mother ironing, and the smell of wet clothes on a wooden frame drying in front of a coal fire, and how he liked to pretend that the clotheshorse was a house. His father wore a vest at table and ate pork dripping and kippers; his mother
I took him carefully through his early years, focusing not so much on the facts and dates (McAra had assembled those dutifully enough) as on the impressions and physical objects of his childhood: the semidetached home on a housing estate in Leicester; the personalities of his father (a builder) and his mother (a teacher); the quiet, apolitical values of the English provinces in the sixties, where the only sounds to be heard on a Sunday were church bells and the chimes of ice cream vans; the muddy Saturday morning games of football at the local park and the long summer afternoons of cricket down by the river; his father’s Austin Atlantic and his own first Raleigh bike; the comics—the Eagle and the Victor —and the radio comedies— I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again and The Navy Lark ; the 1966 World Cup Final and Z Cars and Ready, Steady, Go!; The Guns of Navarone and Carry On, Doctor at the local movie theater; Millie singing “My Boy Lollipop” and Beatles singles played at forty-five RPM on his mother’s Dansette Capri record player.
Sitting there in Rhinehart’s study, the minutiae of English life nearly half a century earlier seemed as remote as bric-a-brac in a Victorian trompe l’oeil—and, you might have thought, about as relevant. But there was cunning in my method, and Lang, with his genius for empathy, grasped it at once, for this was not just his childhood we were itemizing but mine and that of every boy who was born in England in the nineteen fifties and who grew to maturity in the seventies.
“What we need to do,” I told him, “is to persuade the reader to identify emotionally with Adam Lang. To see beyond the remote figure in the bombproof car. To recognize in him the same things they recognize in themselves. Because if I know nothing else about this business, I know this: once you have the readers’ sympathy, they’ll follow you anywhere.”
“I get it,” he said, nodding emphatically. “I think that’s brilliant.”
And so we swapped memories for hour after hour, and I will not say we began to concoct a childhood for Lang, exactly—I was always careful not to depart from the known historical record—but we certainly pooled our experiences to such an extent that a few of my memories inevitably became blended into his. You may find this shocking. I was shocked myself, the first time I heard one of my clients on television weepily describing a poignant moment from his past that was actually from my past. But there it is. People who succeed in life are rarely reflective. Their gaze is always on the future: that’s why they succeed. It’s not in their nature to remember what they were feeling, or wearing, or who was with them, or the scent of freshly cut grass in the churchyard on the day they were married, or the tightness with which their first baby squeezed their finger. That’s why they need ghosts—to flesh them out, as it were.
As it transpired, I collaborated with Lang for only a short while, but I can honestly say I never had a more responsive client. We decided that his first memory would be when he tried to run away from home at the age of three and he heard the sound of his father’s footsteps coming up behind him and felt the hardness of his muscled arms as he scooped him back to the house. We remembered his mother ironing, and the smell of wet clothes on a wooden frame drying in front of a coal fire, and how he liked to pretend that the clotheshorse was a house. His father wore a vest at table and ate pork dripping and kippers; his mother
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