Speaking recently on ABC radio, the present-day mentalist Philip Escoffey suggested that ‘a lot of the coding was in the silence’. It was a fiendishly demanding mental exercise perhaps, but demonstrably not thought transference. Heard on disc today, the show is remarkable for its periods without any dialogue at all: there are interludes of 15, even 20, seconds when Syd is purportedly ‘sending’ a selected passage of text to Lesley. There is reason to believe that they served as pointers. In the verbatim record of their Tower of London exchange, for example, it appears that some words have aįorced, pre-determined presence: the use at critical stages, for instance, of complete’, ‘sympathy’, ‘co-operation’ and ‘now’. Then her telepathy partner, Syd, used coded dialogue to guide her to the right page and line number. Professional actress, Lesley memorised the complete text of the book used in those imaginative stunts devised byīraddon. It appears feasible that by drawing on her technique as a Nigel Starck writes in the National Library Magazine (March 2013).
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