We wept while reading Aditya Chakrabortty’s article (What my mother’s glorious life taught me about Britain today, 30 April). While moved by his account of his mother’s life and death, we also felt shame and anger about the treatment of such people by successive governments.
Jane Orton and Tony Wragg
London
• Romek Marber (Obituary, 20 April) could be a minatory figure in the studio, leaning over a student’s work and intoning: “This is not – graphic – design!” But I treasure his dictum that courses should be judged not by the successes of their best students but by the standards of their worst.
David Page
Starston, Norfolk
• As men are more vulnerable to Covid-19, has anyone considered allowing women and children out of lockdown first? We could run the country for a few weeks and see how things go while men stay at home baking banana bread and clapping.
Sarah Moss
Coventry
• I’m trying to persuade my family that, having found my missing birth certificate, I was born in 1952, rather than 1948 as we thought, in case the lockdown for the over-70s is extended (Letters, 27 April). Their response was to demand the return of four years of birthday presents.
Annie Bullen
Wildhern, Hampshire
• When I was a toddler in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai with my parents, those on bread-making tasks soon gave up removing weevils from the flour (Letters, 28 April). Instead they were seen as a protein supplement to our meagre diet.
Elizabeth Griffiths
St Combs, Aberdeenshire
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