Regarding Nigel Farage’s difficulty believing that people can remember schoolboy “banter” of more than four decades ago (Former Dulwich pupil says Farage told him: ‘That’s the way back to Africa’, 5 December), perhaps I can helpfully direct him to an African proverb: “The axe forgets, the tree never does.” This succinctly summarises the disparity in recollections of interactions between victims and perpetrators.
Juliet Winstone
Dorking, Surrey
• “Farage has suggested that it is simply inconceivable that anyone could recall such events of over four decades ago,” says Yinka Bankole in your article. Such events that hurt children or young people, whether words or actions, are remembered for the whole of a lifetime. I remember a similarly unpleasant event that happened to me at the age of 13 on 14 February 1964. I could go to the exact spot. That was more than six decades ago, not four.
Name and address supplied
• I was sad, but not surprised, to read the letter from Kirsty Pierce (2 December) regarding her experiences of bullying at a convent school. My school was a Catholic grammar in the north-east and bullying from both staff and pupils was rife. In the 1970s, the advice was to ignore the bullies. This does not work. The perpetrators get away scot-free and the pain remains for ever.
I could never understand how these people could be so devout at Sunday mass and so spiteful for the rest of the week.
Pippa Lewer
Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire
• It is true that appalling racism was commonplace in the 1970s, but it was also the era of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. As teenagers, we knew it was wrong then, and the passage of time doesn’t provide excuse for it now.
Clare Baguley
Broadbottom, Greater Manchester
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