Jesus wept
Sir: Sam Dunning’s brilliant exposure of the corrupting links between Jesus College, Cambridge and the Chinese Communist party (‘Centre of attention’, 5 February) raises the question of how the college can be rescued from its current leaders. Their virtue-signalling gestures (the Benin bronze, the Rustat memorial etc) have already prompted many of us alumni to delete Jesus from our wills. But this association with vile tyranny is altogether more serious. Perhaps an academic boycott might bring the Master and Fellowship to their senses. Certainly something must be done to save this ancient Christian foundation from its present role as an agent and support of manifest evil.
Francis Bown
London E3
Passing the bullet
Sir: Jeremy Clarke writes of injuries sustained but long ignored by veterans of the Great War (Low life, 5 February). I was a trainee doctor in London in the early 1960s and at that time it was still quite common to see these little old barrel-chested veterans of the trenches. When X-rayed, they often displayed a variety of military hardware within them of which they were quite unaware. Some of this metal needed surgical removal but occasionally it passed per via naturalis. A nurse (now my wife), witnessing such an event, reported a satisfying clang as the bullet hit the bottom of the urinal!
Adam Lewis
Radlett, Herts
Treasure trove
Sir: I can relate to Laurie Graham’s conundrum around sorting out what to keep and what to discard (‘Small matters’, 29 January). I have a loft full of baby clothes, favourite toys, cards of all sorts, nursery drawings and now, bits and pieces from my parents’ house. I’d just like to add a cautionary note to Laurie’s desire to clear the decks so the next generation doesn’t have to. We cleared my family home when my father died in 2020 — just before lockdown began. My parents had bought the house in 1964 and my father had started to clear out an old shed that needed to be demolished, the old caravan rotting in the garden and the boats that hadn’t been sailed in well over 40 years. Luckily for me, though, he didn’t get to the old rusted tin in the other shed… the tin that contained a stash of letters my mother wrote to him when she was in France in 1948/49; the letters in the run-up to their marriage in 1950, when she was teaching in a school in the Lake District; and the letters she wrote to her mother from the boat and from Australia when they travelled there to live (for 18 months) in 1956. This is an absolute treasure trove that has given me immense pleasure to read and transcribe.
It has to be said that not everyone in the family sees these letters as I do, and some felt that I shouldn’t have read them. But for me, it’s been an absolute joy, giving me an insight into their early relations, a view of France still emerging from the war, and an understanding of a girl of 20 struggling to work out if this young man really did love her or not. If he’d remembered they were there, I think he would have thrown them out, and I would have missed out on this beautiful window into their world.
Moira Throp
Solihull, West Midlands
Mellow yellow
Sir: I found Gus Carter’s piece on daffodils (‘Notes on…’, 5 February) absorbing, particularly his description of their unusual spiritual roles in various societies. But it contained one significant omission: the part daffodils played in the early 19th-century Romantic movement. The flowers inspired one of Britain’s best-loved and memorable poems, a masterpiece and embodiment of the Romantic era: William Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’. ‘Fluttering and dancing in the breeze’, daffodils’ mesmerising beauty was captured poetically for eternity, symbolising rejuvenation and joy — attributes to be as much valued this spring as then.
Peter Saunders
Salisbury, Wiltshire
What you’ve got
Sir: The ineffable Rod Liddle, when writing about the BBC, quotes Joni Mitchell’s famous line ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ (Books, 29 January). Very true, but ten years earlier than Ms Mitchell the Presley doppelgänger Ral Donner made the same point even more entertainingly via his hit single ‘You don’t know what you’ve got (until you lose it)’. It’s still available on Spotify.
Tim Rice
Hambleden, Bucks
Road to nowhere
Sir: Toby Young’s dismay at the new Highway Code rules and the apparent bias against car drivers is understandable (No sacred cows, 29 January), but I think he misses one important point. We are not one category of road user but many. So sometimes I’m a motorist, sometimes a cyclist and sometimes a pedestrian. What we need on our roads is mutual respect, not tribalism.
Paul Larsmon
Burbage, Wiltshire
Bring back bells
Sir: In Julie Burchill’s article ‘Get out of my way’ (29 January) she didn’t mention the lack of bells on modern bikes. When I was a child in the 1950s, bells were considered so important that our local bobby used to check ours. Recently, as I walked down a country lane with two friends, all was quiet when we were suddenly overtaken by three bicycles, which gave us a real shock. Had one of us by chance stepped out further into the road, we would have been run over. We had no idea they were behind us. No voice, no bell, no sound. This is dangerous.
Jane Mounsey
Malmesbury, Wiltshire
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