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.
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