A book to look out for, The Long March by Sun Shuyun:
The day her period came, a few weeks later, “I felt as if a millstone had been lifted from my neck. I promptly climbed up a mulberry tree and got a wad of leaves. Standing there, I wanted to shout to the world, ‘I’m not pregnant! I’m not pregnant!'” The women, she said, “dreaded pregnancy more than the plague”.
Recalling those times, Wang, now 91, still had a look of pain on her gentle face, when I tracked her down at the start of my journey retracing the Long March. …
Wang saw one woman go into labour while marching, with the baby’s head dangling out. Another had a difficult birth with Chiang’s troops in hot pursuit, and bombs dropping like rain. As if afraid of the violent world, the baby refused to come out. A whole regiment of the rearguard was ordered to put up a fierce fight for more than two hours and lost a dozen men. After all their pain, however, the women were not allowed to keep their babies. It was the rule with the First Army: a crying baby could endanger the troops. The tiny boy whose arrival cost a dozen soldiers’s lives was left on a bed of straw in the abandoned house where he was born.
And if you’re not going to find time to read the book, at least check out the article; it is a wonderful example of oral history.
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Who’d have thought it, Anatole Kaletsky, very well-informed, but right-wing economist, is effectively: advocating a boycott of the supermarkets.
As one of the prosperous burghers of Central London, I sorely miss the freshly baked bread, high-quality charcuterie and organic smoked salmon that used to be available in my local grocer’s and do not appreciate Tesco’s alternative “offer” of a dozen varieties of cheap washing powder, tinned tuna and sliced bread. I therefore yield to no one in my dislike of Tesco’s bullying tactics and its philistinism towards food.
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