1 JULY 1989, Page 20

Sir: I was in Peking at the time of the

massacre. The corpse of a nine-year-old boy with seven bullet wounds was brought onto campus. I saw bloodstained students returning with tear-gas canisters, bullets and the bloody hard hat of a worker bayoneted to death.

There is now a consensus that the 'civil war' was a rumour put out by the army and that the numbers killed were nothing like the round figure of 10,000. Maybe — but let us not blink at an atrocity with a com- forting slogan `small slaughter in China not many killed'.

Valerie Grosvenor Myer

34 West End, Haddenham, Cambridge