"Home, of course," I replied. He turned to face me. There was emotion in his voice, though he spoke quietly.

"Home? What home? I share a tiny room with my two grandsons. I have a corner surrounded by a bamboo curtain. Just for the bed. That's all. When the kids are home I come here for some peace and quiet. Why do you have to take this away from me?"

His words filled me with shock and shame. This was the first time I had heard a firsthand account of such miserable living conditions. I turned and walked away.

This teahouse, like all the others in Sichuan, was shut for fifteen years until 1981, when Deng Xiaoping's reforms decreed it could be reopened. In 1985 I went back there with a British friend. We sat under the scholar tree.

An old waitress came to fill our cups with a kettle from two feet away. Around us, people were playing chess. It was one of the happiest moments of that trip back.

When Lin Biao called for everything that represented the old culture to be destroyed, some pupils in my school started to smash things up. Being more than 2,000 years old, the school had a lot of antiques and was therefore a prime site for action. The school gateway had an old tiled roof with carved eaves. These were hammered to pieces.

The same happened to the sweeping blue-glazed roof of the big temple which had been used as a ping-pong hall.

The pair of giant bronze incense burners in front of the temple were toppled, and some boys urinated into them.

In the back garden, pupils with big hammers and iron rods went along the sandstone bridges casually breaking the little statues. On one side of the sports field was a pair of towering rectangular tablets made of red sandstone, each twenty feet high. Some lines about Confucius were carved on them in beautiful calligraphy. A huge rope was tied around them, and two gangs pulled. It took them a couple of days, as the foundations were deep. They had to get some workers from outside to dig a hole around the tablets.

When the monuments finally crashed down amidst cheers, they lifted part of the path that ran behind them.

All the things I loved were disappearing. The saddest thing of all for me was the ransacking of the library: the golden filed roof, the delicately sculpted windows, the blue painted chairs… Bookshelves were turned upside down, and some pupils tore books to pieces just for the hell of it.

Afterward, X-shaped white paper strips with black characters were stuck on what was left of the doors and windows to signal that the building was sealed.

Books were major targets of Mao's order to destroy.

Because they had not been written within the last few months, and therefore did not quote Mao on every page, some Red Guards declared that they were all 'poisonous weeds." With the exception of Marxist classics and the works of Stalin, Mao, and the late Lu Xun, whose name Mme Mao was using for her personal vendettas, books were burning all across China. The country lost most of its written heritage. Many of the books which survived later went into people's stoves as fuel.

But there was no bonfire at my school. The head of the school Red Guards had been a very conscientious student.

A rather feminine-looking seventeen-year-old, he had been made the Red Guard leader because his father was the Party chief for the province, rather than because of his own ambition. While he could not prevent the general vandalism, he did manage to stop the books from being burned.

Like everyone else, I was supposed to join in the 'revolutionary actions." But I, like most pupils, was able to avoid them, because the destruction was not organized, and no one made sure we took part. I could see that many pupils hated the whole thing, but nobody tried to stop it. Like myself, many boys and girls may well have been telling themselves that they were wrong to feel sorry about the destruction and needed to reform. But subconsciously we all knew we would have been crushed instantly had we raised any objection.

By then 'denunciation meetings' were becoming a major feature of the Cultural Revolution. They involved a hysterical crowd and were seldom without physical brutality.

Peking University had taken the lead, under the personal supervision of Mao. At its first denunciation meeting, on 18 June, over sixty professors and heads of departments, including the chancellor, were beaten, kicked, and forced to kneel for hours. Dunce caps with humiliating slogans were forced onto their heads. Ink was poured over their faces to make them black, the color of evil, and slogans were pasted all over their bodies. Two students gripped the arms of each victim, twisting them around behind his back and pushing them up with such ferocity as almost to dislocate them. This posture was called the 'jet plane," and soon became a feature of most denunciation meetings all over the country.

I was once called by the Red Guards in my form to attend such a meeting. Horror made me feel very chilly in the hot summer afternoon when I saw a dozen or so teachers standing on the platform on the sports ground, with their heads bent and their arms twisted into the 'jet plane' position. Then, some were kicked on the back of their knees and forced to kneel, while others, including my English-language teacher, an elderly man with the fine manner of a classical gentleman, were forced to stand on long, narrow benches. He found it hard to keep his balance, and swayed and fell, cutting his forehead on the sharp corner of a bench. A Red Guard standing next to him instinctively stooped and extended his hands to help, but immediately straightened up and assumed an exaggeratedly harsh posture, with his fists clenched, yelling: "Get back onto the bench!" He did not want to be seen as soft on a 'class enemy." Blood trickled down the teacher's forehead and coagulated on the side of his face.

He, like the other teachers, was accused of all sorts of outlandish crimes; but they were really there because they were graded, and therefore the best, or because some pupils had grudges against them.

I learned in later years that the pupils in my school behaved relatively mildly because, being in the most prestigious school, they were successful and academically inclined. In the schools which took in wilder boys, there were teachers who were beaten to death. I witnessed only one beating in my school. My philosophy teacher had been somewhat dismissive to those who had not done well in her classes, and some of them hated her and now started to accuse her of being 'decadent." The 'evidence," which reflected the extreme conservatism of the Cultural Revolution, was that she had met her husband on a bus. They got to chatting, and fell in love. Love arising out of a chance meeting was regarded as a sign of immorality. The boys took her to an office and 'took revolutionary actions over her' the euphemism for beating somebody up. Before they started, they called for me especially and made me attend.

"What will she think when she sees you, her pet pupil, there!"

I was considered her favorite because she had praised my work often. But I was also told that I should be there because I had been too soft, and needed 'a lesson in revolution."

When the beating started, I shrank at the back of the ring of pupils who crowded into the small office. A couple of classmates nudged me to go to the front and join in the hitting. I ignored them. In the center my teacher was being kicked around, rolling in agony on the floor, her hair askew.

As she cried out, begging them to stop, the boys who had set upon her said in cold voices, "Now you beg! Haven't you been ferocious? Now beg properly!" They kicked her again, and ordered her to kowtow to them and say "Please spare my life, masters!" To make someone kowtow and beg was an extreme humiliation. She sat up and stared blankly ahead: I met her eyes through her knotted hair. In them I saw agony, desperation, and emptiness. She was gasping for breath, and her face was ashen gray. I sneaked out of the room. Several pupils followed me. Behind us I could hear people shouting slogans, but their voices were tentative and uncertain. Many pupils must have been scared. I walked away swiftly, my heart pounding. I was afraid I might be caught and beaten myself. But no one came after me, and I was not condemned afterward.