But Mao’s plans to head toward the Soviet border changed when Mao and his colleagues discovered from Guomindang papers that a Communist base area existed in Shaanbei, in northern Shaanxi province near the base of the Great Wall.

He left me to run the yard and I back chatted him one day. He told me to 'fuck off' so I told him to 'fuck off' and as I'm walking off up the road he hit me on the head, from about thirty yards, with a half brick. He knocked me out in front of his pals.

They made an appointment to meet at six.

A short while after we had published our early experiments with quartz glass, a man in Southern Virginia wrote to suggest that there might be mutual profit for him and for me if we would consider making silica-glass coffins which, he said, ought to be hellproof.