Diary

In September 1978, on a night train from Milan, I was forced to have sex with an architect on his way to the site of a biscuit factory he was designing somewhere outside Naples (or so he claimed). It’s a simple enough story. I was a graduate student, changing trains at Milan, and laden with luggage for a term’s research in Rome. There were a couple of hours to wait for the most convenient train south, so I went to the station bar on the look-out, I suppose, for an opportunity to wheel out my still very faltering Italian. The architect was there, on the look-out, too, presumably. Discovering that I had no couchette for the journey, he insisted on trying to book one for me; he took my ticket (which I meekly gave him), returned triumphant and then helped me with my cases and backpack to the train. Predictably enough as it now seems (though I’m sure I didn’t foresee it at the time), what he had actually booked was a two-berth first-class wagon lit. He bundled me in, took off my clothes and had sex, before departing to the upper bunk. I woke a few hours later just outside Rome to find him on top of me again, humping away – taking his last chance before handing me over to the sleeping-car steward to deposit on the platform, while he no doubt slept on to Naples. The only face I have chosen to remember (or perhaps re-create) from the whole incident belongs to this steward, the sly and uncomfortably knowing face of a man who had recognised exactly what was going on and had seen it all before, many times. As he pressed a small plastic cup of coffee into my hand in a routine way, I could tell that it would have been useless appealing to him for help, even if I’d had the chance.

To all intents and purposes this was rape. I did not want to have sex with the man and had certainly not given consent. If I appeared to be compliant, it was because I had no option: I was in a foreign city, with enough of the local language to ask directions to the cathedral maybe, but not to search out a reliable protector and explain convincingly what was happening. If no violence was used, it was because the man’s weapon was my own tiredness (a mind set on sleep, rather than watching for the tell-tale signs of danger) and the luggage. With two heavy cases and a backpack I couldn’t make a dash for it, nor could I just abandon a couple of pieces: never mind the clothes, I had spread my precious thesis and all the notes carefully through the different cases (a misplaced faith in the eggs-in-one-basket-caveat, as it turned out).

That said, I can’t claim to have been particularly traumatised by what happened. I suffered no subsequent aversion to late-night trains, foreign railway stations or even Neapolitan biscuits; and I would give my eye-teeth to be able to zoom around Europe in a first-class wagon lit – something I haven’t been able to afford since. Instead, I nursed some strange and oddly misplaced grudges. One was against the funding council that was sponsoring my research; for had they not insisted, I reasoned, on my using the cheapest method of transport (at that time, a train), and allowed me to go by plane instead, none of this would have happened. Another was against the friend who had been going to travel with me – even though it was I who’d changed my plans and had come on later. Another was against the biscuit-factory man himself, not so much for what he did, but for doing it twice. Even now, more than twenty years later, I can still rage at the memory of waking up to find him doing it again.