Sweet And Sour Days In Perugia

As a student, Elinor Goodman was bowled over by a charming American, who did the dirty on her. Fifty years later, he got in touch…

Revenge is a dish famously best served cold.

In this case, 50 years cold. When I was 18, I was sent to the University for Foreigners in Perugia to learn Italian. It wasn’t really a university – the only person I know who claims to have graduated from it was the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith – more a depository for kids not clever enough to get into a proper university at home and Americans trying to dodge military service in Vietnam.

Frank was the latter. He was tall with dark, curly hair, black eyes and a hirsute body spoilt only by rather bowed legs. Without a single pimple, he was unlike any of the boys I had had ungainly wrestling matches with at parties in England. Compared with him, they seemed childish.

He oozed confidence and experience. The trouble was his experience had included getting a girl pregnant in the States two months before while he was working at a ladies’ college. For him, Perugia was a way of dodging not just the draft but also the irate father of his pregnant girlfriend.

I met him in a bar beneath my pensione – where the landlady, who was supposed to talk to me in Italian, took out her teeth before every meal and fell silent. I felt very alone, so although I had been warned by friends at school not to trust Italian men, I was bowled over when Frank asked me to share a pizza – and later his very narrow bed in a room he shared with another American.

We were all loose cannons, away from the constraint of school and parents, smoking quantities of pot and partying for days on end in a room we rented within the city wall.

One night, we hired a car and spent the night in it in Assisi. The windows got so fugged up with smoke that the police couldn’t see us through them when they tried to move the car out of the piazza.