Italy under rain, or one guest too many.

Brindisi, December 1975, and it had been wet all day. The dense, solid bank of uniformly grey cloud had been oozing an insipid, cold drizzle since I left Naples in the early morning, relentless, dirty rain, the kind of rain that can hold the whole of Ireland in an oppressive grip for days on end at any time of the year, but I expected better from Italy. Each town the train shunted reluctantly through gave the impression of having been dipped daily for decades in yesterday’s cold, grey, soap-greased bath water. All the towns were dismal, and the countryside looked like a wasteland of puddles and empty spaces peopled with poverty and hopelessness, a country of tatters, as if post-war regeneration had never arrived and it had indeed never arrived.

But the atmosphere inside the everslow, evergrey train was cheery. Young, single, foreign travellers gravitated towards each other over the course of the day till the lonely individuals from France, Canada, Australia, Chile and Ireland became a group and there’s always one from Ireland. We swapped stories and histories. We pooled our loose change to buy wine and stale sandwiches. We despaired about Italy and wished better things for her and played cards to pass the time when the train stopped just short of Brindisi for half an hour when the driver joined a strike.

But Brindisi was not a destination, not for any of us. Brindisi was a staging-post, a point of transit. Istanbul was the destination and we still had to negotiate Igoumenitsa and Patras as well as the port of Brindisi, and Brindisi was nothing more than a ferry terminal stuck on the edge of a poverty-stricken urban wilderness, all half derelict, shells of improbably inhabited buildings, decrepit with decay, rags that looked like clothes hanging limp on lines destined never to dry in the mist-saturated air.

The ferry wasn’t running that night. There were storms in the Adriatic, there was a strike, the boat needed repairs, all depending on who you asked, but any of those reasons was good and the group we had become decided to stay in a youth hostel. I didn’t want to, never wanted to stay in youth hostels, but the group warmth kept me on board.


The hostel was a long way out of town; a bus ride, a trudge through relentless, malevolent mizzle that found its way through waterproof boots and inside underwear. There were six beds available. We were seven but we told the guy at the desk we were six and improvised a spontaneous choreography of dripping wet hair, passports, shouts, interruptions and requests for tourist information to baffle and distract the desk guy and we managed to sneak number seven up the stairs. We never did decide who number seven was but took turns through the night to sleep on the floor. There were six beds in the room. We all took turns at being number seven.

We went in and out of the dining room in groups of two or three, sometimes four, someone always nipping out on their own, swapping pullovers, anything to prevent Fabio the desk guy from knowing, guessing. Adversity, sweet adversity. Mother of hunger, invention and fellowship.

We ate. We decided not to have the shower we all longed for till we were about to go to bed so as not to have to pull on wet clothes afterwards, but leave them hanging on the clothes line whose loopy gait ran the length of the corridor and then go straight into bed. None of us had dry clothes. None even had damp clothes, only clothes wet through, wet even through the waterproof bags we’d packed them in.

And so eventually we showered, leaving clothes dripping in the cold corridor where they had no chance of becoming dry by morning. Hot water after a day of rain-soaked wretchedness and shivers. It took a while to dissociate the warm, comforting torrents from the cold miserable ones but in a while it worked. Hot showers. We found the small shower room down the hall. Six shower heads dangling loosely from the ceiling and mould growing out of the spider’s web of deep fissures in the grubby tiles with soap scum tide marks showing where the water rose to when the drains were blocked. The window frames high in the walls had no glass and let the steam out where it added a waste of heat to the rainy night. We resented that and laughed at it.

Heaven-generated, smooth, hot water tumbled all over us, seven bodies in six showers moving around from one shower head to another so that no-one felt like number seven. The smell of soap and shampoo obliterated the misery of grime that hung about the hostel. More stories, more histories, no-one wanting to move on to the damp bedroom with damp beds, everyone still uncounted by Fabio at the desk, free to be seven.

Rebellious, subversive, sloshing our feet around in the grey, soapy water deepening on the floor, finding and unclogging the plughole choked with generations of travellers’ gunge, making us feel tired but reluctant to leave the comfort of friendship, to get dressed in anything other than the finery of incongruous camaraderie and shared confessions, the anonymity and confidence of nakedness; a great place to hide.

In the morning Fabio at the desk woke all seven of the six of us along with everyone else at the hostel when he piped a particularly dreary version of Bridge over Troubled Water through his sound system; all versions are dreary, even back in 1975 when it was still kind of fresh. And so breakfast. The smell of the coffee was weak and insipid and could hardly find its way out of the cups. So we skipped breakfast. Instead we all marched out single file past Fabio the desk guy, disguised and self-conscious in our still damp clothes, an honest line of seven defiant guests but Fabio never counted, never noticed.