Raped? Me? Of course. Lots of women get raped. I mean, haven't you ever had sex when you'd rather be curled up in bed with a book? You've said yes because it was expected of you, not because you wanted to. In its way, that's a type of rape. My experience was just a little more blatant than that.
I was in Africa at the time. I was working as a nurse in this little Red Cross hospital way out in the country. No civilisation for miles around, and I mean a lot of miles.
Part of my duties was to go out with the doctors to remote villages and deliver medicines and things and to do quick health checks. A couple of times when the doctors were all too busy to go I'd be sent out alone. All the local villages knew us and expected us.
One day I was scheduled to go with Doctor Tanner to a little village about fifty miles away. I'd never been to that particular village before. I'd just got in the jeep when this battered old truck came hurtling into the hospital yard. They had a couple of injured people on board and suddenly Doctor Tanner was up to his ears in emergency work.
He told me to just go ahead and visit the village by myself. The way was clearly marked and the area was considered safe. So off I went.
About half way to the village there was this river. You've probably read Kipling and heard of his great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River. This river may not have been the Limpopo but it was its first cousin. And the track led straight up to this little jetty.
I pulled up on the jetty and looked around. There was a ferry on the other side of the river and it was being poled across the river towards me. There was this big rope that stretched across the river, preventing the river from washing the ferry downstream. All the ferryman had to do was pole back and forth.
The ferry pulled up next to the jetty and the ferryman hopped out and wandered over to me. I have to say he was the biggest and most 'African' African I had ever seen. His skin was so black that he was probably invisible at night. And he was huge. I'll swear that he was nearly seven foot tall and must have weighed three hundred pounds, all of it muscle.
You probably think I'm exaggerating his size, but I'm not. He looked as though he could go three rounds with a bull gorilla and win every time.
This guy walks up to me and held out a hand that was about the size of a dinner plate. A large dinner plate, at that.
"Ferry. Dollar," he says.
Now I knew that this was a grossly inflated price and so did he, but I wasn't going to argue and I suspect he knew that, too. I gave him his dollar and he pointed to the ferry and just said, "On."
So I drove onto the ferry and stopped in the middle where he pointed. The ferryman then lifted the ramp back onto the ferry, picked up his pole and pushed off.
God, he was strong. He pushed the ferry off and started poling us across with no problem, car and all. The problem came when he got to the middle of the river.
He just stopped poling and dropped the pole on the floor of the ferry. Then he came over to the jeep and plucked me out of it as though I was a small child, and that's how big I felt next to him.
"Fun," he says, and the next thing I know he's undoing my jeans and pulling them off. And if you're wondering why I didn't try to stop him, I did. He just ignored whatever I said or did. My jeans and panties were both just peeled off and tossed back into the jeep. I'm lucky he didn't toss them overboard.
He let me go and started taking off his own trousers. He could afford to let me go, because there was nowhere to go. Jump in the river? Ha! Have you seen the size of the crocodiles they have there?