On the second night we were there, before the marches began, before our muscles learned to tense for flight at the smallest noise, we attended a gig at the Genoa Social Forum, the centre of the protest for those of us in the Red and Pink Blocks, who advocated peaceful, non-violent resistance. It was a warm evening; the air was still. I was pushing back through the crowd, pockets loaded with cans of cheap Italian lager from a stall, when a new act came on to the stage. It caught my attention because it was the first song in English I’d heard all evening; I then realized I dimly remembered it from my childhood. She was young, red-headed and her voice soared out across the crowd.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked my friend Simon.

He gave me that look that said God, Jess, you know nothing about music as he popped the tab on his beer. ‘It’s Clio Campbell. Clio Campbell. Don’t you remember?’

Two days later, walking with the Pink Block in formation along the Corso Italia, we noticed the crowds swearing at us. Nobody in Genoa seemed to be very pleased to see us. I’m still to this day not sure what it was that flicked, whether the police were waiting for a signal, whether they had something planned. Later, we’d hear rumours that they had undercover agents posing as Black Block agents provocateurs, starting trouble to give them an excuse for a show of force and power to impress the visiting world leaders, exactly as Silvio Berlusconi had intended. From nowhere, there were batons, raining down on us, shouts in Italian from both the riot police and the protesters.

‘Non violenta! Non violenta!’ I shouted, as we’d been taught in the non-violent direct action workshop the day before. I tried to make my body go limp. Remember, the Pink Block believed in non-violent resistance. We were absolutely the least likely people to fight back. That’s why we made such a good target, I suppose.

There were limbs all around me. I had no idea which of them belonged to my friends. I was twenty-one, I was far away from home, and a baton had slammed into my shoulder, sending a dull, weird ache juddering through my arm. This was nothing like the demonstrations I’d been on in England, where we’d waved banners and sung songs and had a laugh in a public park then caught the bus back home again with a bag of chips. I’m pretty sure I was crying at this point, but I don’t remember. I felt very very young and very afraid.

Then someone grabbed my hand and pulled me towards them. ‘Non violenta,’ I muttered. Someone was holding me, had their arms around me, was pulling me out of the scrum and away from the main fight, up an alleyway. They were whispering something in my ear, in English.