Funny how, as you get older, you look back on your life through a different lens – only to realise how awful some of the things you shrugged off at the time really were. And to feel a fresh fury over how powerless you were.

The first time a man infuriated me was on a flight from London to Warsaw. I was 14 and travelling alone to meet my parents. Dad was working in Poland at the time.

The smartly dressed businessman in the seat next to mine said he felt cold and wondered if I was feeling chilly. I was. He, very kindly I thought, offered to share a large blanket that was provided by the airline and draped it over his legs and mine. Very quickly I realised his hand was creeping up my skirt. I slapped it, threw off the blanket and said I wasn’t cold any more.

I was fine. I didn’t mention the creeping hand and it didn’t occur to me to complain to the staff that I’d been sexually assaulted. I’d just discovered what men could be like and put it down to experience.

There were many more such incidents where men seemed to think they had a perfect right to do whatever they chose without any danger of getting into trouble.

Before I joined BBC Radio Bristol in my early twenties – more than 50 years ago – I had a short job as a hopelessly ill-qualified secretary to the boss of a travel company. My typing was appalling, but I was good at filing – yet it turned out that standing in front of the filing cabinet was far from a safe position, given the proliferation of wandering hands in the office.

It’s not easy to deal with your boss when he is a big and rather crude man, sliding his hand around your body and performing what I think Donald Trump would describe as a ‘pussy grab’. I elbowed him in the stomach with a feeble ‘Don’t do that.’ And left the job soon after.

I thought it would be different at the BBC. It wasn’t. One day I was studying the news reports that came clattering out of the teleprinters when I felt hands around my upper body, grasping my breasts. I whacked him, too.

By now I was familiar enough with the workplace to know the wives of the men who surrounded me – we would meet, early evening, in the BBC club bar. So I warned this man with the hands that if he ever behaved like that again I would be telling his wife about it. He didn’t look overly concerned.

Men had such power when I was a young woman. The kind of behaviour I had to deal with was just what seemed to be expected of the male of the species. They ran everything from the arts, to the City, to the police and the judiciary. We were expected to be flattered to have got a decent job in the first place and to understand, without complaint, that we were there to brighten up the scenery and allow men to enjoy their fantasies.

I am always surprised when women tell me they never experienced men like this. How did they avoid it?

I asked myself so often if it was my fault. Had my top been too tight or my skirt too short? Had I been too chatty in the bar, joining in the joke-telling with gusto? Had I invited the mauling?

Why did I never complain? Why did I never see it as assault? Of course I didn’t. We all thought it was just the way things were. Deal with it and hope it stops. It was just the way it was.

Of course, eventually my generation began to fight for equality and, to a degree, we changed things. Slowly, gradually, things did become easier for women, but sexual banter and wandering hands remained prevalent in the workplace well into the 21st century. It took a huge, international phenomenon to really put a rocket under the process of change.

Next month it will be eight years since #MeToo launched. That autumn, The New York Times and The New Yorker published damning exposes of the appallingly predatory behaviour of film mogul Harvey Weinstein. But it was the actress Alyssa Milano who wrote on Twitter: ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ in response to this tweet.’

Instantly the hashtag went viral. We’d all suffered and finally someone was describing it as assault or harassment. Why had we put up with it without defining it as exactly what it was?

I know a lot of men who scoff at the mention of #MeToo, but for women it was a game changer. Immediately there was a sense that, yes, we’ve taken it in the past, but we’re not taking it any more.

It’s been interesting to read the views of actress Emily Atack on the subject in Radio Times this week. She was the bombshell in The Inbetweeners and, most recently, Sarah Stratton in the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals – the one who plays tennis in the nude with cad Rupert Campbell-Black. But she revealed that her history of sexual abuse at work has been long and distressing.

‘I’ve been sexually assaulted throughout my career,’ she said, ‘whether on set or at a wrap party. But, since the #MeToo movement, people are listening and aware there has to be a shift in behaviour on sets.’ Things, she said, really have changed.

She’s delighted at the trend for intimacy co-ordinators. ‘I’ve seen people roll their eyes at them and say, ‘I don’t need one’,’ she said. ‘There’s a defensiveness about it, but intimacy co-ordinators are there for support if you feel uncomfortable, whether you’re a man or a woman.’

The sex scenes in Rivals are frequent and hot so the intimacy co-ordinators have not toned down the fun, they’ve just made sure everyone is OK with what’s expected of them, and no one will take advantage for a quick fumble, as used to be the case.

Looking back at the many experiences I had as a young woman, I’m grateful that I’m of the Queen Camilla generation – we were not afraid to hit back at men who dared to abuse us. The Queen reportedly used her shoe to fend off wandering hands on a train when she was a teenager.

If only more of us had called out the fumbling as harassment or assault, we might have changed the law sooner, scared men off and saved the generation that came after us from going through what we endured.