When I was in primary school, my brother and I occasionally went to visit friends of ours who lived in a nudist commune. When I related this recollection to my mother recently, she frowned, and said that it wasn’t a nudist commune, just a commune where a lot of people didn’t wear any clothes. This distinction didn’t make much sense to me, but I think she meant that the commune wasn’t based on ideals that included naturism - it just happened to include quite a few naturists.
I didn’t find it very strange at the time. My parents were fairly casual about clothing, which you can afford to be when you live on a large country property. We used to go to the commune and play dress-ups, which I find rather ironic now. There was a cupboard full of 70s clothes, including someone’s wedding dress - white satin, with tiny buttons along the sleeves - which was a prized toy. We would array ourselves in our colourful finery, and parade between the houses. I remember walking along a ridge and seeing some adults working in the fields below, wearing shirts against the hot sun and nothing else. “I can see a bottom!” one of my friends shrieked at them, and they turned and waved at us.
I remember going to visit one of the children’s father, a rather old man as I thought at the time, who was completely naked apart from the knotted string tied around his waist. I wondered why he bothered to wear the string, feeling rather puzzled at such a pointless accessory.
I suppose that such an environment would seem terribly unsavoury today, with unpleasant sexual overtones, but it didn’t seem that way at all to me. All the children wore clothes, and I wasn’t of an age where I really connected nudity with sex. Nudity was fairly practical for the adults sweating in the summer heat, and their wrinkled and sunburnt skin didn’t particularly interest me. What I remember most clearly is being allowed to wear the beautiful wedding dress, if only for a short time as it was in high demand, and the feeling of the satin skirt swishing around my legs.
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