Story 79 Background.

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                                                                                                                    Posted by Susan

         You have already seen in earlier stories that Joseph discovered a camping ground that was clothing optional. This ground is supposedly set in the Te Henga Valley backing on to the Regional Centurial Park. This is completely fictional and as far as we know there is no park like this in that area. Many years ago there was a nudist club in the area but that was only open to club members I believe.

        The original goal of this story was just to introduce the camp and set the scene for the stories that will follow. I wanted to just describe the camp layout, letting you know the location of lakes for swimming, the mainstream, the playing field, the main admin block and the arrangement of camp sites.  The reasons for this will become clear when we reach some of the other camp stories. For many years that was basically how the story was left. 

        But then much later in 2012, we began the second series of camp stories, which will be found at the beginning of Volume Eleven. Here Greeshma gets involved in some rather naughty fun herself. We decided to go back to this earlier series and give her a slightly sexier role here. That is why the second part of this story we find Greeshma goes swimming topless. As Shanti tells Joseph, she had stepped out of her usual comfort zone to do that.

        The main theme behind this second part was Greeshma actually going topless and then Joseph coming to terms with it. I think the little conversation between Shanti and Joseph helps here too as she tells him Greeshma is not just his mother, she is a woman like Lizamoa. If topless is ok for Liz then its ok for Greeshma too. Joseph seems to see the reasoning of this but we can still see he is not entirely comfortable with it.   

         The sickness of Shanti's father is based on a real event that happened at this time. Reshma & Shandra's mother - Allan's step-mother became very sick with cancer. We all knew it was bad but for a few weeks, she seemed to recover. She wanted to visit her family in Wellington but the trip proved too much and she went quickly downhill after that. In a way, this theme in our stories is in memory of her.

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