2018.02.12 Tatler
‘They did tell you about the nudism, didn’t they?’
‘They’ hadn’t, but there it was, round the pool the hotel’s owner had just led us up a slope to see, as she introduced us to her rustic Provencal property: pendulous breasts, swinging dicks, copious pubic hair (this was the Nineties) and a benign group of French/Dutch/German advocates of going naked as nature intended.
My six-year-old daughter squawked – and ran. My ten-year-old son gawped – and looked green. My partner and I turned to each other and panicked.
We needn’t have done. True, it had been a last-minute booking, in the days before Booking.com and the pictures that accompany the properties they’re offering. True, it had meant an overnight (and sleepless) train to Avignon and a couple of hours killing time before we could check in. Still, the welcoming baguettes were warm, the coffee delicious and the countryside beautiful. As weren’t, however, all the bodies on such unclothed display. But…
Well, it was indeed naked as nature intended: there was nothing lewd, or porno, or, thank goodness, awash with genital jewellery about the scene. And the nudism wasn’t compulsory – there was a tacit agreement that the nakeds would inhabit one end of the pool and the fig-leafed the other. In a sense, it was no different to the ‘nude’ beaches of Mykonos, in the good old days before roads criss-crossed the island. Then, nudism was illegal, but you could go naked on Super-Paradise or Elia, both beaches that could only be reached by caique – and which the police could only raid from the sea, allowing ample time for the beach to slip into its speedos or bikinis.
Anyway, back near Avignon, the children adapted very quickly, as children do. I didn’t join the nudies: I thought that might be pushing it. But my daughter (and my son) very quickly couldn’t have cared less about those hirsute pubic mounds or those peculiar penises and even took pride in showing the acres of fully exposed flesh to friends who visited us. And when it was time to leave, my daughter insisted on saying goodbye and thank you to the proprietor - who was by the pool, sans bikini top and sans bikini bottom. She bent down to my daughter, her generous breasts waving in the wind, and the two embraced, warmly and unselfconsciously. All’s well that ends well, with or without clothes.
