In the Seventies, some mates and I travelled to England for the big OE (Overseas Experience). Many Kiwis do this in their late teens or early twenties, once they have completed University, or their apprenticeships, etc.
We all found jobs around London, partied hard and did weekend trips to all the touristy spots. One day, one of our mates brought to our attention an advert for students to do volunteer work in an American at a Summer Camp. We all applied, not really thinking we had any chance, as the English advert was really aimed at English University students in their summer break. But we cunning Kiwis had arranged New Zealand students cards, before we left home to get us discounts for travel, tourist attractions, shows, etc.
Long story short I was the only one that got accepted, I have no idea why, but in early July, I boarded a plane with a couple of hundred English students and headed for New York. When we arrived, I found I was being sent to a camp for underprivileged children, a couple of hundred miles south of New York.
The camp was run by a Christian charity, and had a permanent camp director, running the place. There were three groups of boys, ‘Older Boy’s,' ‘Middle Boys’ and ‘Younger Boys’, with around twenty-five campers in each age group. There were three councillors looking after around eight kids from the group, and a senior councillor overseeing each age group.
This setup was mirrored on the girl's side of the camp. Most of the councillors were between eighteen and twenty-one, the six senior councillors tended to be a year or two older. I was assigned to Older Boys, who were mostly fourteen and Fifteen-year-olds. There were always half a dozen trainee councillors in the camp also, they were usually ex-campers, who had shined as they had attended over the years. There were also ancillary staff, a nurse, kitchen staff, and specialist staff that handled the canoe’s, horse riding, etc.
There were five two-week camps over the summer, so I would have a group of boys for twelve days, then had the weekend off before getting a new group for another twelve days, and so on.
We had the kids for twenty-four hours a day and each day had to make up a program to keep them entertained. Swimming in a nearby river, hiking, doing craftwork (Tie Dye Shirts, etc.), taught them bushcraft, and each group got to go canoeing and inner-tubing down the local river, at least once during their visit.
In the evenings, we had events like Indian gatherings around a campfire, the councillors acting out funny skits, or we just sat in our own clearing telling stories. The kids loved ghost stories, and a couple of nights I had boys sleeping under my bunk after I had told a particularly scary story.
The year went pretty much as expected, the kids were mostly black and came from the nearby city’s ghetto. I loved working with them, hard kids with real character.
Now this story is true, with very little embellishment. I was very fit at the time of this story, pursuing a variety of sports. Standing six one tall, olive-skinned, with long black hair, my English/Kiwi accent certainly attracted the American gal’s. At twenty-two, I was a couple of years older than most of the other councillors, and about ten times more ‘worldly-wise’.
And as I was rubbing shoulders with about twenty eligible females each day, the opportunities were boundless. But conscious of the fact we were all living together for three months, I limited my affairs and tried to keep them very discreet. Or so I thought.
My first adventure happened on the second night after I arrived. We had an inauguration sleep out in the woods, and Cindy, who was sleeping next to me, rolled out of her sleeping bag into mine. I thought this may be the start of an affair, but found out the next day that her boyfriend was arriving that very day.
There were another couple of brief affairs to follow this before I set my sights on a young lady called Loni. She was hot, petit and attractive, and she had caught my eye from day one. I had been pursuing her for a couple of weeks, and not making much progress. Then low and behold, she invited me to spend our next free weekend at her home. WooHoo! Progress.
On the following Friday, we did some morning activities with our campers, then after lunch, packed them all on the buses that were taking them back to the city. When the last bus had finally departed, I went down to my tent and packed for the weekend.
On walking back up to meet Loni, I found I was not the only person invited for the weekend, Cindy and Mary joined us, weekend bags hanging from their shoulders.
Cindy, I have already mentioned; and as her boyfriend was not invited, the thought ran through my head, that if Loni still played hard to get all weekend, it was odds on I might get lucky with Cindy again.
Mary was a different story altogether, she was very strait-laced, and I don’t mean that as an adverse comment. In fact, I really liked Mary and often searched her out when I wanted good sound advice. She was loved by everyone, had a beautiful nature and always smiling. But no one swore around Mary, and I would never have dreamed of putting the hard word on her.
Loni’s mother turned up about 3:00 pm in a huge Lincoln statesman. This was the first indication I had that Loni came from a monied family. So when we drove up a wooded drive and stopped on the circle in front of a very substantial house, I was not too surprised and managed to hold my mouth from dropping open.
The house had seven bedrooms (I think all had their own bathroom), and two kitchens; one for the help to use, the other was Loni’s mother's kitchen. Loni and her mother cooked up a beautiful dinner and afterwards, we watched a movie in one of the several private lounge/family rooms. By this time we were all struggling to keep our eyes open and we're all keen to hit the sack.
About midnight I awoke, aware someone was in the room with me. A distinctly female silhouette was leaning over me and shaking my shoulder. My first thought was Loni! But that was quickly dashed, as the female form was much taller and had much larger breasts. I knew it wasn’t Cindy, as she was short and had a much more rounded figure. Then I panicked, as I came to the realisation it had to be Loni’s mother.
Still, I rolled to the far side of the bed, making room and nervously watched the female apparition pull the nighty over her head and climb beneath my sheets.
But I got an even bigger shock, when a melodic southern drawl whispered in my ear, “Will you be gentle with me? It’s my first time.”
It was Mary, the last person I would have expected. She snuggled her curvaceous, warm body into mine and searched out my lips. I felt my cock immediately expand and stand up against her thigh, and I rolled away slightly, not wanting to embarrass her. But she just dropped a hand between us, took my length into her hand, fondling it like it was some delicate flower.
Things progressed very rapidly from there, I was soon between her legs, holding my weight on my elbows and trying to gently ease my length into her forbidden grotto. We made love, her frantically, while I tried to curb my urge to hammer away like crazy, and instead gently eased myself against her thrusting hips.
I was to find in the coming weeks, that I did not need to be gentle with Mary, she was quite the vixen in bed and loved to be hammered hard.
She stayed with me until the sun was just starting to show through my blinds. We made love three times that first night.
In the morning we all met at breakfast, and Mary acted as if nothing had happened. Loni borrowed her elder brother's car and had me drive us all to Atlantic City for the day, where we walked the boardwalk and tried many of the attractions, like riding the Ferris wheel, etc.
I spent the day looking after and being very attentive to Mary and now found that Loni was pestering me for attention. I had to walk a very narrow line, of not offending my host, but also looking out for Mary, as I most definitely did not want her to think that the night before was just a one-night stand.
That night, even though we were all exhausted, Mary crawled into my bed again. Once again she asked me to be very gentle with her because she was quite sore from our lovemaking the night before. So after playing with her breasts and getting her excited, I crawled my way down between her legs and ran my tongue from her navel and into her sopping wet slit. She fought me at first, saying it was dirty, but soon was thrashing around in my bed in delirious rapture.
We spent a lot of time together in the following weeks. Often going for walks through the woods to the river, once we had our campers safely asleep. We would lie in the thick beds of leaves, under the trees and make mad, exuberant love. Crazy really, as the woods were renowned for copperhead snakes. It really is a wonder, we never got bitten on our fine naked arses.
——
At the end of summer, the camp director, we’ll call him Rhett, put on a leaving party. He was in his mid-thirties and his wife Liz was twenty-six. Liz was an air hostess, a blond with an amazing body. She was seldom at the camp, which really was a crying shame, as she was a very attractive woman. And I mean, turn your head around so fast, you tripped over attractive. So you won’t have to stretch your imagination a lot, to know that I had many wet dreams about being alone with her.
Maybe we saw Liz for one or two days of each week, some weeks more, some weeks less. When she was at the camp though, she was happy to help out. So if one of the senior boy’s groups was planning to go to the swimming hole, you would sound out some of the free staff to help you, and if Liz was around, she was always first to put up her hand and help.
There was plenty of food and alcohol at the party. Alcohol being a total No-No, while the campers were in attendance.
The party was a blast, good music, dancing and I even got to sneak outside with Mary and have a quickie against the sickbay wall. Near the end of the night, I was sitting on a sofa out on the sun porch, when Liz came over and sat on my knee. She had gotten herself crying drunk, and embarrassed me by throwing her arms around me and sobbing in my ear, that Rhett was a pig.
I quickly glanced around to see if Rhett was watching, and there he was on the other side of the room, looking straight at me. But instead of looking angry, he just threw his hands in the air and gave me a, ‘She does this all the time,’ look. Then mouthed to me, ‘Did I want him to pull her away,’ he obviously didn’t want a scene. So I mouthed back to him that I was all right, and waved my hands to inform him he could relax and to go look after his guests.
I manoeuvred Liz off my knee and down onto the couch to sit beside me, then asked her what was wrong. She opened up and told me that Rhett didn’t understand her, he was just a pig, she had needs, he treated her bad, etc., etc. Then she really embarrassed me, as she spoke up quite loudly, “I wish he was like you, you would understand me.”
Then it got worse, “I know you have slept with half the girls in the camp, they tell me you know! You could have me anytime you want.”
Fuck! Mary was within hearing range and there were other councillors sitting or standing close by. I talked fast, calming her down, pouring placating words quietly into her ear, “There, there, I understand.”
Slowly she calmed and started answering some of my questions somewhat rationally, and I told her some jokes and stories and got her laughing. Finally, Rhett came over, thanked me for calming her down, and took her away to bed.
So that was the end of my experience with Camp America and their summer camp program, or so I thought. But I have to admit to having many dirty dreams and a lot of masturbating when I back to London, reminiscing on that summer, and especially about what could have been with Liz.
——
When I arrived back in London, most of my friends were away in Europe, travelling around in vans. I moved in with an extremely hot lady, that I had been going out with before I left for America. Her name was Fran, an Australian Girl from Sydney, she had been a dancer at Whiskey-A-Go-Go, up Kings Cross, so you can imagine she was a bit of a looker. She had been waiting for me to return so we could head over to Europe together. And two days later we were hitching down to Spain, where we spent a week in a small apartment in Sitges, just south of Barcelona.
Near the end of the week, when we were trying to decide where to travel to next, I received a postcard from one of the girls from my flat, asking me to meet up with them at the Fusina Camp in Venice. It took us two days to hitch up through France, across Italy to Venice, only to find we had missed everyone by hours. They had all left that morning for the Octoberfest in Munich.
We stayed the night in a cabin at Camp Fusina. The place was a bit of a mess, as they had had a bad Tornado just days before. In fact, many of my friends got caught in it, and one had a tree fall on his tent and break his back. There was another guy who died from a tent pole whipped up by the wind, hitting him. We all went back the next couple of years, to the Fusina T-Day festival that I believe, ran for many years.
So the next day it was on the road again, hitching over the Brenner Pass to Munich, where we joined up with my mates from NZ, and the girls from my London flat. A drunken three or four days followed, where we all attempted to drink the various beer halls dry!!
Some of the girls were returning to London, but Diana and Fleur wanted to continue on, to see more of Italy, Greece and Turkey. Fran and I needed little encouragement, we happily joined them in their green 1968 Bedford van.
After the Beer Festival, about a dozen of us travelled down to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play, where we met up with an American couple who joined with us for the rest of our trip.
I will not go into any detail about the trip through Italy, down to Brindisi, where we crossed the Adriatic to Greece. Nor our time on the nude beach on Mykonos and the trip up through Greece to Bulgaria. All of which could fill a book or two, but this story is about my adventures at the American Summer Camp. However, the events from Bulgaria and Turkey do have a bearing on my story.
When we arrived in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, we met up with a crazy trainee doctor who invited us all to a party at his apartment. The party turned out to be a scam. It was just him and a mate, who wanted to get into the four girls' pants. But we did have an interesting night and tried plenty of the local booze. I mention him, as we all stayed the night in his apartment, sleeping on the floor, and the next morning when he found we were intending to travel on to Turkey, he explained to us there was an outbreak of Cholera there, and we needed to get vaccinated.
He guided us to the hospital where he worked and directed us to the vaccination clinic, where we all got Cholera jabs. Afterwards, we were each presented with an official-looking vaccine card. It was signed off with our names, date of vaccination and batch number etcetera. I was amazed that it didn’t cost us a thing, usually, the locals of these countries are always trying to get money from the rich Westerners.
After lunch, we all piled in the van and set off for Istanbul, where we got trapped for about two and a half weeks. The doctor guy was correct there reportedly was a Cholera outbreak, and all the neighbouring countries to Turkey had closed their borders.
We did hear rumours that a Bulgarian pilot had defected over to Turkey with one of the latest Soviet Fighters and that Turkey let the Americans in to pull it apart before finally handing it back. But I have never heard if that was actually the case.
Anyway, after spending a couple of days gallivanting around the backwaters of Istanbul, we drove to the south of Turkey for a week to kill time. Then fast running out of money we headed back to Istanbul to await either Greece or Bulgaria to re-open their borders.
It was here that one of the weirdest things in my life happened. There were many people from different countries caught with the border shutdowns and we all sat around campfires at night, smoking pot and talking shit.
An older guy had joined our campfire group, he was in his early forties I guessed. He told us all that he was a male witch. Being a smart arse, I said you mean a warlock, ‘No!’ He retorted back, insisting he was a male witch. I left it alone, it did not really matter to me what he called himself, but it certainly seemed to matter to him.
He said he was returning from India, where he had been studying all sorts of supernatural stuff and he said he wrote books about it. He told us all sorts of weird things he had done and could do. Now I didn’t believe in all that mumbo jumbo and still don’t today. But he offered to read the Tarot cards for us and tell us something about our past and future.
As I say I was not a believer and wanted no part in it. But Fran was very interested and said she would like her fortune read. He told her all sorts of things that had her quite perturbed. She told me in quite a scared voice, that everything he had told her was right on the nail. I tried to explain to her they just generalise and pick stuff that can be true to most people. But she tried to convince me there was much more to it, and that he had told her stuff he couldn’t possibly know. Still seeing the disbelief on my face, she persuaded me to give it a try. I was sceptical, but I moved over and sat in front of the so-called male witch.
He laughed at me, having heard my discussion with Francis he knew I was a sceptic, but he dealt out my cards anyway. At first, the things he told me were on the ball, but I put them down to good guesses or stuff he had heard around the camp over the last couple of days. But then he floored me by exclaiming, “I don’t understand what the cards are saying! They're saying you have three fathers, and I realise that’s quite silly. But that’s definitely what the cards say.”
I kept silent, knowing they get a lot of information by reading your reactions. Then he seemed to have a revelation and asked me if my mother had been married more than once.
This sent a huge bubble of doubt, even a bit of fear, running through me. He was correct, my mother had been married three times. My real father, separated when I was three, and died when I was eleven. Her second marriage had been to give me a father, as I was going off the rails in my early teens. He died when I was about seventeen, and two years later she married again, to a guy I really liked, and he became my father for many years. There was no way on God's earth he could have known these things.
That settled, he continued the reading, and his next revelation calmed me back down. He said I had just travelled far oversea’s, and that I would travel back to the same place next year. He had to be talking about America, and I knew this to be impossible, as the Camp America trips are a one-off experience and you don’t get to go twice. So sitting there half stoned I figured out he had got lucky with the father thing, but he was, as I had thought, full of shit.
I was even more convinced he just got lucky, when he said, “You didn’t get any financial reward on the last trip overseas, but the cards say you will reap financial reward next time when you return there again.”
I figured he had to have heard me telling someone I had been to Camp America. But as for going back, impossible, and I knew no one gets paid. I didn’t give it much more thought, but just nodded thanks to him.
