Chapter 1 : DAY 1

“Olive, it says Olive”

“Yes, but my name is Clive”

“Ah you sure?”

Clive, travelled from the UK to be here. He bit his tongue; he’d been told that Americans didn’t like sarcasm, that they didn’t understand irony (neither turned out to be true), so he didn’t say ‘I’m pretty sure what my name is’ or ‘Oh, no, I’m a girl, you’re right, thank you for sorting that out’. He just looked and waited, finally, “Well this is a girls’ summer camp, you’ve come to the wrong place”

“But that is my form you have, I was expected”

“No, OLIVE was expected”

Another pause. He looked concerned, concerned silence often provokes a response. Finally the woman (who was a lot more kindly than the rather pinched face often suggested), said “Well, you can stay in a guest room tonight. There is a boys camp on the other side of the lake.” they both involuntarily looked across to the far horizon, where a dim green line suggested this water didn’t go on for ever “I’ll call them tomorrow and see if they have any vacancies.” The lake looked about the size of the North Sea, keeping the boys and girls apart was clearly a priority.

The camps had only been single sex for 7 years. After a series of unfortunate, teenage pregnancies it was felt to make sense to reorganise and the mixed CampaFun became CampaGirls while the SportsCampUSA became SportsBoysUSA (they’d had their share of midnight mixed contact sports too). The baseball pitch became a rounders court, indoor basketball became indoor netball (and then indoor netball or basketball as more and more girls found it was more fun to run with the ball than stand around throwing it), Soccer gave way to a form of American Football without the macho charging down – which often degenerated into full contact sport, something that wouldn’t have happened with boys watching. Except for rare parental visits a male hormone had only visited during the camp season to unblock the toilets, (a regular requirement with girls) until now. It seemed to work; some of the girls claimed to hate being at a single sex camp when their hormones were crying out to show off the developing bodies to potential mates; but actually they mostly found it surprisingly liberating not to have to strut their stuff, not have to dress to look good. There was still competition of course, girls don’t only dress to impress boys (like boys don’t only do silly ‘tough’ walks to impress girls), but a lot of the girls were semi-secret repeat bookings (“Oh God, Mum and Dad are insisting I go there AGAIN!” to the friends; and “Can I go to CampaGirls please, it was kinda fun” to parents). And there was also the fact that female-female relationships could develop without the immediate accusation of the ‘L’ word. Some of those friendships would carry right through life – and if there was a hint of sex in the attraction, well so what? How is that different to the massive team hugs of boys on the sports field?

“The guest rooms are clearly signposted from the square, umm, hang on ... TRACEY-MAY!!!!” she had a voice that also belied her body, she could roar like a sergeant-major “Yes, can you sort out bedding for GR1? Thank you so much.” Her smile looked like the smile of a crocodile with a baby zebra in its sights, but at least he was being given somewhere to stay tonight. He’d arrived that morning on an overnight flight, made his way by the MARC to Baltimore Penn station where he met the bus to SummaCamp (urr!!!! He had thought for the hundredth time, it’s just brainless marketing, not cool to replace the ‘er’ with ‘a’). Perhaps if the bus had said ‘CampaGirls’ he might have asked a question, but ‘SummaCamp, Lake Smooth’ didn’t suggest anything. Okay if he’d been more wide awake he might have thought “Heh, every other person apart from the driver is a girl.” but he was tired, just a little drunk still (lots of free booze and no-one asked his age; he knew from a previous trip to stock up now before the age checks kicked in) and, anyway, the coach driver just asked his surname. If someone had looked then and said “Sorry, this says Olive”, he’d have been stuck in Baltimore, which the MARC coming in did not advertise as a good place in which to be alone and home-less. The bus drove for 5 hours including the comfort break along interstates and freeways, then turned off and started winding up into hills, past marshes and stands of trees that were probably here when his predecessors landed at Jamestown; but he didn’t see any of them. By then he was fast asleep with his head against the window. He woke to the announcement (accompanied by loud, annoying, pointless squeals from numerous girls) that they had arrived, he also woke to find an attractive blonde slowly coming back to life after sleeping on his shoulder. She smiled, said her name was ‘Mandy’ or ‘Randy’ or ‘Andy’ and sat up, brushed her shirt down with hand actions that he couldn’t help following as they swept over her breasts, realised he was watching and more furtively pulled her shirt into place. He looked groggily out and realised he’d found paradise. It wasn’t the girls – all ‘camp friends’ as the brochure told visitors they were called, these were not the happy campers, these were the organisers, team leaders, activity group leaders, cooks, nurses, advisors, mentors, etc etc etc that any well ordered camp (or at least this one) needed to function like a military organisation – it was the scenery, the lake, the forest, the sky.