Yarns Without Threads 

Mrs Ludlow slumped back in her chair. Her eyes half closed, her thin lipstickless lips parted, her vast breasts hung almost to her waist, the nipples like sere brown fingers. She sat very straight in her chair, her hands resting on either side of her cup and saucer.

A large white hoarding stood just inside the lot facing the road. On it was printed in tall stencilled red letters:

And below this in smaller black letters:

The Society is buying land, enrolling members and making plans to maintain genetic integrity in the event of a thermo-nuclear disaster. The separate colonies would stay in touch and revitalise the world after such a disaster, as well as, ultimately, develop a community reflecting those humanistic values and a way of life in keeping with Man's evolutionary progress. The primary object of this counter-culture (post-nuclear holocaust or not) is to proclaim a new world order so vast, so marvellous as to dispel the inordinate claims of technical expertise where they have no or little bearing on improving the quality of life or are alien and destructive to Man's spirit.

At the base of the notice was the Society's Wellington headquarters address, to which those interested were invited to write. And a date: November 11, 1985.

Netta Ludlow had been the prime mover behind the Sun Club land at Waiouru Bay being adopted for this purpose. She (and somewhat less fervently her lawyer husband) had since early adulthood been naturists and pure food addicts. When the Decontamination Farms Society was formed Netta Ludlow prevailed upon the Waiouru Sun Cub (at whose camp the couple had always spent the summer months) to set itself up as the main northern area colony. ("After all," as she put it at the time, "naturism and humanism - which was meant to take all human attitudes and fuse them together - ought to be natural bedfellows, oughtn't they?" . . . A sentiment with which most of the Sun Club members wer in ready enough accord. And more especially with the humanistic philosophy regarding man's "wholeness", psychic and physical: which happened, did it not(?) to create the magnificent nude art of Greece and the Renaissance. And in turn a "one world" not only at the political level, but in which every natural process and every human action, now and in the past and in the future, would be seen as part of a composite system. Not an avid, deterministic system, but a rich, colourful picture of the inhabited world, in which everything was interesting. As a consequence over two-thirds of the Sun Club members had thrown in their lot with the Society.)

Mr Heatherley noticed for the first time a book just behind his head lying on top of a pile of old Reader's Digests and Argosies. Its edges were frayed and dog-eared, and its cover loose. It bore the title The Wind in the Willows and a coloured drawing of two animals in a boat - a mole and a water rate - and, further away, several otters chasing one another along a stretch of green sward. All the animals wore clothes. Mr Heatherley thought how nice it would be to be wearing clothes as well, to keep the sun off his peeling body.