I was just 18 when I first visited and stripped off at a nude beach. I went there by myself and was a very, very long way from home. Apart from people who are brought up as a naturist I can’t imagine how I could have started any earlier than I did, and despite having something of a shock on my first outing, I’ve been a complete naturist ever since.

Going nude on the beach was something I had wanted to do for some years before I tried it, ever since I first saw a copy of Health and Efficiency when I was about 15. It convinced me that just about the only people who ever visited nude beaches were young and attractive women who always smiled. I even wondered if I’d feel out of place simply because I would be so heavily outnumbered… needless to say that hasn’t turned out to be a problem in naturist life!

I had sometimes got undressed outdoors on my own when younger, in our back garden after dark for a supposedly daring night-time walk, and occasionally in the countryside for a few exhilarating minutes of freedom. But never in front of other people outdoors, which seemed to me like the real thing.

So it was the nude beach at Ladies Bay in Auckland where I first bared all in public. I was visiting New Zealand on a gap year from England and within a couple of weeks of arriving heard about the nude beach and visited it one Monday morning, some time in March 1987. I climbed down to the main beach area, which had a couple of clothed fishermen, and walked along the rocky shore for some minutes until I saw my first ever nudist, an old guy sitting on his own reading a newspaper who ignored me. He was side-on to me so I could see he had nothing on, but had his paper over his lap, which felt a huge let-down if you had to be sort of covered.

I went on and saw a few other older men dotted along the shore, about a dozen in total by the time I came to the end, all of them lying down and sunbathing. Puzzled I walked back to the middle and sat on what seemed to be a large empty stretch of sand. I looked again to check and they were all definitely nude. When one finally stood up I noticed with great surprise that his bottom was the same colour as the rest of his skin – a glorious deep brown which seemed completely unachievable to an ordinary mortal like me. Emboldened at the sight of someone walking about nude along the water’s edge, I pulled off all my clothes, stripping my trousers and underwear together, and sat blinking in the bright sunshine with my heart in my mouth and my knees together, tingling all over.

Needless to say the world didn’t come to an end and I knew immediately that I was doing what I had always wanted to do – it felt like my body could breathe for the first time. I was in heaven, ecstatic with the thrill of it and also relieved to find the nerves did indeed dampen any arousal problems as the naturist magazine had assured.

I was less sure about my fellow beach visitors however, since several men appeared over the next 30 minutes, all fully clothed or wearing just shorts, and offered to put suncream on my very white back. After the third or fourth time I put on my shorts and walked over to a naturist sitting near me on a log, and asked him if this was a genuine nude beach. He was very friendly and pointed out that I had placed my towel at the bottom of a direct access path down to the beach, so anyone coming to take a look at the nudists would immediately bump into me! I moved my towel pretty quickly after that, and began to enjoy my first ever naturist socialising.

It never occurred to me I would stand out so much, but my skin was completely white and I was at least half a century younger than my fellow naturists, so they were all curious to meet me over the course of the afternoon. One or two were clearly more interested than the others, but they were happy just to sit with a novice naturist without making me uncomfortable in any way at all. I visited the beach a few more times that late summer, and grew to appreciate my nude beach companions in ways I would never have dreamed about before that first visit. They weren’t nubile young women, but they were absolutely naturists from top to bottom, as natural and as happy in their bare skin as I had always wanted to be. I still find them an inspiring memory even today, 25 years later.

I’ve been back to Ladies Bay several times over the years, once with a long-term naturist girlfriend one day in 1998, but now on my own again; attached picture shows the beach in April 2008 at high tide. The beach has had some negative publicity in recent years and there is talk of clamping down on nudity there. And yet even as a naive 18-year-old I knew that the only pushy and unpleasant people I’d met there were what I now know to be textiles, people who had failed to understand something as basic and as wonderful as naturism. There was a clear divide, and I knew which side I was going to be on for the rest of my days.