A swimming pool drowning

I have always had a stronger than sneaking suspicion that I was secretly lucky to be born to my own parents and not some of those that I had read about, or saw on television or those that belonged to some of my friends.
There were a lot of things other families had, that even at a young age I was aware that we never had, but nothing that made our lives uncomfortable or difficult to bear.

Take the swimming pool incident. I mean you couldn’t script incidents like this. Not even if you tried. Incidents like this make you wish that our lives did have a replay button.

I was 11 years old and in standard three when my parents bought our seventh house.

Including two rentals, this was the ninth house I had lived in, in my eleven sun filled years. This was quite a few houses by anybodies standards.

This new home was a small, neat Victorian house in Mowbray. Complete with bay windows, Victorian fireplaces and two tiny outside rooms off the back garden that had previously served as domestic quarters.

No sooner had we moved in than we started the big renovation.

Part of this particular renovation was the inclusion of a  swimming pool.

My parents thought that they had a brilliant innovation and had worked out that for a fraction of the cost and the time you could get a pool that looked and felt just like a cement and concrete pool if by sinking a porta-pool below the ground.

With one exception, the membrane of the pool, although sturdy, was still only made of plastic sheeting. You were inevitably going to get occasional nicks and cuts which would result in leaks. My parents had considered this in advance and had worked out that you could simply repair any cuts with a special glue and  plastic that perfectly matched that pool membrane.

They were quite right and the cuts were never an issue. We had a couple of surface cuts that were repaired with ease before we discovered a cut on the bottom of the pool.

Other than the general shitty condition of the house when they bought it another of the reasons my parents had managed to get a good deal on the house was that the back garden was overlooked by a block of flats. It was rather invasive having a block of flats overlooking your garden but we discovered that for ninety percent of the time nobody was ever on their balconies, and for the ten percent of the time when they were it was hardly like they were leaning over looking down at us. We ignored them and they ignored us and we all discovered that the block of flats slowly evaporated into invisibility like a giant David Copperfield illusion.

The leak on the bottom of the swimming pool brought my parents, their pool repair system, and the block of flats behind our house together one sunny, summer Sunday morning in a way that we could never have guessed.

My father was in his bathing costume with a diving mask on his face and the repair kit lying on the side of the pool. I was tinkering around and generally getting in the way and offering unwanted advice. After a thorough search, which involved my father snorkelling around on the bottom of the pool, the leak was found and marked with a pebble. He cut and prepared the plastic patch and covered the one side with glue and left it to dry for the prerequisite five minutes. And that is when things started to go wrong.

My father was not weighted and as easy as it was to dive down to the leak, he couldn’t spend any time down there and was unable to exert the required pressure on the patch for the correct duration of time. He tried again and again, but each time he pushed down, his body simply rose up through the water. It clearly wasn’t working and he was clearly getting peeved. The voices and conversation was getting noisy and interesting.

Enter my mother with a broom. Between the two of them they decided that the best idea and most logical solution would be for her to pin him down with our kitchen broom pressed into the small of his back, allowing him the minute or so at the bottom to do what was needed.

I thought it was a superb idea.

And that is what the tenants in the block of flats saw when they looked over their balconies to investigate the source of the excited noise the on that sunny, summer morning.

A woman attempting to murder her husband by straining to pin his struggling body to the bottom of the pool with a sturdy kitchen broom in front the eyes of her young son. As his bubbles grew less and less frequent and his struggles weaker and less violent, more and more of them appeared at their balconies staring down in horror.

When my father eventually surfaced, glowing at having successfully completed the task, his eyes were drawn up to the block of flats beside us. My mother and I followed his gaze upwards. My permanent recollection is of several staring faces looking down at us over their balconies in wide eyed and wide mouthed silence.

At that stage my father would have raised a glass of dry white wine in their direction with a cheerful smile and headed inside to get lunch started.