When The Paddling Pool Went Through The Floor

The afternoon it happened

I taught primary school for thirty-one years, most of them at a little school out past Katoomba, and I always thought I understood how quickly a calm afternoon could turn. Twenty-eight children in a room will teach you that. But nothing prepared me for the sound our deck made that January, a sort of soft groan followed by a crack, the way a branch goes in a storm.

We had the whole family up for the holidays. My daughter Kate, her husband, and the two little ones. My granddaughter Mila, who was four at the time, had a bright plastic paddling pool set up out the back, the kind you fill with the hose and top up all afternoon because it never seems to stay full. She was sitting in it with her cousin, both of them shrieking the way children do when the water is cold and the sun is hot, and I was in the kitchen shelling peas and watching them through the window.

Then one corner of the deck simply let go. The pool tipped, a great slap of water went across the boards, and Mila slid down toward the gap that opened up beneath her. I have never moved so fast in my life. I was out that door with wet peas still in my hand. She was fine, thank goodness, just soaked and startled and more upset about the spilled water than anything. But when I looked down where the pool had been, I could see straight through to the dirt below, to the dark and the spider webs and the smell of wet rot that had been building up under there for years without any of us knowing.

Thirty years of not looking

That deck had been at the back of our house since before my husband Ron passed. He built a good part of it himself in the late eighties, hardwood boards he was very proud of, and for a long time it was the heart of everything. Christmas lunches out there under the shade cloth. Ron reading the paper with his tea going cold. The kids learning to walk on those boards, then learning to ride bikes off the edge of them into the yard, then, somehow, bringing their own children back to do the same.

I think that is why I never really looked at it properly. When a place holds that much of your life, you stop seeing the thing itself. You see the memory laid over the top of it. I would sweep it and hose it and put the pot plants back and never once get down on my knees to check what the weather and the years had been quietly doing underneath.

The Blue Mountains are hard on timber. People who have not lived up here do not always believe me, but we get the lot. Heavy frosts that split things open, then long wet stretches where the fog sits in the yard till lunchtime and nothing ever fully dries, then a summer that bakes it all. Thirty years of that will find every weakness. The boards that gave way were the ones tucked into the shady southern corner, the part that never saw enough sun to dry out, and when the builder finally pulled them all up he showed me joists gone soft as cake. He pressed his thumb into one and it just sank in. I felt oddly ashamed, the way you do when a doctor tells you something you should have caught yourself.

Asking the family

For a few weeks I did nothing but put a plank and two witches hats over the hole, which is exactly the sort of temporary fix that becomes permanent if you let it. But the back of the house is not a part I could just abandon. That is where we live, really. The front room is for best and hardly gets used. The back, with its view down to the gums and the neighbour's chooks, is where the family gathers.

So one Sunday over lunch I asked them all what I should do. I half expected everyone to have an opinion and no one to agree, which is usually how my family works. My son-in-law, who is practical and does not say much, surprised me by having thought about it already. He said if I was going to spend the money I should think hard about not putting timber back down, because I would only be signing myself up for the same sanding and oiling and worrying in another twenty years, and I would be well into my eighties by then. He had been reading about composite decking and how it holds up in exactly the damp shady conditions that had rotted my old boards.

I will be honest, I bristled a little at first. It felt like giving up on Ron's timber, on the thing his hands had made. Kate saw my face and said something that has stuck with me. She said the deck was never really the point. The point was everyone being out the back together, and Dad would have wanted that to keep going long after the boards he chose had worn out. That settled something in me.

Getting it done

I am not going to pretend I understood all of it. I am a retired teacher, not a tradesperson, and half of what the fellows told me went straight past. But I made myself learn a bit rather than just nodding along, the same way I used to tell my students that a question asked is never a silly one.

I found out that the composite decking Sydney tradespeople work with is a mix of recycled timber fibres and plastic, pressed into boards that look a good deal like wood but do not soak up water and swell the way hardwood does. That mattered to me, the recycled part. Ron hated waste. He kept jars of screws sorted by size in the shed for forty years. I think he would have approved of boards made partly from things that would otherwise have gone to the tip.

The men who did the work were local, one of them a former student of mine, though he was too polite to remind me and I was too proud to admit I could not place his face for the first hour. They took up all the old timber first. I kept three of the better boards. I could not help it. They are in the shed now and I have not decided what to do with them, but I was not ready to see all of it go in the skip. Then they sorted out the frame underneath, which was more work than the boards themselves, and only then did the new surface go down. Watching them click the composite decking boards into place over two days, I kept thinking how strange it was that the fix looked so tidy and ordinary, when the thing that led to it had been so frightening.

The first lunch back

We had everyone up again at Easter, the first proper gathering on the new deck. I set the long table out the back the way I always have, with the mismatched chairs and the good cloth that has a stain from a Christmas trifle in 2011 that will never come out. Mila, who is five now and very grave about the whole affair, walked out and stamped her little foot on the boards a few times, testing them, and then announced to the whole family that this one would not break. Everybody laughed. I had to go inside for a minute.

The truth is I do not think about the decking much day to day, which the tradesman told me is rather the point of it. I sit out there in the mornings with my tea, which does go cold, some habits are inherited, and I watch the fog lift off the yard. The boards do not need me to oil them or fuss over them, and that has freed something up. I spend the time I would have spent maintaining timber just sitting instead, watching the gums, waiting for the grandchildren to come thundering out the back door the way their parents did, and their grandfather before that. The house has a good back to it again. That is all I ever really wanted.