The Pulsating Epic Of A swimming Pool.
by
Bernard King
Copyright 2011 Bernard King
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Author notes.
This is a true story of the construction of my swimming pool. Except for most of it, where I lie and exaggerate.
Although the book was written in France any mentions of President Sarkosy have been cut, only David Cameron remains, for dramatic effect.
All names in this story have been changed to protect the guilty, which means everyone.
My thanks to the French National Health Service for the anti-depressants, sleeping pills and crutches used throughout this narrative.
I should also like to thank my neighbours for putting up with all the noise and upsets. But I can’t, the bastards never stopped whinging and now do not speak to me.
I cannot bring myself to give a capital in the title to an activity I detest. It helps me to ignore it.
The Pulsating Epic Of A swimming Pool.
Chapter 1
I did not want a swimming pool. My wife Jane did not want a swimming pool, and Carrot, our dog did not want a swimming pool.
But my step daughter and her husband, my step son and his wife, and their five children wanted one, and our three year old granddaughter told me her teddy wanted one as well.
And last summer, our first in the Luberon, had been rather warm.
No, it had been hot.
No, it had been bloody hot.
Forty two degrees is bloody hot. Movements must be slow as the air seems to burn any naked skin. The birds have stopped flying, when the dog pees on the lawn, steam rises, and you could fry an egg on the paving of the terrace, and sausages and tomatoes – which, when unnoticed, people tend to skid on.
But I still did not want a swimming pool.
I had heard stories.
Horrible stories.
Of wild hogs, unable to get out, threshing for hours before they drowned. Of children with iron spikes puncturing the pool liner and clapping as the water gurgled out.
Of entire pools moving, and slowly going next door.
Jane said she would never understand the relationship between ph and C1 and the formula for temperature times two equals hours. Also, as blue pools had been banned in the Vaucluse she could not possibly contemplate a black or green liner.
And pools must be kept sparkling water wise, and clean everywhere else wise. Anything that has to be kept sparkling, demands work. With nets and brushes, power washers, and underwater Hoovers. Hands have to be attached to these implements for them to work, and I had a pretty good idea that those hands would be attached to me.
There is also winter to consider, did we want an iceberg in the garden? Did Jane want to hear the screams and groans as it moved in the night and then hear my screams and groans as pipes burst and valves shattered?
No, a swimming pool was hole in the garden from hell, and to be avoided.
My stepson brought me the first estimate. The salesperson had visited when he knew Jane and I would be out.
I laughed when I saw the price, Jane laughed when she saw the price, in fact we giggled right up to bedtime.
The second estimate arrived the next day in the post, our daughter knew her brother always went for the most expensive.
“I simply cannot afford to buy anything cheap.” It was his excuse when his wife went mad after he had overspent.
The second estimate was cheaper but did not include the pool surround.
“Or the diving board,” smirked our son.
“Or the parasols,” added our daughter.
“Or the basketball net,” nodded our son in law.
“Or the sun beds,” our daughter in law always thinks of everything.
“Or the big plastic shark I saw on telly.”
“Or the underwater disco lights.”
“Or the reverse current and air massager,” added three of the grandchildren, the remaining two were killing each other in the woods behind the house.
“We could of course have drinks in the evening around the pool.”
The hair shot up on the back of my neck!
I gaped at Jane in disbelief.
That was a ‘for’ the pool statement! And the way she was looking at me, steadily and pointedly, above the ridge of marmalade on her slice of toast, told me her normally iron resolve was cracking.
She had been brainwashed. There is only one person who can brainwash my wife. Our Goddaughter and her bloody ‘Made in China’ Teddy.
But I cannot criticise, I have been known to melt before the big, blue, pleading eyes.
I tried to talk myself into the project.
I could swim a hundred lengths a day and have a heart attack.
I could have a nap beside the water after lunch and get sunstroke.
I could fall in when I was pissed and drown.
I could pay more rates when the commune discovered my concrete lake.
The water might turn and we all catch typhoid.
However there were also advantages.
There would be a ready water supply when my house was burning down.
When the village’s water taps ran dry in the summer we could drink it.
It would attract the hoards of wasps from our kitchen.
It was somewhere to wash the clothes when the machine broke down.
But the weight of disadvantages sank the hopes of the wasps and firemen, Jane, now out of sight of the Goddaughter, recaptured her will of iron and the project vanished into the waste bin of life, alongside my ambitions to be a guitar God and a torturer in chief of imprisoned politicians.
The lunch was at 13.00 hrs on the 13th day of the month and there were thirteen of us. How bloody foreboding is that?
One of the ‘us’ was Jeremy, and he was rolling in dosh, no, he could not roll in it. He had so much it was up to his neck so he could not move, that was why his head was tilted in such a superior manner. Otherwise he was a charming man who suffered from the character defect of all estate agents – he was one.
He had arrived in a helicopter, which rather devalued my story about receiving a smile from David Cameron two years ago somewhat.
“I’d say about a million and half,” his scan around my kingdom was of an expert. I did a knee jerk with my head, suddenly I turned into a cash register and was visibly whirring.
“Possibly two million if there was a pool.”
Jane, standing beside us was on the point of feinting, and it took a good grip of her bottom to reduce her sway.
In my world money does not talk, it shouts its bleedin’ head off.
Our house had tripled in value in a year and would triple again if we had a swimming pool.
“Would you buy it?” I had asked a loaded question, it was loaded with the same saliva that was dripping from the corners of my mouth.
“Like as shot, but,” and here his finger wagged. “Not without a pool.”
OK, so Jeremy was a hotshot property man from the cauldron of money in the centre of London, but, and this was my thinking, if there was one foreigner that did not flinch at six figures, there must be more.
“A pool would be an excellent investment!”
That was the statement, plus the eager nod from Jane, that brought the family thinking as one again.
We would be having a swimming pool.
Chapter Two
“They’ll wreck your garden,” Roland took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed. The sticky end of the pipe, still smoking and dripping with saliva was waved across my landscaped and cosseted kingdom.
“Why should they do that?” My question was wrapped with respect. Roland had lived in the South of France for fifteen years and already had a swimming pool.
“Builders wreck everything.” Roland’s pipe was returned to his mouth and with a disgusting suck and a gurgle; he continued his walk with his stupid looking poodle, puffing a trail of pollution that made me hold my breath until I reached the kitchen.
“You’ve been talking to Roland.” Jane sniffed and moved the runner beans she was peeling away and turned her back. “I can smell it from here.”
I shouldn’t talk to Roland. He is my negative neighbour, a counterfeit person, offering a jolly, contented, relaxed and laid back persona to the unwary.
In fact Roland is a procurer. He is constantly on the lookout for recruits to join his club. But the sad thing for the recruits is, most don’t realise they have joined his organisation.
I have seen it happen, Bertrand, the owner of the only hotel in the village is a member, Janine, who looks after the church is now an addict, and the Guarde Champetre, the gardener of the village, is also totally hooked.
Roland’s assertion that the pine forest at the back of our houses would disappear overnight gave me the clue to his intent. The trees had been fought over by the residents who lived on the outskirts of the forest, and the Chatelan.
The Chatelan is the owner of not only the Chateau, but just about everything around the village.
The court decided the Chatlan could not build the housing estate he wanted on the land and since, for the last twenty years, he has seethed with fury and, with his lawyers, has tried break the courts decision.
“A couple of bulldozers, couple of hours, and it will be gone!” The end of Roland’s pipe panned across the stately Pine trees that stood listening to him predict their fate the day I clued up to my neighbour.
Roland was brainwashing me. He was trying to ensnare me into his Waiting For The Coffin Club.
The first talent required for entry is depression, genius level. The ability to see black dripping from everything. To take all your cheerfulness and lock it away forever. To religiously destroy pleasure by joining a religion, to flatly allow hope to pull any of your strings.
Roland was a master at depression. He could kill a smile at fifty paces, long before he could see the white of your eyes.
Inviting him to a party was like inviting the disc jockey of doom. You always knew which room he was in by the silence, the awful cloying silence as partygoers digested the latest helping of gloom Roland had just served them.
He had spent the first five years of retirement nearly killing himself in the garden, nearly killing himself re-decorating his house, and nearly killing himself with his new found hobby, cycling.
A doctor, a wife, and a shelf heavy with pills cured the heart attacks and so a now near immobile Roland had chosen his next project. Galloping depression.
Jane stopped her runner beans hopes of ever running again by chopping them into little pieces.
“There is,” she said in her tone of early triumph. “A problem with the pool!”
There!
I knew it. It was causing trouble before it was even built. She took my hand and pointed, through the window at the scene of consternation.
We had decided to install the pool at the end of the front garden, beside the hedge by the lane.
That twenty word sentence, is easy reading, which conceals the hours of babble, the long pauses of deliberation, the exchanged stares of doubt, the arm folding obstinacy, and the foot stamping fury of it s creation.
We could not put the pool at the back of the house, because the backs of houses in the Luberon do not have windows. The backs of the houses are double insulated. All the screws at the back of the houses are screwed up tight. Nothing that can move is allowed to stand near the back of the house. Even the wall of logs for the fire is tied down.
Because of Mr Mistral.
Mr Mistral is a wind. A wind of some fame. Shopping centres, aircraft, sailing boats, cars, and a million other products have been christened after it.
The name conjures up speed, sleekness, strength, and power.
It shrieks up men’s trousers legs and rattle things that hurt. It shrieks up women’s trousers legs and makes things that purse, purse even tighter. It blows babies in their push chairs away, it burns delicate flowers to death, it brings you the dustbins from next door. It drops the thermometer by fifteen degrees, if you can find it.
It is a wind that is dreaded, sometimes blowing for three weeks, but it is a necessary evil. Without the mistral, our sky would not be permanently blue, clouds would roll down from the North and gives us the grey half light of the UK.
Jane turned up the gas under beans and presented the problem she had discovered about our unborn pool.
“Imagine you wanted a dawn swim,” The lid snapped down on the saucepan. “There would be a tree in the way.”
After thirty odd years of marriage her observation was a surprise. Jane knew I hated swimming, knew I had never seen the dawn, and from where I was standing, the path to the pool site was unhindered.
With the sigh of a wife of a wife who knows her husband inside out, she led me to the spot where the pool would reside, burying the green grass we had spent a fortune nourishing the past year.
“You have no imagination!” she snapped as I shook my head, for me, there was not a problem in sight.
A giant pine tree to the east was apparently the villain.
“It might fall on you when you are swimming?” I ventured. Notice I said ‘you’ are swimming. My body was built for warm showers at eight o’clock, not brain paralysing shocks at five in the morning.
“Think,” she ordered, and then gave me a clue. “Where is the sun?”
‘In the sky’, would have brought her special sneer, so I shook my head and waited.
“In the East!” Again, my glimmer of understanding was not glimmering.
“Behind the tree!” She pointed and stamped her foot and insisted I understood.
But I am not a pool owner, I do not think or act like one, so her insistence bounced of my ignorance.
“There’ll be no sun on the pool before ten!”
It was true, the long shadow was aligned along the length of the proposed site.
I solved her calamity instantly.
“So we’ll chop it down.”
“No we won’t, we’ll move the pool.”
No!
No!
Not again.
We had already moved the pool six times. I had lost at least twenty hours of my life pushing a little square of blue painted paper over a scale plan of our garden.
There was only one answer, we would have to have a swimming pool on wheels. My suggestion was answered by Jane’s eyes closing slowly with impatience and my presence dismissed in favour of her straining her beans.
So we watched the sun.
No.
We watched the shadows created by the shapes in our garden blocking the sun.
After day of study the answer became apparent. There was only one place our pool would be in sunshine all day. In the middle of the lane outside our house.
The old dear at the end of the lane would starve. She was much too frail to swim. Knowing our postman’s hate for using brakes, he would drive into it and Roland, and his stupid looking dog would drown when they went for a walk in the mist.
Compromise was necessary. Removing the large tarpaulin covering our winter’s wood and pretending it was a pool, we placed it between the shadows and slowly dragged it around the garden to follow the sun before arriving at a necessary decision.
God had given us a choice, No sun in early morning or no sun in late evening. For me the answer was obvious – I didn’t give shit.
Jane plumped for the early morning, arguing that in the late evening there would be far less warmth in the sun.
The pool would ripple by the hedge that separated the lane from the front garden, as far as possible from the house for three very good reasons. Swimming pools, when full of grandchildren are very noisy places. Swimming pools, when full of excited adults are very noisy places. Swimming pools, when full of grandchildren and excited adults make even the local spiders cover their ears.
And being a premiership pool hater, I was tempted to offered three more. Pools attract toads, their pump sounds like trawler thudding across the lawn, and they smell of chemicals. But the thought of the amount our investment would surge price our house, gagged me effectively.
With the pool site firmly fixed we made the first in a litany of mistakes that stretched back to England.
No, it was the second mistake. The first was even thinking of having a swimming pool.
We asked around for advice.
It cascaded in.
From the baker, from the barkeeper, from the chemist, from the delirious, the excited, the friendly, and the garage man.
You will have noticed the advisors are in alphabetical order. I have stopped at G. If I tell you we also had advice right down to our local Zulu you will realise I have saved us both a lot of time and effort.
At the end of a week we sat across the kitchen table and stared into each others eyes.
I felt like an encyclopaedia that had burst. Jane had the glazed look of too much knowledge. And the neat thing about all the information was – everything conflicted.
“Don’t buy a roller blind, it encourages Algae. You must have roller blind it protects from Algae.”
Don’t have a pool, have a basin, you won’t pay tax. Don’t have basin they always look dirty.
Don’t buy a pool Hoover, get a robot, they are much better. Don’t buy a robot, get a Hoover, they are much better.
The torture by knowledge went on for days, by email, by telephone. We could not walk down the road without advice being poured into our ears.
If we went away for a couple of weeks perhaps they will forget. We could move further up the mountain. We could wear earplugs, perhaps we should ask the mayor for protection. The solutions to arrest the mud slid of advice were becoming more desperate. We were becoming hermits, frightened to go out, pick up the telephone, or turn on our computer.
Our friends, Babette and Thomas, who lived further down the mountain, heard the news.
“It must be Michael.” Babette insisted. Michael had built their swimming pool. Michael was a master mason.
It was a state of the art installation and we were invited for a swim. Jane does not swim in public and I do not swim full stop. Neither in public, nor in private, not because I cannot, but because I do not like swimming. I do not like skiing, or ice skating, or playing rugby or cricket or football or tennis or chess. If Winston Churchill had been a bit younger we would have got on well together.
We could forget our bathing costumes.
That would be the excuse for not getting wet. We would admire their pool, drink their white wine and talk about the pool, but we would not go in it.
Also, there was a trace of mistral as we drove down to their property, the wind giving a further excuse for avoiding taking my socks off.
Babette and Thomas lived a kilometre off the road at the end a winding track that dithered through the small oak trees that pack the mountain side. Their electric gate glides aside to allow you to pass through the centre of their apricot orchard, a turn left at the end and you pass through the centre of their cherry orchard, a low wall and you enter their apple orchard, by now you can see the house, having passed rows of plum trees, it just leaves the pears to navigate and you arrive at the path to their front door, lined of course with lemon trees. It’s a bit like going through a Tesco’s fruit department without a roof.
The Luberon is recognised as the orchard of France, trees groan heavy with produce everywhere, so Babbette and Thomas cannot give the stuff away. But Babette is a resourceful woman. She spent the autumn turning her harvests into jam. But she was not resourceful enough, she couldn’t give that away either.
Raised granite blocks chiselled to a millimetre framed black water sparkling to infinity, a waterfall chuckled at the opposite end of the pool changing colour to soft music.
A wall of bamboo on the north side of the pool smothered the slight wind, killing part of our excuse for not swimming. To the south, nature was left untouched. The granite blocks tickled by Babette and Thomas’s vines strolling off into the distance. (They can’t give their grapes away either. But that is another story you might not escape.)
“It’s salt,” Thomas was caressing the surface of the water with the palm of his hand. “No chemicals here.”
“It is amazingly clear,” Jane looked down at her reflection, wishing her complexion was as amazingly clear as the water.
I was hauled off to below water level, to nod admiringly at the pretty red and yellow and blue pipes, valves, taps and dials in the concealed pool house.
Thomas spent half an hour telling me why I must on no account have a chlorine pool, rattling on about stabilisers, algae, acids, and white deposits.
His persuasion was effective. I vowed never to have a chlorine pool – but then changed my vows when I heard the price of the cost of salt. Whilst a salt pool was obviously superior in every way, I have always been taught that if something has been made to be adjusted, it will need adjusting, and adjusting things cost, and Thomas’s control panel was full of things to be adjusted.
But adjustments and costs and technicalities vanished as we emerged from the pool house.
Eyes!
Look up!
It was an order. Suddenly they were forbidden to look down. But forbidding my eyes to do something, my seventy years of experience tells me, is asking for trouble.
A terrible three way battle launches, between my brain, who is the boss, my eye muscles, who try to do as my brain commands, and my eyes, two rebellious little bastards.
Why the order? Why should my eyes rebel, you ask?
Fair questions.
When you leave Jane and Babette sipping wine on a recliner at the poolside, your eyes expect a repeat of scene when you return.
They do not accept Jane and Babette sipping wine on a recliner at the poolside with Babette soaking wet - and naked.
Thomas did not flinch, but then he had seen his wife naked – I suppose. Jane was looking bit flustered, and I was losing the battle with my eyes who were fighting my brain, and muscles. With a triumphant squint they looked down, straight at Babette’s whatsits.
I dragged them back to a level of politeness, but it was hell keeping them there, they kept twitching in the direction they were not supposed to look. I sat down with Jane between me and the whatsits, blinking my eyes back into their sockets.
“They have left their swimming things behind.” Babette leaned forward in time with my eyes trying to leave my body again.
“No problem, we don’t use them.” Thomas was unbuttoning his shirt. “Whose coming in?” Thomas was unzipping his shorts. “Twenty four degrees - perfect!” Thomas was dropping his underpants and kicking off his sandals.
True, he did turn before he was naked and his dive into his state of the art, show off how rich I am pool, was perfect. True Babette was a bouncing flash and a bare bottom as she followed him in and it was true they turned around together and looked up at expectantly.
Jane stood up and I watched with shock as she slowly took off a shoe. Surely my wife who hides behind the wardrobe door when even a fly enters the bedroom when she is naked, was not going to strip?
But her strip was only one shoe. Enough to expose her toes which she dipped into the pool. Babette and Thomas were swimming around in a circle like a couple of eager porpoises waiting for a new mate.
“What a shame!” The new mate groaned. “It is much too warm.”
Babette looked at Thomas, Thomas looked at Babette. They paid good money to heat their pool and now someone had critised it for being too warm!
Slowly they digested the insult when, as one, they turned and swam thoughtfully away from us, along their twenty metres of purified salt water towards the infinty end of the pool, Babette breast stroking with annoyance, and Thomas crawling with fury towards the setting sun. They did not look back, and neither did we, as we escaped, dodging furtively behind the hi tech shower, around the electronic drying and massaging air jets, over the sun cool paving towards our car and a quick getaway.
We now share nods when we meet in the village and sometimes a tight smile. I suppose you can’t really criticise a one hundred and twenty thousand Euro pool installation and expect the owners ever to talk to you again.
Chapter three.
A swimming pool is a hole in the ground that has been prettied up with tiles and paving stones and filled with water.
First you have to dig the hole and then you have to make it watertight before you fill it with water.
In the South of France they have been building swimming pools for at least two hundred years.
This sort of information is not going to set you on fire with amazement. It is also not closely guarded or classified, it is in the public domain and is not subject to copyright.
Therefore, should you have three estimates from three pool companies, it might be assumed they would be within a few hundred Euros of each other, or a thousand Euros of each other, not ten thousand Euros of each other.
Michael, the mason of Babette and Thomas fame sat in our kitchen swallowing Marseille milk (Pastis) almost a quick as Jane could serve it.
“Thick,” he said measuring a size between his vertical palms. “That thick.”
His estimate for the pool could only be described as hysterical. Producing gales of laughter that were not gales of laughter at all but releases of energy whipped up by incredulity.
A hundred and twenty thousand Euros was a lot of money.
“That does not include the terracing or the surround.” He added proudly. “But it will be that thick.” Again the hams he called hands measured the distance.
“I promise you it will never move or crack.”
I took a long stare at him, his estimate, and his hands. But today God had shut down the shop that sells him enlightenment. We live on solid rock, OK there’s a token amount of about thirty centimetres of soil for weeds to grow in but anything beneath is solid rock. The solid rock that our swimming pool was to be hewn out of. Anything that is chiselled out of such material cannot move or crack.
Michael was untouched by my arguments. “It still has to be that thick.” The hams slammed down on the table – end of discussion.
Michael and his thick swimming pool was moved to one side as we considered the second estimate – from Mr Wineglass.
I called him Mr Wineglass because he always seem to have one in front of him, filled with my wine.
“We dig half a metre,” the wine slopped dangerously close to spilling as his glass was waved excitedly. “Then ten concrete blocks to support the pool, fill the gaps with earth, job done.”
True, his estimate was two thirds less than Michael’s, but why did he not dig down further and build the pool in the hole? Save on concrete blocks and earth and the pool could not move in the rock?
First his palm went under his chin, his index and forefinger tickled his nose thoughtfully before the obvious answer tinkled from his lips.
“Because we do not do it that way.”
Mr Wineglass sat next to Michael in the pending folder as more local pool companies explained in detail how they were all going to do the same job differently for prices ranging to plus ten thousand Euros.
There was also a slight problem of opinions.
“Don’t use him, he never finishes anything.”
“He’s a very good mason, but is he is building six pools at the same time so it takes a couple of years before any of them are finished.
“His pools are always finished on time, problem is they are never straight.”
And so it went on, maddening confusion filled our days and horrific confusion filled our nights.
It seemed most pool suppliers in the district had been stricken by some form of business malaise. From finishing late, doing poor work, not finishing at all, not correcting faults, or running off with the woman of the house.
One story we heard was particularly horrifying. One of the workers had fallen in love with an au pair in the house and could not be got rid of. He left his wife and camped in the front garden until the pool house was finished and then moved in there.
The client had to sack the au pair before he could turn on his pumps and wave machines.
It seemed we were faced with two problems.
The correct construction of the pool and the correct construction of the labour to do it.
We had seven estimates from seven different experts, all building the same pool seven different ways. This made our table of confidence sag somewhat under the weight of doubt, we also had seven sets of workers who seemed to suffer from the same problem, total disregard for the client.
We dithered for a month, from the crack of dawn until our mouths fell open in the evening in preparation to snore the night away.
It seemed our plans to have a sparkling pool of happiness ready for next summer had completely dried up.
Until...
One day, a huge lorry overtook me on the motorway. A brightly coloured swimming pool painted on a flapping tarpaulin was waving the solution to our problems in my direction.
The lorry belonged to a national swimming pool company. It was our answer! We would use a National company to build our pool.
The advantages were obvious. There would be no messing about with locals. Any problems and there would be a head office to complain to. There would be little chance of the firm going bust half way through the work. There would be a contract with a finish date with fines for over runs.
We contacted three large companies, the first could not take on any more work for two years, the second did not come as far south as the Luberon, and from the third, the Silver Fox arrived with catalogues, flyers, testimonials and photographs of their last hundred installations.
The Silver Fox, was a sharp young man, so sharp I was surprised he had not cut himself to ribbons years ago. He wore a light grey suit, a silver neck chain, a silver bracelet, three silver rings, a silver earring, and yes, wait for it – a pair of silver shoes. Twice during his sales pitch I had to move my chair to escape the dazzle.
The second part of my nickname was inspired by his eyes, they were brown and darting as if he was always looking for chickens to eat.
He was an excellent salesman, as Jane and I are suckers for the hard sell we were putty in his hands.
Our stroll around the garden and chat in the dinning room confirmed that he knew his job, he had answers to our questions before we had asked them. The list of accessories he was selling us suddenly seemed less accessory and more essential. But even he realised he had gone too far when he started to wink at Jane whilst trying to sell her a gold plated pool thermometer.