The Big Dig: Trivia
The Story Behind the Story
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The idea for the story came from my own childhood. Like the boys in The Big Dig, my brothers and I lived at the local pool when we were kids. It was only a fifteen-minute bike ride, but that seemed far enough in the middle of summer when it was pushing 40 degrees. We were always pressuring our parents for a backyard pool and one day Dad finally snapped and said, “Yeah, you can have one if you dig it yourself.” That was more than enough for my older brother, who immediately took matters, and shovels, into his own hands. Things descended into “mud-pit” very quickly, though, and he only managed to salvage the hours of work he'd put in by turning it into a cunningly concealed booby trap for the rest of us. My brother's poorly thought out backyard pool was definitely the starting point for The Big Dig.
Adding a Dash of Fiction
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Although "just because" was a good enough reason for my brother to want a backyard pool, I decided that wasn't enough for the book. I needed a stronger motivation for Nathan and his mates to start digging, and I decided the sudden closure of their local pool would do the job. Although this never happened to us as kids, the pool we so loved was radically re-vamped many years later into the kind of whizzbang aquatic centre complex Nathan, Ronnie and Weasel encounter in The Big Dig, complete with warning signs of every description. When I first visited it as an adult, I remember thinking how even though it was all kinds of fantastic in some ways, it had lost much of the homegrown flavour of the old pool, and that was a shame. That memory definitely came into play in the story, too.
How Nathan, Ronnie and Weasel Were Almost Jack, Matty and Simon (Except Not Really)
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When I started the book, it wasn't a story about Nathan, Ronnie and Weasel. I had three boys again (it's very useful for my main character to have two sidekicks - one to egg him on and one to urge caution, kind of like the angel and the devil on the shoulder in those old cartoons), but I gave them different names. This was because I wasn't writing a series as such, but a standalone book, so I thought I should come up with new characters. It wasn't long, though, before I realised I was really writing the same boys, just with different names. The day that "Jack" called "Matty" "Science-Boy", I decided I'd better let my editor know what was happening and ask if it was okay to write another Nathan, Ronnie and Weasel adventure, since that's what I seemed to be doing anyway. Luckily, she said yes. I found the story much easier to write after that.
My Spooky Psychic Powers
- Most of this book was written in
two-hour bursts at Melville's Civic Square Library while my daughter
went to a PEAC course at a nearby school. What I didn't realise that
as I was chewing my pencil in the library, a drama very similar to
the one I had invented for my story was unfolding in the council
chambers just around the corner.
Shortly after I finished the manuscript, a series of articles appeared in the local paper - "Centre Closed!", "A Fifty Minute Drive for a Swim?", and "Sad Farewell to a Local Favourite". Melville Council had closed the pool at Leeming Recreation Centre and was "centralising" facilities at the whizzbang Melville Aquatic Fitness Centre, which locals described almost exactly as my boys describe BayView in the book, as "too far" and "too crowded", "packed with grandparents and swimming classes”!
It was a bit spooky seeing what I was writing starting to materialise so close to home. Now, I’m just waiting for a follow-up article – “Boys Welcome Locals to Backyard Pool” – to confirm my incredible psychic powers.
