Alice, an artist on the Isle of Wight, was hopeful that her son would be a confident swimmer by the summer. Her six-year-old had been making good progress in his lessons and was enjoying learning to swim underwater.
So it was a huge loss to learn in January that Gurnard Pines, the leisure centre where he took his lessons, had suddenly been closed down. “It was quite dramatic, we heard the locks had been changed and no one could get in,” says Alice, 40. “Everyone was really distressed. My son had been going for a year and prior to that his swimming had been nonexistent because of the pandemic.”
