For years, when on holiday in Ayia Napa, Charlie Dark would “look cool around the pool with my sunglasses on and get in the shallow end but that’s as far as my skills went”. But now the 44-year-old DJ and creative writing teacher is learning to swim for the first time so he can enjoy swimming with his two children.
Dark is far from unusual: according to the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA), one in five adults in England are unable to swim – more than nine million people – despite swimming also being the most popular participation sport in the country.
Like many, Dark’s memories of school swimming lessons are not fond ones: the teachers “just stood on the side and shouted at you”, and so he grew up with a secret fear of the water.
Six weeks ago, however, he joined a challenge in which 15 non-swimming adults began training to do the Great North Swim – a mile in open water – in four months’ time.
His teacher, Harley Hicks, 24, says the group include several who “had bad experiences in water as kids and that’s turned them away, others who didn’t enjoy it and some whose parents didn’t think it was important”.
Hicks believes that swimming teaching has hugely improved. “I remember my lessons as a kid – the teacher standing on the side shouting, ‘kick, kick, do this, do that’. It was almost like an army training camp,” he says. Nowadays, lessons are “more inclusive and fun. We train swimming teachers to build a good rapport with people in the water, and use different types of floats and hoops.” Crucially, teachers now get in the water.
Another of Hicks’ class, Kai Wright, 18, says having a teacher alongside him has really helped. “If someone is next to me I can tread water and get away from the wall – I feel much more confident.”
According to the ASA, 2.3 million adults want to learn to swim, but some are happy enough without the skills.
Nigel Bramley, 68, says he regrets not learning to swim – lessons, he says, were too militaristic – but now the relative inconvenience of swimming as a sport compared with walking puts him off. “If I’m by a pool somewhere and it’s a hot day I think it would be nice to go in and have a swim, but the feeling is not strong enough to make me go out and learn,” he says.
Dark, a keen runner, now waxes lyrical about the joys of almost weightlessly sliding through the water. “My fear of water is gone. I see it as a very good metaphor for life – when you learn to relax in the water and stop fighting the water, it’s like life. When you learn to go with the flow and trust it’s going to take care of you, suddenly you’re floating.”
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