When David Warr was 11 he thought he was dying. At his school swimming lesson, he jumped in and swam – then realised with horror that his feet couldn’t feel the bottom. He recalls his teacher, standing on the side of the pool, shouting at him to “just swim” and his own immobilising fear. “I thought, ‘I can’t. I don’t know what to do.’ I started to panic hard. I thought, ‘She’s going to let me die.’”
Warr, 61, has blocked out how he reached safety, but for five decades he refused to go out of his depth again. He lives on the island of Jersey where water is a fact of life – but even when his sons were small, he would only wade a bit, and watch them swim with envy and pride. In contrast, he felt he was “battling the water”.
Warr runs a tea and coffee business and also works as a politician; he’s a deputy for the St Helier South district. He doesn’t go on holiday often, but last year he and his wife visited Norway and stayed in a hotel on a lake. The water was murky and dark. There were no shallows. Warr’s wife swam; he dipped in a toe. “I thought, ‘I’m not going in there. I don’t trust myself.’”
A few days later, they passed a long zip wire. Warr plays tennis and keeps fit, and “the sense of holding age at bay is strong” for him. “I have this thing in me, which is, if there’s an inadequacy, I want to overcome that.” Warr went on the zip wire, and when he and his wife returned to Jersey, he asked his boys’ old swimming teacher, Sally Minty-Gravett, for lessons. She had repeatedly swum the Channel, so she knew what she was doing.
They met at the bottom of a slipway. Warr put on goggles and a hat. “All the gear, and no idea.” In the first lesson, he practised floating. After a few sessions, he became more confident, but he still couldn’t go out of his depth.
When Minty-Gravett asked him to jump off the slipway into the deep, it was “the most fearful moment … Here I come – you can kill me now, kind of thing,” he says.
“Sally said: ‘David, why are you so worried about being out of your depth? You should maybe lie on a couch with someone and discuss it.’”
Warr grew up in Kilkenny, Ireland. But at 11, he moved with his father and brother to England. “Sadly, my mum passed away,” he says. The swimming pool incident happened soon afterwards, at his new school. Before long, he was moved to a boarding school – “basically, popped out of the way somewhere”.
The topic of his mother’s death never came up, until he caught chickenpox and “got chatting to the school nurse”. When he told her about his mother, “she was absolutely shocked”. But there was no grief counselling. “I internalised stuff, then explained it away to myself.”
“I feel this is something I’ve got to confront myself. I can’t explain the fear to anybody else,” he told Minty-Gravett. He jumped into the deep water. “And I bounced back up to the surface, kicked around for a bit, and thought, ‘What now?’” Minty-Gravett reminded him to float. That when he couldn’t swim, he could float. “And I then managed to creep along the side of the slipway.”
“Sally’s commentary was, ‘David, the sea is not trying to kill you. Let the water support you … It’s holding you, it’s embracing you.’ I’d never thought of that concept.”
Warr has learned that he doesn’t need to feel the ground beneath his feet to feel safe. “No matter how fearful you become, the loss of your mum at a young age – that’s the abyss. Nothing else is ever as traumatic.”
Warr has since swum out to a boat, accompanied by Minty-Gravett, and completed lengths of the local pool. While swimming, he has seen the sunrise and his island from a different perspective. He’s seen the small-boat fishers return with their catch, and the wild swimmers. “There are people who walk out of their houses and jump straight in the sea.” He has found “a new connection” with his home. The shoreline, he says, “is teeming with life”.
