Despite living on an island, David Warr avoided the water for five decades – until a swimming teacher made the link between his fear and a childhood trauma
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hen 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.’”
