It’s humiliating to admit that at 37, I can’t swim. I’ve spent most of my life embarrassed about not having a skill familiar to most children. It’s not as though I can blame never having had lessons. I did. Each week, with my nine-year-old classmates, I would trundle off to our local leisure centre in Oldham for compulsory classes.
I didn’t hate them, but I didn’t exactly enjoy them either. My limbs flailed and I disliked that stench of chlorine. Any skills I picked up by the end of the year atrophied. I found myself returning to the pool with increasing infrequence. My insecurities deepened, turning into an insurmountable, all-encompassing fear of the water.
At the beach, I would walk on the edge of the sea, allowing the water to lap at my ankles before I retreated to dry sand. On most holidays, I went with a friend who also had the same phobia. The pair of us would sit on the edge of the pool and merely dip our feet in. Over the years, I mustered enough courage to stand in the shallow end, with my arms resting on the edge just to be on the safe side.
I’m not alone, either. Roughly one in three adults in the UK can’t swim. When it comes to South Asian women (myself included), the stats are dismal: 76 per cent of us can’t swim 25 metres. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that Muslim women are conditioned not to show their skin. And, as ridiculous as the burkini is, I do at least credit it with allowing Muslim women to enjoy the pool like everyone else. On one holiday in Abu Dhabi, I saw quite a few burkini-clad Arab women and even young girls in the hotel pool. What is rather depressing, though, is that the men are quite comfortable wearing regular shorts, while their wives and daughters must cover up.
This year, I finally decided I would learn to swim. Or rather, my friend Carl decided for me, having taught himself when he was younger. ‘If I can teach myself, I’m sure I can get you to swim!’ he insisted. He promised – threatened – to have a go.
And so, during a trip to Berlin in May, Carl said it was time to confront my fears. As I watched children leaping about in our hotel pool, I wanted to die of shame. If theycan do it, then surely so can I. ‘The trick is just to float,’ Carl said. ‘Once you know how to float, it’s easy.’ OK, but how to get to that point?
First, he got me to put my head in the water. Eventually, I built up the confidence to submerge my head fully. Slowly, and with a lot of encouragement, my anxiety began to disappear. Within an hour, I became aware of the lightness of my body. ‘Being able to float without panicking is the key step,’ Carl said later. ‘After you’ve got that, the actual swimming is just a bit of technique.’
I then decided it was time to hone my skills, so I booked private lessons in Wembley. Ellis, my instructor, asked me to show her what I could do, before handing me a noodle, as she instructed me on the basics of kicking. Kick from the hips, not from the knees, she told me. She also got me to blow a stream of bubbles out of my nose and then later my mouth, which I hated. How do people get used to this, I wondered. Ditto getting water in the ears. But the main trick to swimming is to let go of the fear and trust that the water will do most of the work.
It’s a process, as they say. I can’t yet swim, but I am learning to trust that I will. That’s what I’m still missing. Trust not just in the water, but myself.
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