So we all kept an eye on Helen. Well, Niki did. Sympathy, or indeed empathy, is not something that courses freely through the veins of either Janette or Frances. They are more Yorkshire than pudding, and their suffering of fools and vomitus is limited to say the least. But what neither of them could fault Helen on was her absolute determination to keep on going during those first 72 hours. She was not so much ‘eat, sleep, row, repeat’; more ‘puke, sleep, puke, row, puke, repeat’. It was impressive. Her eyes were glazed, her conversation was non-existent, but still she managed to row. The waves crashed against the side of the boat and Helen stood firm. ‘Just a few more days,’ we all kept on thinking; just a few more days and we hoped Helen would be able to crack a smile and keep down the all-in-one breakfast-in-a-bag.
But it was about 2 a.m. in the morning on the third day when disaster struck. The boat was lurching from side to side in the huge waves, the few lights we had on board were flickering and it was Helen’s turn up on the oars.
‘Five minutes!’ yelled Niki, knocking on the door to the sealed cabin.
‘What do you think?’ asked Janette through the darkness, sliding back and forth on her seat. ‘Do you think Helen is any better?’
‘A bit,’ said Niki, holding onto the boat while trying to slip out of her wet-weather gear. ‘She is being very brave. Stick to the Ultra Fuel and I’m sure she’ll pull through, eventually.’
Just then a huge wave hit the side of the boat, sending Niki flying. With one leg still in her trousers, she didn’t stand a chance as she was hurled against a metal peg that sank hard into the base of her spine.
‘Oh my GOD!’ she screamed in the darkness. ‘Oh my GO-O-OD!’
‘Are you okay?’ Janette leapt off the oars.
Niki was writhing around in the water at the bottom of the boat, screaming and clutching the base of her spine. Both Frances and Helen appeared, from either end of the boat.
‘No! NO! I am not!’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Yes! My bum, my bum –’
Niki was shaking and stammering with cold and pain.
‘Have you broken anything? Cut anything? Is there blood?’ asked Janette, scrabbling about in the darkness.
‘No. I don’t know… my back, my coccyx, my pelvis. It’s agony… Aaaah – this is worse than childbirth! Worse… than… bloody… childbirth!’
‘Here,’ shouted Frances, staggering towards her. ‘Here’s the medical bag.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Janette, leaning over and grabbing the bag. ‘On a scale of one to ten. One to ten, remember. What is your pain?’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ spat Niki. ‘Once a nurse, always a bloody nurse.’ Janette was indeed once a nurse.
‘It’s a ten! Of course it’s a ten!’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Janette, fumbling through the bag in the darkness. ‘How about… paracetamol? No. Tramadol? Or…’ She strained to read the label in the dark. ‘Diclofenac?’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a painkiller and an anti-inflammatory.’
‘What will it do?’ gasped Niki.
‘Make you go… um, diclofuckit?’ suggested Janette.
‘I’ll have two diclofuckits,’ said Niki desperately.
‘Two,’ nodded Janette in agreement.
‘And I don’t know what you’re looking at,’ said Niki, lying flat at the bottom of the boat, staring up at Frances as yet another wave crashed overhead. ‘It’s all your fault we’re here!’
‘Yeah!’ agreed Helen, speaking for the first time in 24 hours. ‘This is the last time I listen to any of your bright ideas.’
SHIP’S LOG:
‘We were holding on, yet at the same time we were letting go. The first 24 hours of our row were about letting go – letting go of life enough so that we could venture into the unknown. Each of us had to eventually stop looking at the outline of the land and turn instead towards the vast open ocean. That first stroke of the oars away from the shore was our first step into an unknown world. It takes courage to let go of what you are familiar with. Once the step has been taken, there is no knowing how the ride will go – and that’s the fun part.’
(JANETTE/SKIPPER)
CHAPTER 3
The Beginning
‘A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.’
YOKO ONO
3 May 2013, Leeds
It was just past seven in the morning as Frances Davies, a 45-year-old lawyer from York, was driving down Whitehall Road, Leeds, listening to Stan Graham, a favourite folk singer of hers.
She’d been up since 5.30 a.m., as she had been every working day for the past 20 years. As a busy mother of two, it was the only time when she could have a moment to herself. The house was quiet and her husband, Mark, and their two children, Jay and Jack, would be asleep, so she would potter around their Victorian terraced house in the centre of York, listening to motivational TED talks on her computer, soaking up the words and ideas of Diana Nyad, who, at 60, was the only person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. Either that, or Frances would sneak in an extra chapter of a book, with her yoghurt and fruit, reading about ex-headmistress Anne Mustoe’s account of cycling around the world at the age of 50. And then she’d kiss everyone goodbye while they were still asleep in their beds, get into the car and drive the 25-mile journey to the office and the job she’d had for the past 13 years.
Sitting at the traffic lights that morning, dressed in her grey suit and white shirt, with her chin on the steering wheel, she watched the same old man walk the same elderly dog across the same road at the same time as he did every day. She looked up the road towards her looming office building and across at all the other commuters sitting in their cars. She thought of Patrick Swayze from one of her favourite films – Point Break – and those ‘dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins’.
There were only a few lights on in the office – she’d be one of the first in, again, and one of the last to leave. She’d miss school drop-off and pick-up as usual. She’d probably have to stop for a drink with a client at the end of the day and wouldn’t be home until well past nine that evening.
‘Who knows what’s around the bend? A brand-new start or the bitter end?’ sang Stan Graham in Easy Street.
Frances glanced at the radio, her palms feeling clammy, her heart beating harder in her chest. A brand-new start? Or the bitter end? The bitter end. ‘Will this be my entire adult working life?’ she thought to herself. Wearing the same old groove? Going on the same journey 25 miles in and 25 miles out of Leeds? Every. Single. Day?
‘That’s it,’ she said to herself, pushing herself back in her seat. ‘I am asking them again. They can only say no.’ She put the car into gear. Her mother had died at the age of 58 from breast cancer. Frances was 28 years old at the time and her mother’s passing left a huge hole in her life. Her mother had lost her battle with cancer when she was little older than Frances is now. She had not lived long enough to meet Mark or her grandchildren – a loss that Frances had always felt very keenly.
‘We are only here once,’ she reasoned. ‘We should make the most of our short time here. I’m fed up with going to things and hearing how “busy” everyone is. I don’t care who is “busy” or who is not “busy”. What is admirable about being busy? I don’t care about any of that. I want to get out and do something else.’
One of the things about the death of her mother that had always inspired Frances was how she never gave up – she always carried on fighting. For years she battled cancer with a serenity that was humbling. Her courage against all the odds was overwhelming.
So, after refuelling with a weak, tepid coffee from the office kitchen, she sat down at her desk and wrote this email:
From: Frances Davies
Sent: 03 May 2013 08:19
To: Janette Benaddi; Niki Doeg; Helen Butters; Caroline Lennox
Subject: Atlantic Campaigns | Atlantic Rowing | TALISKER
Whisky Atlantic Challenge | Atlantic Rowing Race – Helen – don’t delete!
http://www.atlanticcampaigns.com/
Morning,
Do you remember my suggestion at the boat club dinner? I thought I would forward this to all of you. I do see that it sounds very silly, but I think we could do this race. Other people have done it and we must be just as good as they are.
I think it’s possible to enter as 1, 2, 4, 5 or 6, so any combination of us could enter. It’s quite pricey and, of course, would mean taking a couple of months out of our regular lives! We would need sponsorship. Mark obviously thinks I’m ridiculous, but I have sold it to the boys on the basis that they get to go to Antigua to meet us at the finish!
It would be amazing and probably life-changing, and we definitely won’t want to go back to work afterwards – we could maybe sign up for it if we get very drunk in France in September.
Anyway, have a think about it.
For those racing this weekend – good luck.
Have a great weekend
F xx
She pressed send, sighed and waited. Shuffling through the papers she needed for her first meeting that morning, she kept her eye on the screen.
It took Janette precisely 13 minutes to reply:
From: Janette Benaddi
Sent: 03 May 2013 08:32
To: Frances Davies; Niki Doeg; Helen Butters; Caroline Lennox
Subject: RE: Atlantic Campaigns | Atlantic Rowing | TALISKER Whisky Atlantic Challenge | Atlantic Rowing Race – Helen – don’t delete!
Life’s for living, so let’s really live. I am definitely up for it.
J
Janette Benaddi
That was so very typical of Janette. An impetuous force of nature, she is a self-made businesswoman who has been running her own clinical trials company for the past 20 years. Married to Ben, a French-Moroccan, whom she met dancing in her sister’s sitting room, she has never knowingly taken a duvet day in her life. Even after the birth of her first child, James, she didn’t take any time off. Not even a day! It wasn’t meant to happen that way, but she’d been booked to give a talk in London. She had originally thought she’d be fine. She’d have her baby; he would be two weeks old and she’d leave him with Ben for the day while she popped down to London to talk at the conference and popped back up to York again. But James was a first baby and first babies are often late. He was two weeks late. Janette had no choice, not unless she didn’t want to be paid, and anyway, she didn’t want to let them down. So she gave birth at 8 a.m. on the Tuesday after a long 36-hour labour with gas, air and ventouse. Come 8 a.m. on the Wednesday, she was on the train to London, leaving Ben in charge of their newborn son. During a break at the conference, there were a few doctors milling around, drinking tea and eating biscuits, and one of them approached Janette.
‘Do you have any children?’ she asked, smiling politely and nibbling the corner of a custard cream.
‘Oh yes!’ replied Janette, beaming with new-mother pride. ‘A son.’
‘How lovely,’ replied the doctor. ‘How old is he?’
‘Oh,’ replied Janette, her brain whirring, not wanting to lie that much. ‘Um… two weeks?’ she ventured.
‘Two weeks!’ The doctor was horrified; the crumbs went flying. ‘What are you doing here? Are you mad! You should be at home!’
Little did she know that, back in Selby, Ben was busy explaining Janette’s absence to an equally appalled midwife, who turned up to weigh the baby and was completely astonished to find no sign of the mother.
But Janette has never been one to conform. She left school at 16 with two O levels and eventually became a trained nurse, after putting herself through night school while working in a doctor’s surgery. As a nurse she became frustrated, as there was never enough time to do the job properly, never enough time to speak to the patients or give them the care they needed. Gradually, she found herself moving into the world of medical technology, travelling the length and breadth of the country, selling dressings and syringes to doctors, hospitals and surgeries.
The second of four girls, her childhood was peripatetic, and financially it was either feast or famine. Her father was also no stranger to graft, and had at any one time an HGV business, a bingo hall, a coach business and a tyre business. ‘Some Christmases there were loads of presents and sometimes there was very little.’ So when Janette got the chance she worked, and she worked hard. She took the plunge and set up a clinical trial business, although it wasn’t exactly good timing as her husband Ben had just started university. ‘We were really strapped for cash. Every month was absolutely tight – we’d go to the wire, scrabbling around for change, because neither of us was really making anything. It was very hard for us for the first couple of years until the business got going. We didn’t have any holidays – a lot of people don’t, I know, but we didn’t for years. We had an old blue Nissan car and Ben used to make a lot of meals that were full of potatoes so we wouldn’t feel hungry.’
But Janette was very focused. ‘I was once one of those kids who had free school meals. It was so obvious, the kids who were on free meals. We had different-coloured tickets from the rest of them and it was like a taboo was attached to you. It was like being put into a box, and I was desperate to break out of that box. Why should I be put into a box in the first place?’
So then, together, she and Ben bought some old offices in Selby, which they stripped of paint every night until two in the morning, with one heater on and James asleep in a carry-cot. They mortgaged themselves to the hilt and worked all hours while Ben also put himself through university. The idea was to do up the building, rent out parts of it and start a business.
‘I always thought, “What’s the worst that can happen? We lose our house? So what – we have lots of family and friends who would take us in.”’
One night the stripping and the painting got a little boring, and nine months later Safiya was born. More mouths to feed, more work to be done. Fortunately, the business was beginning to grow, Ben graduated from university with a first-class honours degree and they took on their first employee: Janette’s mum! Eventually Janette’s clinical trial business broke through and then her life changed and became a lot more comfortable; she and Ben were able to send their children to private school.
Haunted by the memory of having to conceal a romance for two years – even having to hide in the back of a car – because her boyfriend’s posh parents didn’t want him consorting with the likes of her, Janette wanted something different for her own children.
‘Obviously his mother didn’t want a Catholic girl like me to be involved with her son,’ she remembers. ‘Little things that happen in your life like that can either go one way or the other. They either knock you down so low that you never get up again, or they make you more determined.’
And it was at the children’s school, St Peter’s in York, established in ad 627, that we all met. Not in the car park, as you might expect, as half of us aren’t around to do the school run, but at the Guy Fawkes’ Boat Club (so named because one of St Peter’s illustrious alumni was Mr Fawkes himself) one drizzly Saturday in September 2012.
Our children were all attending school on Saturdays, so we each had the mornings free. We could either lie in bed with a cup of tea and a newspaper, sit googling nice things to wear or put on a pair of wellies, a woolly hat and some Lycra shorts and learn to row. All four of us chose the latter.
Quite why we each of us decided to spend those spare mornings freezing on a muddy riverbank instead of eating a muffin in a coffee shop in town is a question in itself.
For Janette the answer was simple. Baby James was now grown up and had descended into his non-communicative teenage years. He was in a rowing team at school, so Janette concluded that if she also learnt to row, they’d have something to talk about, and she might lose some weight in the process.
For Frances it was a question of a sudden gap opening up in her schedule (her youngest, Jack, had just started g
oing to school on Saturdays), which urgently needed to be filled. She is not someone who can sit still. Even during the ad breaks while watching television she has a burning desire to do something. So the idea that she would have nothing to do on a Saturday morning, nothing at all, while both of her sons were now at school was enough motivation in itself. She’d done the 10-kilometre runs, the Coast to Coast races and already joined the BSAC (British Sub Aqua Club), diving Stoney Cove in Leicestershire and over the harbour wall at St Abbs on the east coast of Scotland, so signing up to the Guy Fawkes’ Boat Club would be no giant leap at all.
And she and Niki Doeg knew each other from book club. Their sons, Corby and Jack, have been friends since they were in nursery together – so why wouldn’t Niki also want to fill a small window on a Saturday morning? In between running her finance business with her husband, Gareth. And training to be a rugby coach. While looking after two small boys. Her plate was simply not full enough already! So leaving Aiden (her youngest) behind with Gareth, Niki turned up at the boathouse at 8.20 a.m. (just after drop-off) on that first Saturday morning at the start of a new school year.
Four Mums in a Boat Page 4