There was one race at Shipley Glen in Bradford where Niki and Frances were put together as a pair, and another where they raced as a four with two other members of the Guy Fawkes’ Boat Club, Charles and Nigel. The second race was in York – the Head Race – and there were hundreds at the staggered start. The weather was kind when the four set off up to the head of the river, waiting for their allotted slot, but during the 45 minutes they had to wait, hanging onto a tree by the riverbank, the heavens opened. ‘Rain, hail, high winds, the lot, and we were sat there getting soaked in nothing but our Guy Fawkes onesies.’
And it wasn’t just the rowing that kept pulling us together. Helen and Frances had spent the whole of that summer jogging every Monday evening. They each had a child in the York Athletics squad and they would have to drive to an athletics track over the other side of York at 7 p.m., for an hour.
‘All the other mothers would sit and gossip with their flasks of coffee, but Helen used to bring the dog and we’d run around the trading estate. We’d do two circuits while the children were doing their athletics and then come home,’ explained Frances. ‘There’s an hour right there. We’re not going to sit about and watch our children when we could be doing something else. Not that there is anything wrong with watching your children; it’s a good thing. But we saw an hour that we could usefully use, and so we usefully used it. I like to be busy.’
Come January 2013, we were fast becoming extremely close friends. Our husbands, on the other hand, had barely met each other. And if we are a diverse band, then our husbands are even more so.
Back then Richard, Helen’s husband, was still a barrister, whereas Mark, Frances’s other half, had given up his career as a solicitor to become a stay-at-home father instead.
The truth of the matter was that Mark worked all hours of the day and Frances, who officially finished work at 2p.m., usually left work just in time to be about 15 minutes late to collect her children from school.
‘They would be swept into prep club because I was too late to pick them up and they would not be allowed out until five,’ said Frances. ‘I was always in trouble. Something had to give, and as I was earning more money than Mark, and Mark was seriously disillusioned with his job, it was decided that I would continue to work and he would stay at home. The results are a very well-walked Jackadoodle called Daisy, a much happier family and some well-seasoned pasta carbonara on the stove,’ she laughed.
‘Actually, Mark cooks everything from scratch every day. Even when it is my turn to host book club, he is the one who does the cooking. I don’t even pretend that it’s me any more. I used to be the one who did everything. I used to finish work at two, then I’d come home, get the children, do tea for them, do dinner for us separately and then I’d start work again. In the evenings I was either working or I had gone to bed. We weren’t seeing each other and it was a bit joyless. Often I would cook dinner and he wouldn’t be back to eat it. He’d still be out. He was a banking lawyer and the transactions happen late and the hours are ridiculous; he often wasn’t home until 11 p.m. We just weren’t seeing each other at all. And then he’d come home on Fridays after a few drinks and then be hungover on Saturday and then you’d think, “Well, that’s Saturday.” It just wasn’t working, so we did something about it. We changed it. I am a great believer in changing things that aren’t working.’
Janette’s husband, Ben, has a degree in IT and does consultancy work and property development, and has also taken on most of the childcare. ‘He cooks, he cleans, he irons, he does the whole bloody lot. He’s much better at it than I am.’
Gareth, on the other hand, runs a wealth management company with Niki. He was already a financial advisor, running his own business, when Niki took voluntary redundancy from her job at Orange, where she had been their UK and Indian broadband account manager, and put all her eggs into Gareth’s company. ‘We are 50-50 partners.’
So the St Peter’s Boat Club dinner in the Merchant Taylor’s Hall in January 2013 was something of a leap of faith. Would the husbands get on? Would they manage to be polite to each other? Would we even like each other’s husbands? Or would it be one of those buttock-clenching nights when no one says anything, we all drink too much cheap red wine for want of something better to do and the conversation hics and trips, stilted to the point of rigor mortis?
The first problem was that Niki was ill. She’d had pleurisy and, as an asthma sufferer, had been in and out of hospital all that week, and couldn’t make it.
So in the end our table of ten became an eight, with Caroline and her husband Mike, as well as Janette and Ben, Frances and Mark, and Richard and Helen all sitting down at the back of the oak-panelled room. With its high-beamed ceilings and glittering chandeliers, the Merchant Taylor’s Hall was a glamorous venue for a black-tie dinner in aid of a school boat club. Somewhat confusingly, we’d presumed the dinner was in aid of the Guy Fawkes’ club, which was for past pupils as well as parents and friends of the school, when in fact it was in aid of the rowing achievements by the pupils of St Peter’s School, so we were rather surprised when we were put at the back of the hall, away from a gang of well-scrubbed-up school students in their party frocks. Of the hundred or so people at the dinner, our rowing club only had about three tables, very much placed towards the back.
Before dinner, the captain of the school boat club stood up and gave a speech, giving an annual review of races won and lost, and of various sporting achievements accrued by members of the school rowing squad.
‘I can’t believe how confident they all are,’ said Frances. ‘It’s a delight to watch.’ The dinner continued, the champagne flowed and weirdly everyone seemed to get on.
‘I normally hate all of Helen’s friends,’ announced Richard, as he poured out some more champagne. ‘But I like you lot.’
‘It’s true,’ confirmed Helen. ‘He does hate MOST of my friends.’
Frances was equally honest. ‘I don’t think we’d have naturally been friends when we were children,’ she said to Janette. ‘We were so very different. At school we’d have been in different sets. I was a swot – I worked really hard at school.’
‘And I didn’t,’ replied Janette.
‘My mother used to have to lock me out of the house to stop me from revising for my exams.’
‘And my mother could never get me to come home!’
‘But as adults we’ve really hit it off,’ laughed Frances. ‘As you get older, I think, who cares about where you’ve been, what your background is, what job you’ve got, any of that? I don’t. It’s all about your sense of humour and… you make me laugh.’
We drank a few more glasses of wine and the evening became even more convivial. Eventually, by the time they started calling the raffle numbers it was a little difficult to focus. Fortunately, Ben was more on the ball than the rest of us and every time the winning tickets were announced he was the one who could tell us.
‘Frances, I think that’s your ticket.’
‘Janette, that’s yours.’
In the end, we rather embarrassingly seemed to win everything, right down to the case of wine that Janette had brought along herself as a prize. It was just one of those nights where the stars seemed to align in our favour and the tickets to The Great Gatsby ballet kept wending their way to our table. We were all getting on, we were drinking lots of wine and our barriers were down. We were all having a very nice time. So perhaps it was no surprise that Frances suddenly made a suggestion.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ she began. ‘Why don’t we do something together, a challenge? Why don’t we row the Atlantic?’
‘That’s a little further than Poppleton,’ replied Caroline.
‘No, I’m serious!’ continued Frances. ‘I’ve been reading about this race, it goes from the Canary Islands to Antigua.’
‘I like Antigua,’ said Helen.
‘Rowing?’ asked Janette.
‘Yes,’ nodded Frances.
‘Let’s do it,’ said Janette. ‘Even tho
ugh we can barely get to the pub and back.’
‘I don’t see why we can’t do it,’ said Frances. ‘I’ve read about the race. It’s called the Talisker Atlantic Challenge. It doesn’t look that hard, honestly. It’s only rowing. Why don’t we? Why don’t we just do it and change things a bit? I’m up for the challenge!’
‘You know me, I’m always up for a challenge,’ said Janette.
‘So am I,’ added Helen.
‘Me too,’ said Caroline.
‘It’s been a dream of mine to do this since I read Debra Veal’s book,’ said Frances with glee, raising her glass.
‘A dream?’ chipped in Richard. ‘Honestly, if we all followed our dreams where would we be?’
But no one was listening to Richard, or Ben, or Mark, or Mike. We were carried away with the excitement of the idea. Why couldn’t we? Why couldn’t some amateur rowers, who had only ever pootled up and down the River Ouse, make it across the Atlantic? Stranger things have happened, surely? We clinked glasses and toasted our ambition and Frances’s idea. What a ride! What a journey! What a trip that would be!
That night, rather the worse for wine, Helen posted excitedly on her Facebook page. ‘I can’t believe I have just agreed to row the Atlantic!’ And Frances spoke animatedly to Mark as they walked home.
‘I can’t believe I asked them to row the Atlantic with me and they said yes! Isn’t that great?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘It is not great. It’s not great at all.’ But then he paused and looked over at her. ‘But if you really want to go and you really want to do it, then it’s okay by me. However, I want you to know that the idea does not make me jump for joy. Not one little bit.’
Perhaps our partners were all hoping we’d forget about it, that the plan would simply disappear, like most plans discussed after a few bottles of wine. They expected it would evaporate along with the hangover.
And for a long time, they were right. We did vaguely discuss the possibility of rowing across an ocean the following Saturday over cups of coffee at The Grange. Helen told Niki the story and we had a laugh on the sofa at the foolishness of it all.
‘Rowing the Atlantic?’ she asked. ‘That’s a long way.’
‘I know!’ agreed Helen. ‘That’s what Richard said!’
‘We’d drunk quite a lot of wine by then,’ added Caroline.
‘Ben is positively encouraging me to go, the sod!’ said Janette.
Only Frances stayed silent, thinking. The problem with saying something like ‘I want to row an ocean’ and declaring your dream, revealing your innermost desires, is that it can’t be unsaid. And once the genie was out of the bottle, it was all Frances could think about. She was determined to do it.
It was fairly obvious what Mark thought about the idea, and indeed all the other husbands. Their surprised, incredulous faces that night around the dinner table said it all. Not one of them believed we could pull it off. Four mums rowing an ocean? It was clearly a ridiculous idea and, anyway, who was going to do the washing if we went?
But Frances mulled, she daydreamed, she googled the hell out of the event and she quietly would not give up. She kept mentioning it to Mark, as a way of getting him used to the idea.
‘I thought if I kept talking about it, slipping it into conversation, he’d believe that I was serious. That I really could do it. The seed that had been sown by reading all those books from the library years before was finally germinating. Why couldn’t I have an adventure? Does being a mother of two mean you can no longer dream? No longer do anything for yourself?’
So that Friday morning in May, she could not control it any more and she emailed them all. ‘It was the grey suits, the grey road, the grey everything, and I wanted a bit of sunshine and a bit of memory-making. I was feeling increasingly frustrated and underappreciated at work. I just kept thinking, “Am I going to do this for another 10 years and then retire? Is this it? My life?”’
Janette, of course, replied almost immediately. But the others did not. There was nothing but radio silence, so much so that Frances began to think that perhaps she’d misjudged the mood. It was, after all, her idea, her mid-life crisis! Maybe the others wanted nothing to do with it…
At least Janette was up for it. In fact, Janette was so up for it that she was ready to row that Christmas. She was a little disappointed to learn that the two of them weren’t taking off in six months’ time but in two years.
‘We’ve got to plan, we’ve got to train, we’ve got to get a boat – we can’t possibly be ready this year!’ explained Frances as the two of them trawled the Talisker website, working out how to register. And register they did. Just the two of them. It was 500 euros each. They were the first to register for the 2015 race. In fact, they were the only team to register for quite a long time. Whatever was going to happen, Frances and Janette were going to row an ocean. There was a small matter of some training and a boat, but they were on their way.
Janette immediately signed herself up to a five-day practical RYA (Royal Yachting Association) Day Skipper at Sea programme in Spain. Of course she did. ‘Well, I was definitely going to row the Atlantic, so I thought I should get started. Also we did have a yacht already, so we thought it was a good idea to do some sort of professional training!
She and Ben flew to Girona, Spain, where they were joined by an elderly chap from Australia who wanted to work on cruise ships in his retirement and a young girl who was keen to work on yachts, and that was it. For five days they learnt how to reverse, turn, hoist sails and get them down again.
‘To be frank, I wasn’t very good. I was rubbish. Ben was trying to help me so that I could pass the test. He was whispering things in my ear, telling me which way to go. At one point we were in a man-overboard situation where they’d thrown a fender into the sea to simulate a body, which I then proceeded to mow down. The skipper wasn’t pleased.’
‘Now, Janette,’ she said, ‘if that was a person, they would be dead by now.’
‘I also launched the 40-foot yacht headlong into the pontoon. I have never seen anyone move so fast in their life when she realised I was about to plough the whole boat into the dock. She grabbed the joystick out of my hand and plunged it into reverse.’
Both Janette and Ben got their International Certificate of Competence and another one in marine VHF (very high frequency) radio.
‘It was a bit of a joke, really, as I was completely incompetent, but the one thing I really did learn that week was the incredible power of the sea. It really opened my eyes. It gave me a flavour of what the ocean could do. We left port one day for a practice and we had to turn back because the weather was so bad and the seas were so big. I had no idea it could get that rough out there. I had no idea how strong and powerful the ocean could be.’
If Frances and Janette were fully signed up to the idea of crossing the Atlantic, the rest of us were most certainly not.
‘Have you heard that this lot are still going on about this ridiculous idea?’ asked Richard as we all sat down to dinner at Helen’s house one evening towards the end of June. We thought the rowing dinner had gone so well, we’d decided to get everyone together again for a plate of lasagne and some wine. Although this was not quite the feedback Frances and Janette were after! ‘It’s madness. You can’t row the Atlantic! I don’t know who you lot think you are. You’re a bunch of nutters!’
‘We are,’ agreed Janette, sitting down next to Richard and taking a mouthful of lasagne. ‘Total nutters!’
‘But we are going to do it,’ insisted Frances.
‘And you’re letting her go?’ Richard asked Mark, pointing at Frances with his fork. ‘Are you?’
‘It’s not for me to say yes or no,’ said Mark. ‘It’s always been her dream to go, to row across the Atlantic.’
‘Yes, but like I said,’ replied Richard, ‘if we all followed our dreams, where would we be?’
‘I think we’d all be happy, Richard,’ said Mark.
‘It’s utter fantasy,’ said Ri
chard, shaking his head.
‘We all agree it is lunacy,’ added Ben, pouring the wine. ‘Total lunacy. But who am I to stand between my wife and her dreams?’ And the conversation moved on.
But then something very odd happened. Helen is always looking for signs in life, little indicators that the path you want to choose or the idea that you had is the correct one. And then, just at the right time, a sign appeared. It was the first week in July, 10 days after the dinner, and St Olave’s, the junior school to St Peter’s senior school, were having their prize-giving. Usually they would book some sort of dignitary, an after-prize speaker to talk to the parents for a bit and pad out the hour or so between the most improved and the best in show. But this year it was different. This year, unbeknown to us, they had invited along Alastair Humphreys.
An adventurer, blogger and motivational speaker, Humphreys, as well as completing a four-year cycle trip around the world, walking across India, competing in the Marathon des Sables and being National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, had also rowed across the Atlantic.
We weren’t sitting together in the hall that day as he started his talk. Actually, not all of us were even there. But those who were sat dotted around the room. Frances was near the back, Janette was to the side and Helen was closer to the front. Humphreys started to explain his new project – microadventures. A pioneering scheme that tries to encourage people to get outside, get out of their comfort zone and go somewhere they’ve never been before. He was an exciting speaker who exuded the sort of positivity that Frances was always talking about. He regaled the room with stories about his cycling trip around the world and about how he broke his foot in the Marathon des Sables. And then, in among his stories of his trips and his experiences, he said something that made our hearts skip a beat.
‘If anyone ever asks you to row an ocean,’ he said, ‘don’t hesitate. Don’t even think about it. Just do it. It is a chance in a lifetime. It’s a moment. And it is something that you will never, ever forget.’
Four Mums in a Boat Page 6