Four Mums in a Boat

by Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg

  ‘Apparently, it was the worst thing I could have done. If you talk to proper sailing people, they’ll tell you never to wear bobbles other than at the end of a plait. It was a schoolgirl mistake! But I had ruined my hair. The others had all gone and had showers and they all looked amazing, and I still had this bandana on my head and this matted mess, thinking, “What on earth am I going do?” Everybody told me I needed to go to a hairdresser. One of the BBC Breakfast crew told me I’d look lovely with an Audrey Hepburn pixie cut, as it was obvious that I was going to lose the lot! So my first night was just miserable. I looked crap and I went to bed at 9 p.m. I think my mum was a bit annoyed, as she wanted to go out partying! At 81!’

  All of us seemed to adapt to sleeping back in a normal bed relatively easily. Stories that we’d read about other rowers rowing in their sleep, sobbing all night or waking up feverishly to start their shift did not apply to us. Frances dreamt about rowing. Niki was just relieved she could breathe properly, and Helen and Janette were out cold after one glass of wine. The only real problem was our painful buttocks, our hugely swollen hands (we were still unable to wear our wedding rings) and our inability to walk. We each had to hang onto the lavatory every time we went to the loo. But frankly we were used to that.

  The next day we woke up at 3 a.m. to do a live interview with BBC Breakfast. ‘I remember thinking, “I can’t believe that I’ve been on a boat for 67 days, only having an hour and a half sleep, and I’ve got to get up at three o’clock, my first night in my bed,”’ said Helen. ‘I think Mark was a bit annoyed… He wasn’t happy that we were being asked to do that, but I could understand that BBC Breakfast’s Jayne McCubbin had flown over to Antigua, and the show had been so supportive of us, every step of the way, so we had to – we wanted to. They had been so very kind to us in the past.’

  In fact, the next few days were quite fraught as we struggled to fulfil all of our commitments and be mums.

  ‘My children were very bored with me being so busy,’ said Frances. ‘It was the most expensive holiday we’ve ever had,’ said Frances. ‘And it’s my children’s least favourite.’

  ‘I wasn’t torn, because my children didn’t come,’ said Janette. ‘But I could see that everyone else was. All the rowers, the race organisers, the TV producers, all those people we had got to know over the years, were all in Antigua and they wanted to go for a few drinks with us.’

  The second night was the most difficult. There was a party for everyone who had been involved in the challenge and there was one question: were the husbands going to come? Or were they going to stay at the hotel and look after the children?

  In the end, Gareth came out, leaving the kids with Niki’s parents, Bunny and Pete, and Mark stayed in.

  ‘Mark said to me, “This is your gig, it’s your party, so go and have a fabulous time,”’ said Frances. ‘He didn’t know many of the people who would be there that night, and he said he didn’t want me to feel I had to spend time with him when I should be celebrating with the other crews and race people. And, of course, there was no one else to look after the boys.’

  ‘I really wanted Gareth with me,’ said Niki. ‘So he came.’

  ‘Ben was in a slightly different situation,’ said Janette. ‘He had been there every day, every step of the race, so he also knew a lot of the people involved. But it was very difficult for the other husbands. We were all kindred spirits; we’d been through the same experience, which was very bonding. We were all being salty sea dogs together, and letting our hair down. Well, most of us were.’

  Back to Helen’s hair…

  ‘Bella, from Row Like a Girl, said there was a really good hairdresser in English Harbour, so I went to her. I remember there was a boy sitting next to me in the chair and he said: “Oh, I’ve got a dreadlock, I’ve got a dreadlock!” And I said: “Look at this, mate.” And he went “Urgh!” The hairdresser was lovely and she poured loads of coconut oil on my head, and then I sat in a chair and basically she was pulling out the lump, hair by hair, using a needle. But you could tell she was thinking, “This is not going to work.” I was in there for about eight hours.

  ‘Sitting next to me was this lovely woman, an American called Jessica, but her nickname was Gassy, and she said: “Oh, are you one of the Yorkshire women?” I said yes and explained the story of the hair. She said: “Do you know what? I’m going to help you get your hair straight.” Because the other three, my dear friends who I had just rowed the Atlantic with, clearly had no interest in trying to sort my hair out whatsoever. My mother couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t do it on my own. So Gassy got out of her seat and, while she was having her hair highlighted and covered in foils, she started on mine. Then she was on the phone to her friend Jackie, saying, “I’ve got one of the Yorkshire ladies here. I need your help. She’s got a massive dreadlock and we need to get it out.” She was amazing. I was then pulled out of the hairdresser’s to be interviewed by National Geographic and, as I left, Jessica said: “Come back tomorrow and we’ll sort your hair out.”

  ‘She was like an angel. It was like I’d put it out there. So the next day, I took a taxi with my mum to find Jessica and it turned out she was a chef on a super-yacht. Unfortunately, my mum couldn’t manage it up the gangplank of the yacht, so we sat on a bench in the harbour as Jessica picked at my hair with a meat probe, which was the finest, sharpest bit of metal she could find in the kitchen. And we just chatted and got to know each other while she was trying to unpick my hair. That was day two.

  ‘On day three, my mum and I went back to see Jessica again. I sat down again and this time there was Jackie and someone called Jane, who’s actually from Antigua, all having a go. I took loads of paracetamol, as it was now beginning to hurt. Before it had been so rock hard that I couldn’t feel a thing, but the closer it got to the scalp, the more it hurt. Janette came past at one point and started to laugh, saying only I could have so many people working on my hair. It was the princess delegating… again!’

  Eventually the dreadlock disappeared and Helen returned to the disbelieving hairdresser, whose mouth slowly opened in shock.

  ‘I booked in for a colour, a cut and a wash, and it was just the most amazing thing. I had my hair back. It was in a terrible condition, but at least I didn’t have to have it shaved off. Now Jessica emails me and we talk all the time. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t met her. I’m so glad now that that actually happened to my hair, because I’ve met this lovely woman who I’ll probably know forever.’

  We wound up our interviews and started saying our goodbyes, getting ready to go home.

  ‘We didn’t want to let it go,’ said Frances. ‘And yet, in a way, we needed to. It was time for us to get on and do other things.’

  The night before we left, we were all sitting in Janette’s bedroom overlooking English Harbour. There was talk of watching one of the last two boats come in – Rowing for Rascals. But frankly we weren’t sure we were up to it. We’d watched Coventry Five-O and Thrift Atlantic Energy arrive a few days before and both Janette and Frances had broken down.

  ‘I didn’t cry when we finished, but I did when I saw Coventry Five-O arrive,’ said Frances.

  ‘His daughters were there for Thrift Atlantic,’ said Janette. ‘His little daughters. They ran and yelled. It was so emotional.’

  So we sat up in Janette’s room, having a final farewell glass of wine as we looked at our extraordinary photographs, taken before and after the race.

  ‘The befores were taken in La Gomera,’ said Niki. ‘They were very close up and all you can see are these very chubby, stressed, tired faces. The afters were taken as soon as we arrived on the other side in Antigua. We all looked five years younger. We looked completely different. There were no bags, no jowls – we were shining. We looked better. We all looked so, so happy.

  All in all, we each lost between 1½ and 2 stone. We all dropped at least one dress size.

  ‘Guess what?’ said Janette, appearing in the doorway of the b
athroom.

  ‘What?’ said Frances, turning around to see the vision before her.

  ‘I can fit into the sodding shorts!’

  It was true. The green-and-turquoise piped shorts were over the hips and fitting nicely around the waist. They were still a little tight over the thighs, but who was really looking? They were on! And that’s what mattered!

  ‘Well,’ said Frances, raising a glass. ‘To the real reason we crossed the Atlantic in the first place!’

  SHIP’S LOG:

  ‘When you accomplish something you have been wanting so much, the feeling is absolutely out of this world, and when you accomplish it with three other strong and amazing women there is nothing quite like that girl-power feeling. No one can ever take your accomplishment away from you. It will stay with you for the rest of your life.’

  (JANETTE/SKIPPER)

  CHAPTER 16

  Re-entry

  ‘The only time you should ever look back is to see how far you have come.’

  ANON

  Of all the books we had read, all the people we had spoken to and all the advice we’d sought, we never questioned or considered what it would be like to return home. We had been so focused on the race, on getting to La Gomera, and then we had been so determined to finish, to cross the ocean, that we had not really thought about what would happen afterwards.

  ‘We planned to get to Antigua. That was that,’ said Helen. ‘But we didn’t plan for what happened later. We all felt weird when we got home, and we had some serious communication problems. It is a massive jolt to the system. I would say to any other teams, just plan for when you get off the boat and be really careful, because there were a couple of teams I met who said they’d fallen out with their rowing partners afterwards. I think it is quite easy to do. We worked really hard at being friends across the Atlantic and it worked, but what we didn’t plan for was how we would feel when we got off the boat.’

  The speed, the noise, the voices and the bustle were unexpected, but so was the media interest in our story. Suddenly we were asked to give interviews, guest on radio shows and go on various TV shows, which some of us were much less enthusiastic about than others.

  But we had commitments and we also wanted to raise money for our charities, and what better way to do that than exposure? Although the kind of exposure that Helen achieved on BBC Breakfast was perhaps not completely what she, or indeed we, were after. Poor Helen. No one is quite sure how it happened but during an interview, as we sat on the sofa with Dan Walker and Louise Minchin, chatting about our trip, they showed some footage of us rowing – only for the camera to pull back and reveal that Helen was devoid of chafe-free pants. Naturally, viewer outrage ensued and pictures of Helen’s pixelated bits were plastered all over the newspapers.

  ‘Of course it was me! It had to be me. I wasn’t that bothered, to be honest, only it was difficult for my children, as it started trending on Twitter and my son was shown the footage on the way into homework club. But truthfully, I just felt very sorry for the editor. People can make mistakes, poor chap. He was so apologetic. I went up afterwards and said I was fine about it.’

  We went from Ant and Dec to BBC Breakfast to This Morning to Welcome to Yorkshire. For the first couple of weeks after we got back our feet did not really touch the ground. It was an extraordinary whirlwind, which we did enjoy, but at the same it taught us to watch what we said and look out for each other, because it’s very easy for one person’s flippant joke to become someone else’s grave offence. And there were a few moments over those first few days when one of us, particularly Helen, became very upset. Hugely upset.

  It wasn’t really anyone’s fault. We had yet to get home, we’d been on the go ever since we’d touched down in London, Helen’s fanny was trending on Twitter, which is enough to make anyone feel more than a little vulnerable, and then Frances cracked a joke – a silly joke at a press conference about Helen’s night-time steering.

  ‘It was a stupid joke, but what a salutary lesson in what not to say to journalists!’ said Frances.

  The next day her glib comments appeared in a newspaper, out of context and without any of the gentle humour attached.

  ‘I felt Frances had embarrassed me. She’d said something about me nearly killing them at sea due to my bad steering. This was a joke, but in print it didn’t come across like that. We were in a hotel room, going on This Morning the following day, when I read it in the bath. Frances and I were sharing a room and I just felt like I’d had enough.’

  ‘I was mortified,’ said Frances. ‘I would never pretend to be perfect, but the last thing I would ever do is intentionally hurt the feelings of one of my friends. Helen refused to speak to me until the next day. It was a very long night.’

  The following morning we all had breakfast together before going to the TV studios, and over the croissants and coffee, we talked it out – not just the night-time steering comment, but everything that had been said at one point or another that had caused upset. Eventually we were all in tears, saying how much we loved each other.

  ‘This was my low point of the entire experience,’ said Frances. ‘Ironic, in the end, that my low point didn’t happen on the boat, but after we had completed the race and were back in the UK.’

  ‘We were all in tears over the breakfast table. We had mainly all kept it together on the boat, and then we were really struggling on dry land. I don’t think we realised how tough it had been. But we were much stronger for that argument,’ said Helen. ‘We’re more like sisters now. I think we probably were when we had that huge row. I don’t think I would have had that row with them all if I hadn’t felt so close to them. We’ve been through all the emotions we could possibly go through. I do think we are very close together, and we’ll always have that special bond. Always.’

  ‘They are like family now,’ said Niki. ‘And part of it is because it’s not superficial. With a lot of friends you’ve never had a falling out, and you’ve not built a relationship. It’s always been nice and easy. Whereas we’ve been through such a lot together these three years – we’ve had good times and bad times, we have all bickered and got through it. I think that’s when you get to a really deep relationship: when you can get through all that and still want to be with each other. It’s quite nice when it’s not perfect. It’s just sharing that level of experience and being able to get through it. But it wasn’t just about the Atlantic, because the Atlantic was just a little part of it. The harder bit was leading up to that start line. That was the true test, I think. The Atlantic’s going to challenge anybody. Everyone’s going to go through similar stuff on the Atlantic, but before that, to get to where we did and to do what we did together, that was the difficult bit.’

  Having lived and breathed as a foursome for so long, we had become so used to each other’s company that we all felt it very profoundly when we came home.

  ‘I was taken away from them straight away, because Ben and I had a nice hotel to stay in in Antigua, just the two of us,’ said Janette. ‘But I was a bit jealous because I thought, “They’re all together still, and I’m not.” And for the first couple of days I thought, “We should have all booked into the same resort, we should all have been together.” But then I was so glad to see Ben that it quickly disappeared. It was lovely that it was just the two of us, but I also needed to be able to spend some time together with the girls so that it wasn’t too traumatic, the separation. And it was a separation. It was definitely a separation. I do feel very close to them now and I really do miss the intimacy that we had on the boat.’

  ‘I’d had enough of everybody initially when we got back,’ said Niki. ‘But after about three or four weeks, slowly but surely I wanted to see them again, and now, if something happens, I always want to pick up the phone and share it with them straight away. It’s nice now that we’ve started to put more things in the diary. When we first came back we were doing a lot of Yorkshire Rows stuff, which was fine. We were seeing each other, but all we were doing w
as turning up at an event, having to be very sociable, and then leaving. It didn’t feel like the old days – having a laugh, sitting around and sharing our gossip. We’ve started to do that again now. We’ve started doing yoga together and other bits and pieces, and that’s quite nice because I feel like it’s gone back to how it was.’

  For the first few days, we also found the pace at which everything was moving very disconcerting. Having been in our watery paradise for so long, we found even the most normal and banal things extremely strange. ‘I got into the car from the airport in London and I could not believe how fast the cars were going,’ said Janette. ‘I was really distracted and I kept on telling Ben to slow down. I kept saying, “This is far too fast,” and he said, “This is how fast you drive!” I suppose I had been travelling at two to three miles an hour for months, so anything over 25mph was going to get my pulse racing!’

  Fortunately, our husbands, friends and family were incredibly supportive and understanding at our re-entry back into the world, just as they had been through those entire three years.

  ‘They have all been amazing. We could not have done anything without every single one of them,’ said Janette. ‘The fact that there were so many people supporting us made us determined not to give up. When you’ve got people backing you and supporting you, you don’t want to disappoint them. I think the support that we had from very early on, until we got close to the race, certainly got us to the finish line – the fact that people believed in us and were saying, “Go on, girls!” You didn’t want to let them down.’

  ‘It’s only when you get back that you learn what everyone else has been doing,’ said Niki. ‘Gareth had spent a lot of time keeping all our friends, supporters and sponsors updated on our progress through emails and Facebook. What a huge task! And on top of everything else he was dealing with, he did all that just for us. Good friends and complete strangers had also raised money through cake and cookie sales, sending all the money to our charities. And our lovely parents, Pete, Bunny and Karen, had helped to make things easier for Gareth and the kids while I was away. I will never be able to repay everyone’s kindness and generosity – it does make you realise how much love and generosity there is out there.’