Janette turned around to look at Frances and smiled. And Frances smiled back. And then, through the sea of neatly combed hair and smart jackets, Frances saw Helen turn around. She was beaming – she slowly nodded, a large grin all over her face. She then turned to look at Janette and did the same. Helen was in. She was going to be on that boat. No matter what.
SHIP’S LOG
‘Just say yes. If someone presents you with an opportunity in life, always say yes. You can figure out afterwards how you will manage it. If you say no straight away, the opportunity passes you by and you might not be asked again.’
(JANETTE/SKIPPER)
CHAPTER 5
Making It Happen
‘If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.’
NORA ROBERTS, TEARS OF THE MOON
If Helen was on board, Richard was still most adamantly not. Not unreasonably, he was worried. Worried that Helen might have to give up her job (the NHS would surely never give her four months off), worried about money and worried about what would happen to the children if Helen upped-sticks and launched herself on the ocean. While Frances’s and Janette’s husbands were being super-supportive, Helen found herself faced with a wall of silence. ‘He just would not talk about it. He would just say no. No, you can’t possibly leave your job. No, you can’t leave the children. No, you can’t do it. Just no. He was concerned about the money we would lose. About how we were going to manage to pay the bills and the mortgage. All very natural for him to be so worried. I’m glad now that one of us was!’
But Helen was convinced she was doing the right thing, and of course saw signs and inspiration everywhere. ‘Even on TV. I remember watching I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! with Melanie Sykes and watching her beating all the contestants who were younger than her. She is my age and I remember thinking, “Look at her, being all feisty and fabulous. I would love to do something that would test my limits. I would love to do something like that.” Then I realised that this challenge – to row the Atlantic – had come to me. I’d asked for it, and now it had come, so I just had to do it. Even if Richard was not happy about it.’
So Helen used the gentle art of ‘familiarity breeds acceptance’. Instead of giving up, she printed off the Atlantic Campaigns material and left it on the kitchen table. And there it sat for days, weeks, months, like a giant unanswered question or a very tacit challenge. Periodically, it would be opened and closed, but it never left the table. ‘Every time I went near it, Richard would walk out of the room, but he never actually threw it in the bin.’
Although Niki and Gareth had started discussing the challenge, the idea itself was a little problematic. ‘We’re very close; we have the sort of relationship where we talk about anything and everything. I don’t think he wanted me to be gone for so long.’
Emotional attachment aside, they also had a business together. ‘He has a very strong work ethic, so he also could not understand why I would want to take time away from our business or how it could work without me.’
Also, Niki’s children were younger than the rest of ours. Unlike Janette’s, who were fairly self-sufficient, Corby was 11 and Aiden was 7 at the time, and despite the fact that Niki’s parents – Bunny and Peter – lived right next door to them, there was still the question of childcare, the school run, homework and tea. But once the idea had been suggested, Niki found it difficult to let it go.
‘I just really wanted the challenge. I think when you go through life you are lots of different people, depending on what you’re doing and where you are going,’ said Niki. ‘I’d been the child, then I’d been the wife, and I’d been the career woman and I’d been the mum. And they are all different people. You behave and act differently in each of those roles. The professional role is very different to the mum role, and the married role is different to how I was as a child. I think, for me, it was about really trying to understand who the real Niki was underneath all of that, because you have all of these different layers and these different roles, and I was just trying to understand who I was again. So I was not going to give up that easily.’
Towards the end of that summer, after many conversations, some sort of compromise was reached. They decided that there was too much for Niki to do at home in York – she had too many responsibilities and too many people depending on her – so she would be involved, but she would be ground crew. She would help with setting up the trip, organising the sponsorship, helping the others get to La Gomera, but come the actual challenge, she would not get on the boat. She would not be there. She would stay behind with Gareth and the children, running the business, doing the drop-off and packing the rugby kit.
In the last week of September 2013, Janette invited the team and the support crew, which at that time consisted of Niki and Dr Caroline Lennox, to come and stay in her house near Perpignan in France. It had been booked as a girls’ trip, as it was around the time of Helen’s and Frances’s birthdays. For fun, she’d planned a week of rowing tuition on a nearby lake, at a rather swish boat club, Perpignan Aviron 66, which had reportedly even trained some Olympic rowers.
‘Some Olympic rowers, and now us,’ declared Janette as we turned up at a beautiful stretch of water, about an hour’s drive from the seaside house that Janette and Ben had bought as a wreck and spent every family summer slowly doing up.
‘My poor children smelt paint stripper more than they inhaled the salt of the sea, and spent more time in Leroy Merlin, the builders’ merchants, than they did on the beach!’
We were standing around at the boathouse, wearing various scruffy, unsporty outfits and waiting for our coach to arrive, when a team of what looked like female gazelles turned up. The French four sauntered straight past us with barely a backward glance. They were long-limbed, stunning and dressed in fabulously flattering team colours. We were transfixed and a little slack-jawed as they walked up to their moored boat, pushed off gently from the jetty and then, in a synchronised move that could only be performed better by the Bolshoi Ballet, leapt into the boat and with a swish of their oars and a flick of their shiny long hair rowed off in sequence.
‘Holy shit,’ said Janette. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Ten minutes later and it was our turn to leave the boathouse. The huffing, puffing, splashing and shouting were mortifying. We were like a group of OAPs struggling to get off a tour bus.
‘Hang on! Wait there!’
‘Hold on!’
‘Hold it!’
‘Move the blade.’
‘The blade!’
‘It’s going to get stuck!’
‘We’re stuck.’
‘Jesus!’
‘Ouch!’
‘Was that really necessary?’
It took us a full 15 minutes to leave the jetty. No wonder, then, that our coach, François, thought we were a bunch of lunatics who had no idea what we were doing. But then, out of the blue, Helen really caught his eye. Or Hélène, as he insisted on calling her. She was rowing along with Caroline in a double scull (although judging by the amount of attention she was getting from the frankly rather ridiculously handsome coach, she could quite well have been rowing alone).
‘Oh, Hélène,’ he said. ‘Come see, it is like zis.’
‘Oh, Hélène,’ he would say again. ‘You stroke soft like zat.’
‘Oh Hélène, zat is good!’
‘Oh Hélène, don’t you worry!’
‘Oh Hélène, let me ’elp you.’
And all the while Hélène was making cooing incompetent noises, giggling, flicking her hair and generally batting her eyelashes. François helped Hélène into the boat. He helped Hélène out of the boat. He showed Hélène how to turn, what to do, where to go. He was très attentive.
‘What am I?’ demanded Caroline at one point, just as he sorted another one of Hélène’s ‘little problems’. ‘Bloody invisible?’
The following morning, Janette came down to breakfas
t in a cloud of Chanel perfume, armed with a low plunge-necked vest and a very sturdy, barely hidden push-up bra.
‘Right,’ she announced with a hoist of her bosom and a tug on her straps. ‘He’s not going to be talking to Hélène today!’
But even Janette’s substantial cleavage was no distraction for the enraptured François, and Hélène received his full and undivided attention for the next three days. It was one of the many jokes that we shared during a fantastic four days when we hung out, chatted, drank wine and tried to nail down some very serious decisions about crossing the ocean.
Such as, what shall we put on our playlists? Janette rather eccentrically decided that she was only going to have Edith Piaf. If the boat was going to go down, all she wanted to hear was ‘Je ne regrette rien’ reverberating in her earphones. Frances was opting for a load of old folk, while Helen, or Hélène, was putting forward the idea that some audiobooks would be a great way of whiling away the time.
Our other major decision was what to call ourselves. It is never a good idea to brainstorm after sinking the best part of a bottle of wine or two. Not that it stopped us. The terrible ideas came thick and fast. M.A.A. was one – Mums’ Atlantic Adventure. Awful. The Awesome Foursome. Worse. The Oarsome Foursome. Downright shocking.
‘I think our name should have something to do with Yorkshire,’ suggested Janette.
‘We don’t want to be Yorkshire,’ said Helen, who always disagreed with Janette if she possibly could, and, indeed, vice versa. ‘That’s not national enough. That’s keeping it too local, and we’re not going to get national sponsorship if we’re just Yorkshire.’
‘But we’re from Yorkshire. We all live there. The lot of us. We should be Yorkshire. It’s a great place to be from.’ She looked at all our faces. ‘It is! Yorkshire people get stuck in. We call a spade a spade. If it’s green, it’s green. It’s not lime. You know what I mean? It’s very much our culture to be very direct and straight and just say it how it is. Just do it how it is. I think there is probably a very different culture about Yorkshire. And we celebrate it! And it’s not the wine talking!’
‘Much,’ replied Helen.
‘We’re real workers. Nobody pretends to be posh… Well, they do, but it’s not a county that pretends to be posh. If you look at it as a county, you’d never say it’s a posh county, whereas if you looked at Sussex or somewhere you’d go, “Oh, that’s quite posh,” wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t say that about Birmingham. You’d never say it about Liverpool and you’d never say it about Yorkshire.’
‘There is something very special about people from Yorkshire. We are different. We should celebrate it. There is a steely toughness about us. It must be the cold breeze off the North Sea!’ declared Frances.
‘Anyway, I don’t know why we’re bothering; we’re only a three at the moment,’ pointed out Helen as we all looked at Niki and Caroline. One of them had to come with us. One of them really was going to have to push extra hard to make it happen. We couldn’t row as a three – there wasn’t a three category. It was solos, pairs or fours, and we needed to be a four.
And on we went, into the night, discussing the pros and cons of Yorkshire and what sort of name we wanted for the boat and the team. It was clearly important that we got the crucial things sorted first! The fact was that we still had neither a boat, nor a team.
Then, almost as soon as we got back to York, Caroline called Janette, sending her apologies. It was just too complicated for her to make the crossing; she had a lot going on at home and she had her prison GP work. So she offered her services as our in-house/on-the-Atlantic doctor and she could also give us some general help with all the paperwork. It was an offer we very gratefully accepted.
So all eyes fell on Niki. Could she persuade Gareth that her rowing an ocean was a good idea after all?
She and Gareth had planned to spend a long weekend in the Lake District as a family treat for them and the children, and Niki’s parents had come along as well. They were going to look after the two boys while Niki and Gareth went on long walks. It was on these walks that they started to talk about the race, looking at it from all angles.
‘It was a very hot topic of discussion!’ said Niki. ‘Our circumstances were very different from the others. My family was younger and I was in business with my husband. For me to leave was a very large wrench. Both Janette and Frances are the main breadwinners in the house, so both their husbands look after their children anyway. Apart from the fact that Janette is incorrigible and Mark would never stop Frances from doing what she really wants to do. He might be unhappy about her wanting to row the Atlantic, but he was never going to tell her she was not allowed to go.’
And despite the confident declaration to Frances that she was definitely on the team, Helen’s position was still not that clear either. Rather than workshopping the idea like Niki and Gareth, she and Richard had simply not talked about it. And yet, by his silence, Helen was fairly sure that he might have just about given his tacit approval and she might have won the argument. Or non-argument. The race guide and registration form were, after all, still on the kitchen table; they hadn’t been binned or burned. So there was still hope, even though the actual words ‘you can go’ had not come out of Richard’s mouth. Nor, indeed, had Helen paid her 500-euro registration fee. But then quite a lot was going on in their household at the time.
‘It was weird, but I think the idea of the challenge was already beginning to change me,’ said Helen. ‘I was in Leeds one afternoon, totally by chance – I had been sent there for a meeting as a replacement for a colleague – and I suddenly decided to pop in and see Richard in his chambers. It was about half-past four and I thought it would be nice to have a cup of tea. He wasn’t expecting me and I wasn’t really expecting to find him there, as he is always in court, but I went anyway. I walked into his office and instead of him being delighted, he was extremely downcast and miserable, surrounded by legal briefs and pink ribbon. I had caught him at a bad moment. He was just sitting there, staring.
‘“I hate this,” he said, looking up at me. “I really hate this.”
‘Normally I would have told him to keep buggering on, like I have done for the last 16 years – life’s tough and dull and no one ever said it should be fun – but this time I didn’t. I said, “Look, you can do anything!” I was feeling incredibly positive.
‘“You’ve got transferable skills,” I said. “Change it all now. Go and join a recruitment agency and make a leap. I don’t know, you could do something like Director of Public Prosecutions. You’re clever, you are talented, you can do anything!”
‘He wasn’t really listening to me. “Don’t be stupid. Those jobs never come up. There’s a DPP in London, one in Scotland…”
‘“I don’t mean that job particularly, but I’m giving you an example of your transferable skills. There are loads of things you can do! You don’t have to do what you don’t want to. You’re in control of your destiny. You can change things if you want to.”
‘I walked out of his office and got in my car. As I was driving home, my phone rang – it was Richard. “You’ll never guess,” he said, sounding a lot different than a few minutes earlier.
‘“What?”
‘“As soon as you left, I went on the legal website, and the first job that came up? Director of Public Prosecutions, Isle of Man.”
‘I just said, “Oh my God, it’s fate.” Because I hadn’t meant that job in particular, just any job… Absolute fate.
‘“I’ve just phoned them up,” he said, sounding slightly in shock. “They’re sending me an application form.” So that weekend he did the application form and sent it off, but I just knew it would happen – we knew it would happen. We knew he’d get it. It was just a matter of when.’
Meanwhile, Frances started attending night school, qualifying for her RYA Day Skipper licence. Janette and Ben booked to go to La Gomera for the start of the 2013 Talisker Challenge to see if they could pick up any tips, advice or cruc
ial information that might help us. And Niki? She just bided her time…
And not long before Christmas, Gareth came round. It was not a sudden, overnight road-to-Damascus conversion. He didn’t see the light or hear a choir! It was a gentle percolation. He’d begun to appreciate that Niki was truly committed to the plan and, as ground crew, she was already spending nights at Janette’s house at meetings, helping out, trying to work out how to raise money, get sponsorship – helping to get the project off the ground. What was the point of all that hard work and commitment, he’d reasoned, if you don’t actually ever get to row the race? Niki was doing all the donkeywork already, without any of the joy of the adventure.
And once Gareth had said yes, Niki was anxious to get the approval of her parents.
‘I told my mother first in the kitchen,’ said Niki. ‘I wanted to be absolutely sure I was going before I said anything. She was a little bit shocked to begin with. She definitely went pale. It is not every day your daughter tells you she is going to row the Atlantic, she wasn’t exactly jumping around, but she was extremely positive. She offered all sorts of help with Gareth and the kids. I was relieved. But I was worried about telling Dad. I asked her if she thought Dad would be all right about it. And she said she thought it would be better if I told him myself.
‘“I’ll tell him you want to pop over later and have a chat,” she suggested.
‘My poor dad. She told him I wanted to have a chat in the morning, but she refused to tell him what I wanted to talk about. The poor bloke. He’d been worrying and worrying all day. So when I finally told him, some four or five hours later, he was SO relieved. He’d been through all the options. He thought I was either dying of a terrible disease or I was divorcing Gareth, so when I told him I was rowing the Atlantic, he couldn’t have been more overjoyed! He was absolutely delighted! He just stared at me to start off with. And then a large grin slowly spread across his face.
Four Mums in a Boat Page 7
