‘“That’s amazing!” he said. “Just amazing!”
‘And he hugged me.
‘He later told me he wrote in his journal that night that my telling him I was going to row the Atlantic was one of the best days of his life.’
Niki was on board! We were a four, at last. Now there was a real possibility of the race actually happening. We could row as a team. We were a team. Four totally different women, from very different backgrounds, united in one task – to get across the Atlantic. To get this far felt like an achievement in itself.
‘It felt great!’ said Janette. ‘I remember feeling really pleased when I heard the news. Niki had been doing a lot of work and it just would have been a shame had she not been able to go the whole hog, so to speak. Also, Niki is a wonderful, kind person and very caring and I thought to myself, “We need that on the boat. She will look after us when we need looking after and she will get the job done.” You can ask her to do anything, and she does it straight away. You can rely on her for sure. I used to think, “Bloody hell, how does she manage to fit that into her day?” Sometimes I would secretly try to beat her to it (I think she knew that), but there was no getting ahead of Niki.’
Telling our children that we were going to do the challenge was something we were all extremely worried about. Concerned about the unsettling effect of our ‘trip’, we approached the idea with as much excitement and enthusiasm as possible. There was a huge amount of emphasis placed on travelling to Antigua for the finish, and going to the Canaries for the start. The truth that we were going to be away for Christmas was slightly glossed over, and all the positive, up-beat ideas about their mums crossing the Atlantic were expressed.
As it turned out, the kids were all remarkably sanguine.
Janette’s children Safiya and James were very relaxed about it. ‘They didn’t really bat an eyelid when I told them I was going to row an ocean,’ she says. ‘They just said “Cool!” as if it was some kind of everyday occurrence! Like, “OK, Mum, that sounds fun - when are you going?”’
‘I’m fine with my mum being away,’ said Jack, Frances’s youngest son. ‘But will Dad cope? I worry about him, and him being able to find my tie.’
Corby, Niki’s eldest, was delighted. ‘Takeaway every night!’ he cheered. ‘My clothes might not be washed, but it’ll be KFC every night!’
Her youngest, Aiden, was a little more cheeky: ‘Four random mums rowing an ocean – they must be drunk!’
It was 14-year-old Lucy, Helen’s daughter, who seemed to understand the idea better than most. ‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it can never be taken away from you once you’ve done it. When you are really old and grey, you will still have the story about how you once rowed the Atlantic. And you will probably never stop telling it!’
SHIP’S LOG:
‘Communication is key. We all have dreams, hopes and goals, and sometimes by sharing them with others we can start to see them happen. The more people you share your dreams with, the more likely it is they will happen. Let the world know your dreams. Telling someone motivates you – it acts like an incentive.’
(JANETTE/SKIPPER)
CHAPTER 6
One Step Forward
‘Ask for what you want, and be prepared to get it.’
MAYA ANGELOU
Down at the boat club it was Janette who broke the news. She and Frances had been discussing telling the coach for a while, but now that the team was finalised (albeit with Richard’s not-quite-really-there-yet approval) it felt like the right time. And she chose a rain-soaked Saturday morning to do it. She, Niki, Frances and a woman whom Janette had christened ‘Perfect Pam’ (due to the exemplary way she took instructions - unlike us!) were entered as a quad, and with the boredom setting in as they hung around waiting for the race to start, Janette thought she would liven things up a bit by telling the coach their new and exciting plan.
‘Hey, coach!’ she said. ‘Guess what? You’ll never guess what we’re going to do.’
‘No idea.’
‘It’s a challenge – one of those physical challenges…’
‘Um…’ He looked at us, a little nonplussed. ‘Row in the Boston Marathon?’
‘No,’ beamed Janette, waving an oar at him by way of a handy hint. ‘Bigger than that. A bit further away than Lincolnshire.’
‘Rowing in the Mediterranean?’
‘Think bigger seas, like oceans! Big oceans!’
‘You’re rowing an ocean?’ Now he was very much paying attention.
‘The Atlantic. We’re doing the Talisker Atlantic Challenge.’
He looked from Janette to Niki to Frances, clearly calculating our combined age of just over 188 years old. Then he looked at us all carefully again, obviously waiting for the punchline of this strange joke.
‘Wow! That is a challenge,’ he finally replied.
‘I know!’ Janette grinned. ‘The idea is to inspire ordinary women to do extraordinary things.’
‘Well, you are certainly doing that,’ he nodded.
‘Helen Butters is doing it with us,’ Janette enthused.
‘Helen?’ he replied. ‘Princess Helen who does nothing but complain when she is out on the river? Surely not? How is she going to last an afternoon on the Atlantic?’
‘Oh, she’ll be different on the ocean,’ insisted Janette, feeling very much compelled to stick up for Helen. ‘I guarantee she will.’
‘Maybe,’ he replied.
‘What’s this?’ smiled Perfect Pam, joining the group.
‘We’re rowing the Atlantic Ocean,’ Janette blurted, mainly to see the expected negative reaction on Perfect Pam’s face. But she just looked puzzled.
‘They want to inspire ordinary women to do extraordinary things,’ repeated the coach.
‘Oh, that’s fantastic!’ exclaimed Perfect Pam, smiling at all three of us. ‘Very impressive. Very impressive indeed. Are you doing it for charity? You must do it for charity. How about the Prince’s Trust? They do lots of good stuff with children. I am going to get a coffee, does anyone want one?’
We all politely declined. ‘Well, she was nice and positive,’ said Niki as we watched Pam walk up the riverbank.
‘I know!’ nodded Janette. ‘Lesson one in life. It’s a basic. Never judge a book by its cover and always give people a chance. Don’t underestimate someone and don’t be quick to jump to conclusions.’
Word quickly got around about our plan. We received an email from Julie, the captain of the Guy Fawkes’ ladies team, wishing us well. Apparently a little bird had told her and she was bowled over by our bravery and couldn’t believe we were doing such a thing. Did we have a website, she wondered?
A website? That would perhaps be a good idea. Helen and Janette were, perhaps unwisely, charged to get this off the ground. Helen said she’d seen somewhere on Facebook someone who did this sort of thing. Someone called Andy? Who lived in her village, Cawood? Armed with the address and, having lived in the area for the past 15 years, supposedly some local knowledge, they set off together on foot to find him. It took a while – about an hour of trampling around in the dark, with various detours up and down the pavement, sloshing up various muddy driveways and searching fruitless cul-de-sacs. They knocked on some eight or nine doors (most of the village, in fact), interrupting people’s supper, or in one case their rapt enjoyment of Coronation Street, before they finally found Andy. They said they knew they’d found the right house when an earnest-looking chap with long hair and pale skin answered the door. And he was lovely. He immediately embraced the idea and offered to get a website up and running as soon as possible. Helen promptly produced a list of things we needed for the website, while Janette did a double-take. She had never known Helen to be so efficient! So as Helen went through the list, Janette enthused about the adventure and the list of charities we were looking at.
There are so many good causes out there; it was hard to know which charities we wanted to support, but Perfect Pam was right. We did ne
ed to choose one or two. It seemed like madness to go to all the trouble of rowing an ocean if we didn’t raise money while we were doing it. We had a meeting at Janette’s house. And it was probably a lot more emotional than any of us intended.
Both Helen and Frances had had a parent die of cancer. Frances’s mother died when Frances was just 28 years old.
‘She’d first been diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 10 and when, after a long, weary battle, she eventually died on the oncology ward of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, there was nowhere for me to go,’ explained Frances. ‘There wasn’t any real support and no one talked about it. My dad did his best but he was grieving himself, and although I was 28 years old I was not really a grown-up. So when I met a woman from cancer support charity Maggie’s at a breakfast seminar through work, I thought their story was so powerful. I really wish they had been around during that period. It would have been so helpful. I find it so odd that she has missed so much of my life. She never met Mark or my children. My father remarried two years after my mother died and that was also a great shock at the time. I was still feeling the hole that my mother had left, but my father had been able to move on. He rang me one day at work and said: “Great news! I’m getting married.” I had not met Audrey at that point. It really struck me that day that a spouse is replaceable, but a mother is not. My stepmother Audrey is lovely. She has always been very supportive and encouraging and has been a wonderful grandmother to my children. And she is fabulous with my father, who was naturally quite lonely when my mother died. It was a relief to know that he was not going to be on his own any more. I still feel my mother’s spirit is close to me – and I felt that more than ever while we were out on the ocean.’
Helen’s situation was similar. Her father also died of cancer. ‘It was a big shock,’ she said. ‘One day he was there, decorating my sitting room, and then six months later he was dead. I remember him being at my house and me thinking, “God, you look very pale,” and he went to his GP because he felt tired all the time. They sent him for a scan and he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It’s one of the worst ones. I don’t think my mum and dad really knew that, so it was just a torturous six months. It would be my birthday and they’d come round and I knew that it’d be the last time he’d be there for my birthday, so I’d be crying at the sink and then trying not to cry when I turned round. It was just awful. Luckily, I wasn’t working at that point, so I could spend all my time with them. That’s what I did. Then I remember the day that Mum phoned me up and said, “He’s really not well.” I went round. The communication between the hospital, the GP and us was really confusing, so nobody knew who we were supposed to ring, what we were supposed to do. Which is why Maggie’s is so important to me, because if we’d had Maggie’s, our experience of his end-of-life would have been so much better. I always remember the last time we were all together as a family. It just happened to be me, my sister, my brother and my mum, all at home before we took him into hospital, and he never came back out. But I was fine with it, because I’d done everything I possibly could and I’d been there by his bedside, so I felt okay about it, actually. What I couldn’t deal with was the funeral bit, which is when my brother Paul and my sister Clare were brilliant. They organised the funeral, they did all of that stuff. I couldn’t even go to the graveside. I went to the church, but I couldn’t go to the grave. But I thought, “Well, Dad wouldn’t care.” I was there when he needed me and I’m there at the church. I found he’d done this thing – a “What’s the meaning of life?” document on his computer. Just his thoughts about why we were here.
‘“The following few pages are just some of my thoughts,” it said. “Questionings and ramblings over more years than I care to remember. Everyone will ponder these basic questions from time to time throughout their lives… I also believe that the utopia of finding all the answers will never happen, although the searching is all very interesting and keeps us busy.”
‘I printed it off and gave it out at the funeral for people to take away. I think during that period I learnt some serious coping strategies – trying not to cry in front of him and just dealing with everything. He was definitely around me on the boat, kicking me up the arse at times when I was scared and needed a boost!’
In fact, we’d all been touched by cancer. Niki’s mum had also fought and survived breast cancer, as had Janette’s mother, who had cancer of the throat, so Maggie’s was our first choice, and a charity very close to all our hearts.
We continued to sit at Janette’s kitchen table, discussing whether we should simply raise money for one charity or if we should add another.
‘Why not do two?’ asked Niki.
‘Spread the love,’ agreed Helen.
‘It will make us work harder,’ added Frances.
‘Then we should definitely do something to do with Yorkshire,’ declared Janette.
We sat and debated and researched, going through the pros and cons of various worthy causes.
‘Yorkshire Air Ambulance?’ suggested Janette. ‘It’s Yorkshire and us two have worked and still work for the NHS.’ She nodded towards Helen. ‘And I have a friend who was rescued by them once.’
‘It’s a popular charity,’ added Helen, who, as a communications officer for the NHS, knows her stuff. ‘And it’s close to our roots and is well worth supporting.’
It was decided. We’d write letters to Maggie’s and Yorkshire Air Ambulance and announce our intention to support them on our challenge, and we’d also sit down and go through the list of contacts we had to set about raising money. Rowing the Atlantic is an expensive business; we had to find ourselves a boat and supplies, and get as much sponsorship as we could, so that none of the money we raised by donations would be used at all on the trip. Everything we raised would go to the charities, of that much we were all agreed. Where the rest of it would come from, though, would be anyone’s guess.
In the meantime, Janette and Ben went to La Gomera to see the start of the 2013 race – the one that Janette had originally thought she’d signed up for just six months before! They booked themselves into the same hotel, the Parador, that we were to stay in two years later (with our plastic bags of chafe-free pants and toothbrushes), and spent four days meeting the rowers and checking over the boats. Although she and Ben principally went for a nice long weekend, their trip did prove invaluable. Not only was it useful in terms of finding accommodation and working out the lie of the land for our arrival two years later, but also Janette came back brimming with confidence.
Firstly, all the rowers they’d met had taken her proposal to row the Atlantic seriously.
‘No one laughed in my face. A couple looked me up and down, but you know, I wasn’t looking very healthy. I was 13 stone and not remotely athletic. But they hadn’t laughed. Not even smirked.’
Secondly, she had been encouraged by the diversity of teams – the fact that not all of them were professional rowers or adventurers. In fact, there was one team who had apparently almost never rowed before. They were a team of handsome young polo players who, by all accounts, just turned up, grabbed their headphones from their digs 10 minutes before the starter klaxon and got into their boat, splashing off into the sunshine, practically still holding a glass of champagne. (Extraordinarily, Atlantic Polo not only finished the Talisker Challenge Race; they were winners in their class and the second team to reach Antigua.)
And thirdly, Janette and Ben came back with the realisation that the hardest part of the race was actually going to be getting to La Gomera in the first place. We had so many things to buy, so many things to organise. The costs, the budget and the amount of energy we would need was a huge undertaking in itself.
By now we were telling anyone and everyone we met about our plan. In the run-up to Christmas, you could give any one of us a glass of wine or a flute of fizz and we would share our story with the room. We needed support and we needed to drum up as much interest in our quest as possible. People were mostly positive when we mentioned
the madness of our idea. They couldn’t believe that we were attempting to do such a thing. At our age! With all our responsibilities! What were we thinking? A couple of people weren’t very kind – mostly florid old men in tight shirts with champagne breath who would insist that we were mad.
‘There’s no way you’ll do that,’ one bloke said. ‘You’ve only rowed on the river. What do you know about the sea?’
And on the school run, there was a little bit of attitude. Mark was asked by a fellow dog-walker friend how Frances could possibly leave her children for that long, as she simply would not be able to do such a thing. To which he replied that she was leaving them with their father, which was possibly an all right thing to do.
Frances said that it takes all sorts to make a world. Some people will never understand. They feel uneasy when other people try and break the mould, rock the boat, and do something a little different; when they stop treading the same path as everyone else.
‘Even my dad said I was bloody mad,’ said Janette. ‘But I think he’d always wanted to do something like that – not row but sail an ocean. And he was worried. He’s sailed a lot himself, and he’d been in some bad weather, so he knew what bad weather could do and he’d been frightened by it many a time! So he had an idea of what I was in for.’
Janette invited her parents and sisters over for Sunday lunch in order to tell them the idea, before they heard it on the grapevine from someone else.
‘You’re mad!’ pronounced Maria.
‘Insane,’ agreed Jane.
‘It’s crazy,’ added Joanne. ‘But then that’s you.’
Janette’s mum was quite worried. ‘What if you need to be rescued?’
‘As far as I know, most boats make it across,’ declared Janette helpfully.
Her mum didn’t seem too pleased with this reply , but nevertheless seemed resigned to the fact that Janette would do it anyhow.
‘Since you were a young child, Janette,’ she said, ‘I have been waiting for news like this. I expected it earlier, if I’m honest. By the time you got to 40 I thought maybe we’d got away with it. You were always determined as a child. You’d never give up. You were bossy, always jumping in with two feet. And NO ONE can tell you what to do! Not ever. Because you’d go and do it anyway!’
Four Mums in a Boat Page 8
