Four Mums in a Boat: Friends who rowed 3000 miles, broke a world record and learnt a lot about life along the way

‘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 breakfast 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