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

‘Square!’

‘Feather!’

‘Square!’

‘More on stroke!’

‘More on bow!’

‘Half!’

‘Quarter!’

‘What the hell’s a square?’ whispered Janette as she wobbled about in the back.

‘No idea!’ hissed Helen as she wobbled about in the seat in front. ‘What’s a sodding feather?’

‘Christ!’ shrieked Janette as she splashed herself in the face with what felt like a bucket of freezing, fetid river water. ‘What are we doing?’

None of the coach’s words meant anything to us. Clearly his favourite method of teaching was total immersion, or indeed a baptism. He bawled and begged us, telling us we were letting the whole boat down by our awful ineptitude. We should whip back and forth on our seat using our strong legs, our blades should glide through water. We should have strength and style. And all the while, all we wanted to focus on was trying to remain out of the water as the boat listed precariously from side to side in the freezing River Ouse.

At the end of the lesson, we crawled – exhausted and decidedly damp – up the muddy riverbank. We all had pink cheeks, runny noses, painful hands and wet backsides, but it was immediately obvious who was going to be coming back the following week. Half the women looked miserable, like it had been the worst two hours of their lives, and there were a few, like us, who were clearly invigorated and excited, adrenalised and very much alive.

‘Who fancies a cup of coffee at The Grange?’ suggested Niki, looking across the expansive playing fields towards the small Georgian hotel next door to the school.

‘Great,’ said Frances.

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Helen.

‘Janette?’ asked Niki, looking over at her.

‘Me?’

And that was it. We would meet every Saturday after that, come rain or shine (mainly rain), and we’d row up and down the Ouse, falling in, getting back into the boat, only to be shouted at by the coach over and over. And then we would retire to The Grange and drink coffee and eat as many biscuits as was politely possible in a smart four-star hotel, while we talked about our husbands, our children and our lives.

People mostly thought we were mad. Our husbands thought we were a little eccentric. Why would four middle-aged women want to spend their Saturday mornings freezing their breasts off rowing, rather poorly, up and down a river? There was the exercise element. And, of course, we were all learning a new skill, but truthfully, after a while it became about the friendship.

We are four completely different characters. Janette is the go-getter with a very dry sense of humour. Helen is always the cheerful one – gossipy, full of stories and tall tales of angels, feathers and the universe. Frances is very laid-back, sanguine and calm; it takes a lot to rile her. And then there’s Niki, the serious, dependable one, who is never knowingly out of wet wipes, with a handbag to rival Mary Poppins, right down to the hat stand.

Our backgrounds could also not be more diverse. Niki was born in Nassau in the Bahamas. Her parents were schoolteachers who travelled all over the world, and Niki lived in Mexico, Dubai, Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia before she was sent to boarding school near York at the age of 10. Rebellious at school, with dyed hair and an attitude to match, she managed to pass her A levels before getting a job at the nascent First Direct bank during her gap year. Having toyed with the idea of joining the Army, she never took up her place at university, preferring to work her way up through the bank and meeting her future husband, Gareth, at the Mansion Pub in Roundhay Park, Leeds, on New Year’s Eve when she was 20. ‘He was quite drunk, I was quite drunk, and he was asking girls for New Year’s Eve kisses. I refused, saying I would only kiss him at midnight.’ And they have been together ever since. Literally. They bought a house together quite soon afterwards and have barely – almost never – spent a day apart. They finally got married in 1999. The theme was fancy dress: Cavaliers Only! Gareth was dressed in high boots and a tabard and Niki came down the aisle in a fabulous corseted gold frock with a feathered mask.

Helen is married to Richard, a former barrister who is currently the Director of Public Prosecutions on the Isle of Man. A Catholic grammar school girl, she attended Notre Dame School in Leeds before turning down a place at the London School of Fashion to work at LTHT (Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust). She worked her way up to management level, only to give up her job to get married and have children.

‘I met Richard in an All Bar One and it was time,’ she said. ‘I had got to a point when all I was doing was finishing work on a Friday and going out for a few glasses of wine. I remember I was waiting for the bus and this man selling The Big Issue was standing next to me. He asked me to look after his dog and we ended up chatting. He was selling the magazine, while I was holding the dog, and I just thought, “Maybe, Helen, the universe is trying to tell you something.” This was not the best use of my Friday night, after all. So subconsciously, I believe, I must have put it out there that I really wanted to find someone. I wanted to settle down. It was only a few weeks later when Richard walked into All Bar One and started to talk to me. He was very funny and bright and clearly one of those people who knows what he wants and gets it and, boof, that was it. Before I knew it, we were married. It was all a bit of whirlwind.’

Frances, on the other hand, grew up in Denby Dale, a quiet village in West Yorkshire in the rolling hills outside Huddersfield. Her mother (a school teacher) and her father (a chemical engineer) got together in their twenties and settled down to family life in Yorkshire, raising Frances and her older brother, Robert. Her parents were not ones to stray too far from the county borders: her father made a single cross-Channel trip for business and her mother visited France once on a school trip. Family holidays were spent in the Lake District and Wales. Exotic travel was not high on the family’s agenda, nor adrenaline-fuelled experiences…

Running was Frances’s escape as a teenager. She ran for Longwood Harriers on the track and in cross-country events, and loved nothing better in the evenings and at weekends than a run across the local hills and along the back lanes around neighbouring villages. Running gave Frances a sense of freedom and independence, and the space to let her mind wander. ‘I just love that feeling of almost leaving the real world when a racing gun has started. You are in this no man’s land. Such a feeling of flow. Then there’s the finish line and the elation when you cross it.’

Perhaps her parents shouldn’t have been so shocked, then, when Frances chose to go away from Yorkshire, all the way to Southampton University, for her degree course. After completing her chemistry degree, Frances studied law in Manchester and qualified as a solicitor, moving to Leeds to join a commercial law firm. Here she met and married her husband Mark, a lawyer at the same firm. ‘Mark has always said that I have a restless soul. One of our first dates was abseiling (my idea), and shortly after that I persuaded him to join me in having a go at paragliding. I think I took him out of his comfort zone, but he must have liked it given that we were married within 18 months of getting together!’

They managed to fit in a trek in Nepal and a London Marathon, and then plans for more ambitious adventures had to be put on hold in 2001 with the birth of their son, Jay, who was closely followed by his brother, Jack, the following year.

‘When the boys were little we used to go to libraries a lot and one day at Acomb Library in the York suburbs, while they took out picture books, I borrowed Debra Veal’s Rowing it Alone, the story of a woman who rowed the Atlantic solo after setting off with her husband. He had to abandon the trip when he couldn’t cope with being out at sea. I also read books by Anne Mustoe and Dervla Murphy – they were my armchair adventures. I would read all these books and dream and think, “I’d love to do that one day.”’

Instead, she channelled her energies into her legal career and raising her family. With the routines of daily life eating away at any spare time, Frances’s thirst for adventure had to be satisfied by taking part in occasional running, cycling or open-water swimming races. But while she was taking part in these races she still dreamed of bigger adventures.

And Janette? Well, her husband Ben’s father was in the French Foreign Legion. Moroccan by birth, Ben was brought up in Paris by his young mother and older father. He was only 15 years old when his father decided to move the family back to Morocco. Ben refused to come, electing instead to stay with his elder brother in Paris, only for him to be turfed out onto the streets when his brother’s girlfriend moved in. He found himself living in a monastery and training to be a Catholic priest – a vocation he thankfully passed up for what was supposed to be a brief sojourn in Yorkshire. Janette always says he came into her life at completely the right time. A vision in white jeans and cowboy boots, he danced into her life in her sister’s sitting room – an inauspicious entrance for a guardian angel who rescued her from a life of impecunious partying. Janette’s sister, Maria, ran what turned out to be a rather posh squat in the middle of Selby, which was responsible for many parties and many international relationships and indeed marriages. Janette’s other sister, Jane, had met her Spanish husband while Samba-ing around the sofa, and as soon as Ben opened his mouth to speak in his thick French-Yorkshire accent, Janette knew he was the man for her! He was invited to her father’s fiftieth birthday party (by Janette’s sister); they moved in together soon after and were married two years later.

So here we were: four completely different women, brought together through our mutual love of biscuits and adventure by a school rowing club in the middle of York.

To start off with we didn’t venture far. We’d go north to Poppleton and back, which was a mere six miles – of blood, sweat and swearing. Or we’d pootle up the Ouse simply admiring the pretty bridges and stunning architecture of York. Sometimes we’d row south to Bishopthorpe and back, another five or so miles of grunting and groaning, and that would be sufficient to exhaust us and send us on our hands and knees to The Grange for a large latte and a plate of shortbread.

We did manage one trip to Newton-on-Ouse, which involved a 10-mile row there and a 10-mile row back, but it was fortunately broken up by a lengthy pub lunch in between. Apart from us four, there was a small group of hardcore Fawkes regulars, including Joan, Sally, Liz and a close friend of ours, Dr Caroline Lennox, and it wasn’t too long before we all thought we might branch out, move it up a gear and enter a few races.

Not that we fancied our chances. Truth be told, we knew we were appalling, though perhaps not quite as appalling as our first outing proved to be.

Obviously it was not our fault and, frankly, it would have been better had we not invited most of our families to line the riverbank to bear witness to our fabulous rowing prowess. But we were keen to prove that we had not been wasting our Saturday mornings, and anyway it was quite a nice day and the race was in York, at the rowing club, so it wasn’t far for anyone to go.

We arrived, dressed in our regulation rowing-club blue-and-white skin-tight Lycra onesies, very much looking and feeling the part. Janette and Helen, who were in the first boat of eight to race, were exuding a little bit of confidence until they saw their cox. He was rather a large chap, with a fuller chest than any of us – not the usual light, pint-sized peanut you hope to have steering the boat.

‘Why have we got the big cox?’ whispered Janette.

‘I suppose we’re beginners and no one really wants to steer us,’ ventured Helen.

‘Well, I hope he knows what he’s doing,’ said Janette.

Sadly, the cox appeared to know even less about rowing than we did, and no sooner had we all parked our behinds on the seats and laced our feet into our shoes than we ploughed straight into the riverbank. The Ouse was obviously quite busy with crews of fours and eights all heading up the river to the start of the race, so the going was tricky. It required skill and forethought to negotiate the traffic, neither of which our increasingly sweaty cox appeared to have.

‘Number 48!’ an umpire, marching along the bank, shouted through a megaphone. ‘Number 48! Watch yourselves!’

‘Is that us?’ asked Janette as we careered into another boat.

‘Yup!’ replied Helen right behind her.

‘Number 48!’ the woman shouted again as we ricocheted off the boat and into the bank. ‘I really think you need to come off the river.’

‘I think we need to come off the river,’ repeated the cox, his round face pale with sweat as he frantically looked around him.

‘This’, declared Janette, as she whipped back and forth on her seat, pulling at her oar, ‘is our first ever race and we are not, I repeat not, coming off the river for anyone. We have family watching.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the crowd. ‘We are not coming off!’

On seeing the determined look on Janette’s face, the cox panicked. We hit the side of another boat and zigzagged straight into the bank.

‘Number 48!’ wailed the megaphone. ‘You are a danger to yourselves and a danger to everyone else on the river! We’re launching the safety boat!’

And that was that. We were towed off the river in front of all the spectators; we limped back to the boathouse in full view of our home crowd, and all the while the safety officer kept asking us what was wrong. Janette kept blaming it on a fault with the steering system, while avoiding the chubby cox’s eye.

‘Well,’ she explained as we shoved our wellington boots back on again, ‘there’s no point in blaming him, the poor sod. He knows as much about rowing as we do!’