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

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СКАЧАТЬ the remaining pair to row the four-man boat without them.

      So we all kept an eye on Helen. Well, Niki did. Sympathy, or indeed empathy, is not something that courses freely through the veins of either Janette or Frances. They are more Yorkshire than pudding, and their suffering of fools and vomitus is limited to say the least. But what neither of them could fault Helen on was her absolute determination to keep on going during those first 72 hours. She was not so much ‘eat, sleep, row, repeat’; more ‘puke, sleep, puke, row, puke, repeat’. It was impressive. Her eyes were glazed, her conversation was non-existent, but still she managed to row. The waves crashed against the side of the boat and Helen stood firm. ‘Just a few more days,’ we all kept on thinking; just a few more days and we hoped Helen would be able to crack a smile and keep down the all-in-one breakfast-in-a-bag.

      But it was about 2 a.m. in the morning on the third day when disaster struck. The boat was lurching from side to side in the huge waves, the few lights we had on board were flickering and it was Helen’s turn up on the oars.

      ‘Five minutes!’ yelled Niki, knocking on the door to the sealed cabin.

      ‘What do you think?’ asked Janette through the darkness, sliding back and forth on her seat. ‘Do you think Helen is any better?’

      ‘A bit,’ said Niki, holding onto the boat while trying to slip out of her wet-weather gear. ‘She is being very brave. Stick to the Ultra Fuel and I’m sure she’ll pull through, eventually.’

      Just then a huge wave hit the side of the boat, sending Niki flying. With one leg still in her trousers, she didn’t stand a chance as she was hurled against a metal peg that sank hard into the base of her spine.

      ‘Oh my GOD!’ she screamed in the darkness. ‘Oh my GO-O-OD!’

      ‘Are you okay?’ Janette leapt off the oars.

      Niki was writhing around in the water at the bottom of the boat, screaming and clutching the base of her spine. Both Frances and Helen appeared, from either end of the boat.

      ‘No! NO! I am not!’

      ‘Are you hurt?’

      ‘Yes! My bum, my bum –’

      Niki was shaking and stammering with cold and pain.

      ‘Have you broken anything? Cut anything? Is there blood?’ asked Janette, scrabbling about in the darkness.

      ‘No. I don’t know… my back, my coccyx, my pelvis. It’s agony… Aaaah – this is worse than childbirth! Worse… than… bloody… child-birth!’

      ‘Here,’ shouted Frances, staggering towards her. ‘Here’s the medical bag.’

      ‘Okay, okay,’ said Janette, leaning over and grabbing the bag. ‘On a scale of one to ten. One to ten, remember. What is your pain?’

      ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ spat Niki. ‘Once a nurse, always a bloody nurse.’ Janette was indeed once a nurse.

      ‘It’s a ten! Of course it’s a ten!’

      ‘Okay, okay,’ said Janette, fumbling through the bag in the darkness. ‘How about… paracetamol? No.Tramadol? Or…’ She strained to read the label in the dark. ‘Diclofenac?’

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘It’s a painkiller and an anti-inflammatory.’

      ‘What will it do?’ gasped Niki.

      ‘Make you go… um, diclofuckit?’ suggested Janette.

      ‘I’ll have two diclofuckits,’ said Niki desperately.

      ‘Two,’ nodded Janette in agreement.

      ‘And I don’t know what you’re looking at,’ said Niki, lying flat at the bottom of the boat, staring up at Frances as yet another wave crashed overhead. ‘It’s all your fault we’re here!’

      ‘Yeah!’ agreed Helen, speaking for the first time in 24 hours. ‘This is the last time I listen to any of your bright ideas.’

       SHIP’S LOG:

      ‘We were holding on, yet at the same time we were letting go. The first 24 hours of our row were about letting go – letting go of life enough so that we could venture into the unknown. Each of us had to eventually stop looking at the outline of the land and turn instead towards the vast open ocean. That first stroke of the oars away from the shore was our first step into an unknown world. It takes courage to let go of what you are familiar with. Once the step has been taken, there is no knowing how the ride will go – and that’s the fun part.’

      (JANETTE/SKIPPER)

       CHAPTER 3

       The Beginning

       ‘A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.’

      YOKO ONO

       3 May 2013, Leeds

      It was just past seven in the morning as Frances Davies, a 45-year-old lawyer from York, was driving down Whitehall Road, Leeds, listening to Stan Graham, a favourite folk singer of hers.

      She’d been up since 5.30 a.m., as she had been every working day for the past 20 years. As a busy mother of two, it was the only time when she could have a moment to herself. The house was quiet and her husband, Mark, and their two children, Jay and Jack, would be asleep, so she would potter around their Victorian terraced house in the centre of York, listening to motivational TED talks on her computer, soaking up the words and ideas of Diana Nyad, who, at 60, was the only person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. Either that, or Frances would sneak in an extra chapter of a book, with her yoghurt and fruit, reading about ex-headmistress Anne Mustoe’s account of cycling around the world at the age of 50. And then she’d kiss everyone goodbye while they were still asleep in their beds, get into the car and drive the 25-mile journey to the office and the job she’d had for the past 13 years.

      Sitting at the traffic lights that morning, dressed in her grey suit and white shirt, with her chin on the steering wheel, she watched the same old man walk the same elderly dog across the same road at the same time as he did every day. She looked up the road towards her looming office building and across at all the other commuters sitting in their cars. She thought of Patrick Swayze from one of her favourite films – Point Break – and those ‘dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins’.

      There were only a few lights on in the office – she’d be one of the first in, again, and one of the last to leave. She’d miss school drop-off and pick-up as usual. She’d probably have to stop for a drink with a client at the end of the day and wouldn’t be home until well past nine that evening.

      ‘Who knows what’s around the bend? A brand-new start or the bitter end?’ sang Stan Graham in Easy Street.

      Frances glanced at the radio, her palms feeling clammy, СКАЧАТЬ