The second of four girls, her childhood was peripatetic, and financially it was either feast or famine. Her father was also no stranger to graft, and had at any one time an HGV business, a bingo hall, a coach business and a tyre business. ‘Some Christmases there were loads of presents and sometimes there was very little.’ So when Janette got the chance she worked, and she worked hard. She took the plunge and set up a clinical trial business, although it wasn’t exactly good timing as her husband Ben had just started university. ‘We were really strapped for cash. Every month was absolutely tight – we’d go to the wire, scrabbling around for change, because neither of us was really making anything. It was very hard for us for the first couple of years until the business got going. We didn’t have any holidays – a lot of people don’t, I know, but we didn’t for years. We had an old blue Nissan car and Ben used to make a lot of meals that were full of potatoes so we wouldn’t feel hungry.’
But Janette was very focused. ‘I was once one of those kids who had free school meals. It was so obvious, the kids who were on free meals. We had different-coloured tickets from the rest of them and it was like a taboo was attached to you. It was like being put into a box, and I was desperate to break out of that box. Why should I be put into a box in the first place?’
So then, together, she and Ben bought some old offices in Selby, which they stripped of paint every night until two in the morning, with one heater on and James asleep in a carry-cot. They mortgaged themselves to the hilt and worked all hours while Ben also put himself through university. The idea was to do up the building, rent out parts of it and start a business.
‘I always thought, “What’s the worst that can happen? We lose our house? So what – we have lots of family and friends who would take us in.”’
One night the stripping and the painting got a little boring, and nine months later Safiya was born. More mouths to feed, more work to be done. Fortunately, the business was beginning to grow, Ben graduated from university with a first-class honours degree and they took on their first employee: Janette’s mum! Eventually Janette’s clinical trial business broke through and then her life changed and became a lot more comfortable; she and Ben were able to send their children to private school.
Haunted by the memory of having to conceal a romance for two years – even having to hide in the back of a car – because her boyfriend’s posh parents didn’t want him consorting with the likes of her, Janette wanted something different for her own children.
‘Obviously his mother didn’t want a Catholic girl like me to be involved with her son,’ she remembers. ‘Little things that happen in your life like that can either go one way or the other. They either knock you down so low that you never get up again, or they make you more determined.’
And it was at the children’s school, St Peter’s in York, established in ad 627, that we all met. Not in the car park, as you might expect, as half of us aren’t around to do the school run, but at the Guy Fawkes’ Boat Club (so named because one of St Peter’s illustrious alumni was Mr Fawkes himself) one drizzly Saturday in September 2012.
Our children were all attending school on Saturdays, so we each had the mornings free. We could either lie in bed with a cup of tea and a newspaper, sit googling nice things to wear or put on a pair of wellies, a woolly hat and some Lycra shorts and learn to row. All four of us chose the latter.
Quite why we each of us decided to spend those spare mornings freezing on a muddy riverbank instead of eating a muffin in a coffee shop in town is a question in itself.
For Janette the answer was simple. Baby James was now grown up and had descended into his non-communicative teenage years. He was in a rowing team at school, so Janette concluded that if she also learnt to row, they’d have something to talk about, and she might lose some weight in the process.
For Frances it was a question of a sudden gap opening up in her schedule (her youngest, Jack, had just started going to school on Saturdays), which urgently needed to be filled. She is not someone who can sit still. Even during the ad breaks while watching television she has a burning desire to do something. So the idea that she would have nothing to do on a Saturday morning, nothing at all, while both of her sons were now at school was enough motivation in itself. She’d done the 10-kilometre runs, the Coast to Coast races and already joined the BSAC (British Sub Aqua Club), diving Stoney Cove in Leicestershire and over the harbour wall at St Abbs on the east coast of Scotland, so signing up to the Guy Fawkes’ Boat Club would be no giant leap at all.
And she and Niki Doeg knew each other from book club. Their sons, Corby and Jack, have been friends since they were in nursery together – so why wouldn’t Niki also want to fill a small window on a Saturday morning? In between running her finance business with her husband, Gareth. And training to be a rugby coach. While looking after two small boys. Her plate was simply not full enough already! So leaving Aiden (her youngest) behind with Gareth, Niki turned up at the boathouse at 8.20 a.m. (just after drop-off) on that first Saturday morning at the start of a new school year.
Helen Butters bumped into Niki and Frances dressed in their tracksuits after their first session as she was picking up her son, Henry (who was also in the same class as Corby and Jack). She insists that she’d been thinking about learning a new skill when she saw them, that she’d been wanting something to do on a Saturday morning as she was only currently working three days a week for the NHS in Wakefield. Not that rowing or getting wet was particularly Helen’s thing, but she does not like to be bored. She’d been a stay-at-home mother once before, for four years, and it had driven her ever so slightly to distraction. She maintains that there is only so much sitting around in ‘cream kitchens, in pretty houses with very thick carpets, in a bubble of niceness’ that she can cope with. The ‘Cashmere Mafia’ with their champagne breakfasts, their Pilates classes and their meeting for afternoon coffee drove her to set up a small business with a friend, Rebecca. It was a loyalty-based card scheme, ‘My High Street Card’, and they went from shop to shop like contestants in The Apprentice, getting local retailers to join up. The scheme was successful for a while, before Helen gave it up to re-join the NHS. ‘I was a much better mother when I worked than when I was at home full-time, because then I would get frustrated and extremely grumpy.’
So it was effectively the second week of rowing club when we all finally met. Well, actually, when we all finally met Janette. It was a dank autumn morning. The air was cold enough to leave a conversation hanging, long after the sound had disappeared. The pretty wooden-slatted school boat house was bustling with women, sorting out their bags, stamping in their boots, keen to get out onto the nearby River Ouse. When, through the early-morning mist, a plump vision in blue and pink rubber sailing boots with a hat as tight as a diaphragm over her blonde head came tramping down the towpath towards us, with a nervous grin on her face. It was Helen who noticed her first.
‘Who’s that weird woman in the boots and hat?’ she asked, zipping up her fleece.
‘I’m not sure,’ frowned Frances. ‘Have you ever seen her before?’
And to her credit, despite not knowing anyone, Janette came over and introduced herself, and within a few minutes she had squeezed her ample derrière into the back of a very thin, very unstable, very wobbly boat, her hat pulled down over her ears. Her reasoning being that if she sat at the back then no one would notice her. It was obvious that all the other women knew each other, except her. She was more than a little worried that she wouldn’t fit in. Fortunately, there was no time to ponder the social niceties and her insecurities before the no-nonsense, bellowing tones of the coach took over.
We limped into the middle of the river, splashing and thrashing our oars as we went, and for the next two hours the coach whipped our behinds, shouting commands and bemoaning