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

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!’

       SHIP’S LOG:

      ‘Four very different women brought together through a love of rowing and none of us would ever have imagined we would join a rowing club. Trying something new or choosing a different path to the one you normally take can definitely lead to amazing and wonderful adventures, including new friendships to be treasured.’

      (JANETTE/SKIPPER)

       CHAPTER 4

       The Team

       ‘That’s a little further than Poppleton.’

      DR CAROLINE LENNOX

      Over the next few months we entered a few more races and actually made it to the starting line. Turns out we were the first ‘senior women’ to enter any races at all in the history of the club. Not that there hadn’t been any mum rowers before, but they had all mostly been recreational rowers, joining the club for social reasons – for the chat, the barbecues and the club ball. It had been the fathers who had raced before, and now we were joining them, and quite often racing with them in the same boat.

      Frances and Niki were, to be honest, rather better than Helen and Janette. Helen had a tendency to talk a lot while rowing and Janette was a little too unconcerned with technique and could often disappear into her own world or, to put it less politely, lose interest while on the river. ‘I liked the idea of being part of a team, while still being with my thoughts.’ Frances and Niki were a little less slapdash – Niki liked the ‘precision’ of the strokes and the technique, whereas Frances just loved being out on the water, away from the office, the telephone and the meetings.

      There was one race at Shipley Glen in Bradford where Niki and Frances were put together as a pair, and another where they raced as a four with two other members of the Guy Fawkes’ Boat Club, Charles and Nigel. The second race was in York – the Head Race – and there were hundreds at the staggered start. The weather was kind when the four set off up to the head of the river, waiting for their allotted slot, but during the 45 minutes they had to wait, hanging onto a tree by the riverbank, the heavens opened. ‘Rain, hail, high winds, the lot, and we were sat there getting soaked in nothing but our Guy Fawkes onesies.’

      And it wasn’t just the rowing that kept pulling us together. Helen and Frances had spent the whole of that summer jogging every Monday evening. They each had a child in the York Athletics squad and they would have to drive to an athletics track over the other