We weren’t sitting together in the hall that day as he started his talk. Actually, not all of us were even there. But those who were sat dotted around the room. Frances was near the back, Janette was to the side and Helen was closer to the front. Humphreys started to explain his new project – microadventures. A pioneering scheme that tries to encourage people to get outside, get out of their comfort zone and go somewhere they’ve never been before. He was an exciting speaker who exuded the sort of positivity that Frances was always talking about. He regaled the room with stories about his cycling trip around the world and about how he broke his foot in the Marathon des Sables. And then, in among his stories of his trips and his experiences, he said something that made our hearts skip a beat.
‘If anyone ever asks you to row an ocean,’ he said, ‘don’t hesitate. Don’t even think about it. Just do it. It is a chance in a lifetime. It’s a moment. And it is something that you will never, ever forget.’
Janette turned around to look at Frances and smiled. And Frances smiled back. And then, through the sea of neatly combed hair and smart jackets, Frances saw Helen turn around. She was beaming – she slowly nodded, a large grin all over her face. She then turned to look at Janette and did the same. Helen was in. She was going to be on that boat. No matter what.
SHIP’S LOG
‘Just say yes. If someone presents you with an opportunity in life, always say yes. You can figure out afterwards how you will manage it. If you say no straight away, the opportunity passes you by and you might not be asked again.’
(JANETTE/SKIPPER)
‘If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.’
NORA ROBERTS, TEARS OF THE MOON
If Helen was on board, Richard was still most adamantly not. Not unreasonably, he was worried. Worried that Helen might have to give up her job (the NHS would surely never give her four months off), worried about money and worried about what would happen to the children if Helen upped-sticks and launched herself on the ocean. While Frances’s and Janette’s husbands were being super-supportive, Helen found herself faced with a wall of silence. ‘He just would not talk about it. He would just say no. No, you can’t possibly leave your job. No, you can’t leave the children. No, you can’t do it. Just no. He was concerned about the money we would lose. About how we were going to manage to pay the bills and the mortgage. All very natural for him to be so worried. I’m glad now that one of us was!’
But Helen was convinced she was doing the right thing, and of course saw signs and inspiration everywhere. ‘Even on TV. I remember watching I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! with Melanie Sykes and watching her beating all the contestants who were younger than her. She is my age and I remember thinking, “Look at her, being all feisty and fabulous. I would love to do something that would test my limits. I would love to do something like that.” Then I realised that this challenge – to row the Atlantic – had come to me. I’d asked for it, and now it had come, so I just had to do it. Even if Richard was not happy about it.’
So Helen used the gentle art of ‘familiarity breeds acceptance’. Instead of giving up, she printed off the Atlantic Campaigns material and left it on the kitchen table. And there it sat for days, weeks, months, like a giant unanswered question or a very tacit challenge. Periodically, it would be opened and closed, but it never left the table. ‘Every time I went near it, Richard would walk out of the room, but he never actually threw it in the bin.’
Although Niki and Gareth had started discussing the challenge, the idea itself was a little problematic. ‘We’re very close; we have the sort of relationship where we talk about anything and everything. I don’t think he wanted me to be gone for so long.’
Emotional attachment aside, they also had a business together. ‘He has a very strong work ethic, so he also could not understand why I would want to take time away from our business or how it could work without me.’
Also, Niki’s children were younger than the rest of ours. Unlike Janette’s, who were fairly self-sufficient, Corby was 11 and Aiden was 7 at the time, and despite the fact that Niki’s parents – Bunny and Peter – lived right next door to them, there was still the question of childcare, the school run, homework and tea. But once the idea had been suggested, Niki found it difficult to let it go.
‘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