Читать книгу The Accidental Entrepreneur - Allis Janine - Страница 8

At 21, with a blue backpack, $6000, a plane ticket and a determined look, I set out on my own. I can still see Mum's bewildered face as I kissed her goodbye at the airport. To this day, she still complains that I didn't turn around to wave goodbye like all the rest of the travellers; my sights were firmly set on the future. I was off to Marine County, San Francisco, to work as a camp counsellor during the American spring and summer.

The camp was for children of different backgrounds, some with health challenges. Many were deaf and in one of the sessions all the children were blind. At the camp I taught the kids about trees and nature, and how to swim, make candles and light a camp fire. At the start of the camp I had to take the children through what to do in the event of a fire or an evacuation. I also explained what they needed to always have at the bottom of their bed – a blanket, shoes and a torch. I asked at the end if anyone had any questions. A blind child lifted her hand and asked what the torch was for. I said to see in the dark, which clearly would not help this particular child; she laughed her head off at this, as did the rest of the class. Obviously, they had played this joke before, but the experience was such a great learning curve for me on how people are people. Not only did I learn a bit of American Sign Language, but I also learned patience and appreciation for what I had as I watched these children with extreme physical challenges overcome daily obstacles.

When the camp ended, I travelled with some of the camp counsellors I had befriended. We travelled up and down the California coast, hiked the Grand Canyon, sat by Lake Tahoe and eventually ended up in New York. From there, we flew to London. I found the city a bit too depressing – grey skies, little houses and lots of rain. I contacted an agency and quickly scored a job as a nanny in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, a little village in France, about two hours from Paris. It was the birthplace of Matisse and the site of much fighting during World War I.

I arrived in the village and couldn't find anyone who spoke English (or at least chose to speak it to me), except the woman I worked for. She was, not to put too fine a point on it, a cow. I was hired to look after her three children and ended up in the basement doing all the ironing and most of the cleaning; I felt like Cinderella, without my Prince Charming in the distance. She wouldn't talk to me for days on end; at other times, she would shout at me for mispronouncing the little French I knew. The kids were lovely – or at least I think they were. They spoke no English and I no French; perhaps they actually said awful things to me. I will never know. Overall, it was a horrible situation, but at the time I couldn't see many alternatives. All I could think was that I should give it my best shot. And sticking with the job was good grounding in finding solutions to problems; when you travel you have to rely on your own resources.

I had been playing Cinderella for the evil French woman for a few months when a friend from Oz called me. She was visiting her father in Munich for two weeks and invited me to meet up with her there. I was so miserable in France, I jumped at the chance. Days later I was in Munich with the one line of German I knew, ‘ein Weißbier, bitte' (which literally translates as ‘one white beer, please'). A much-needed and well-used phrase when travelling through Germany. With the same friend, I travelled on to Denmark and that's where I spent my first Christmas away from home. In Australia, my family celebrates Christmas on Christmas Day; Mum makes a big Christmas lunch and we all sit around eating and opening presents. Denmark celebrates on Christmas Eve, so my Christmas lunch there was spent in a local hotel eating a sandwich and drinking a beer. Even the white Christmas didn't lighten my mood – I'd been travelling for nearly a year and I was starting to miss home.

After Denmark money was running low. My friend and I heard there was work in the Canary Islands selling time share, so we made our way to an island called Tenerife. Tenerife was a major tourist attraction for the English; its beaches had velvet-soft, black sand attributed to the local volcano, which not everybody thought was a good thing. (Two years before the time I was there, the council thought having white sand would help tourism and dumped 200 tonnes on the beaches. Within 48 hours, the white beaches turned back into the black sandy beaches they were meant to be.) My job on the island was to get tourists to visit the timeshare resorts that were popping up everywhere. One of the many downfalls to the job was that ‘promoting' was considered illegal. ‘Illegal' in the Canary Islands was a grey area as far as I could tell. As long as the police were making money off the promoters, they turned a blind eye to the dozen or so on each corner. This is how the system worked: a police officer would issue an ‘on the spot fine' to the promoter (me), the promoter would give the police cash, the police would then give the promoter a receipt, the promoter would then take the receipt to their boss to be reimbursed for the ‘fine'.

This all appeared to be a viable way to earn money, until my friend, who was now also my flatmate, revealed her dodgy side. She and an equally dodgy policeman decided she would purchase a receipt book off him. My flatmate then used the receipts to fraudulently claim reimbursement from the timeshare company. In addition to the scam, my flatmate used the money to buy drugs, thus leaving herself with no money to pay off the policeman for his part in the arrangement. My problem wasn't that I did anything wrong, it was that I was associated with her. I knew over a dozen English friends who were arrested and held without charge for simply being in the vicinity of a pub fight. (They had done their annual ‘boys booze up' in the mountains and a fight broke out in one of the pubs. The police instructed all taxis to take anyone in the area who wanted to go to Playa de las Américas – where we lived – directly to jail. One of the lads was only fifteen.) In a country where corruption exists, association often means guilt; I was in as much hot water as my flatmate. I was facing the same fate as her if she didn't come up with the money ‘owed' to the police.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when my flatmate asked me to leave the front door to our flat open because she had lost her key. I awoke at 2 am to find a six-foot-five security guard standing next to my bed complete with baton, handcuff and a gun. One of his hands was heading under my sheet and the other was undoing his pants. You never know how you're going to react in these situations. Strangely what went through my mind at that moment was not fear – it was pure fury! Who does he think he is? How dare he touch me! Oh my God, is that a gun? — these were the outraged thoughts that were running through my head. Making a split-second decision, I yelled, ‘GET OUT!' To my surprise, he did. I kept yelling and he backed away saying something in Spanish as I stood at the front door. I slammed the door shut, returned to bed and slept. Thinking back, I can't believe that was my reaction. If asked, I would have assumed that I would be a dribbling mess at such a frighteningly close call. However, the next morning the full extent of what might have happened sank in.

After that night, with only a few days until my flatmate's debts were due to be paid back to the police, I decided it was time to leave. It was an easy decision to make, especially because my fifteen English friends were still in jail with no chance of even seeing a judge. (They'd been there for three months by this stage.) This place was not a place where you wanted to get into trouble. My flatmate decided to come with me. After living in Tenerife for four months, we hitched a ride with friends on a catamaran heading for Portugal. Ten days later, we found ourselves in the Algarve in southern Portugal. I was funding both myself and my friend, who kept promising she would pay me back, but never did. In the Algarve we came across some fellow backpackers who had just returned from the south of France. They had been working on yachts for the rich and famous and their stories convinced me this seemed like the direction to head in, so I packed my bags and headed back to France, alone.

So, I'm in Antibes, France, with $40 to my name, no ticket home and $2000 in credit card debt. (I had cashed in my return airline ticket months ago.) Yet, interestingly, I wasn't the slightest bit concerned. Was it the arrogance of youth or perhaps that I knew I would figure it out? I'm not sure – but I do know, if it was today, I would be having heart palpitations. But in 1985, I just knew all would be fine.

The south of France was magical, complete with cobblestone lanes and old men playing boules in the parks. Restaurants and cafes spilt out onto the streets and dogs sat at tables like people, eating off china plates. The quays were full of large white palace-like boats. I was off on another adventure.

At the local pub, an Englishman informed me there was a job on a boat called the Deneb Star, based in Villefranche-sur-Mer, near the border with Italy and a 20-minute train ride from Antibes. After a couple of phone calls (from a pay phone), I got an interview. I was wearing the only nice outfit I had, which just happened to be a woollen jacket with a matching woollen mini skirt. It was summer and 30 °C. Unbeknown to me, the train that I hopped on was an express train to Italy (and remember – this was before the days of the EU). With no passport and no fluency in Italian, I had to convince the Italian border guards that I simply needed to get back across the border to my appointment. Many hand gestures later, I was back on the train and off to my interview.

I arrived in the beautiful village of Villefranche-sur-Mer. I had a moment of bliss, soaking up the surroundings; then I realised I had an hour's walk in my woollens around a massive castle to the quay where the boat was berthed. The bliss turned to big drops of sweat and throbbing feet. Miraculously, I arrived on time, dripping in sweat from head to toe, to meet the captain. I'm pretty sure he didn't offer me the job because he felt sorry for me in my ridiculous attire and with my red, sweaty face. I believe it just may have been the tiny, white porky pie that came blurting out of my mouth: ‘I have enormous yacht experience. I'm from Melbourne!' Suddenly, my money troubles were over. I now had accommodation, food and a job as head stewardess, all in one fell swoop. And after all, I was from Melbourne, and I had seen plenty of yachts.

The boat was 74 feet long. Think of a three-storey house with four bedrooms, a guest area and a further four bedrooms for crew. Now think of a cupboard – that's the cabin I shared with the other stewardess. The space in our cabin was about 1.5 × 2.5 metres and it was at the front of the yacht, so it was pointy in shape. It had a bunk bed about half the size of a normal single bed and the ceiling height was about 2 metres. And we had to share the tiniest wardrobe you have probably ever seen. Despite travelling in a cupboard, I was in heaven – I was on the French Riviera, cruising in a multimillion-dollar yacht. I had gone from dodging police, a potential rapist and a drug-addicted flatmate to floating in paradise.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll

Six weeks after I started on the Deneb Star, David Bowie (yes, the David Bowie) bought the yacht. I was sailing the Mediterranean on the luxurious boat of a bona fide celebrity. Bowie was an amazing, down-to-earth, great bloke. He spent an enormous amount of time with the crew and we were very much part of his ‘gang'. He took us to parties and was generous with his time. We cruised with him and many other rich and famous people to such events as the Cannes Film Festival and Monaco Grand Prix, and across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. We even stayed in his Bali-inspired house on Mustique Island in the West Indies.

David travelled with an entourage that included his financial adviser, Bruce Dunbar, his son, Joe, Joe's nanny, David's girlfriend and a couple of others. Just to name-drop, here are a few passengers who came on board: Robin Williams, Mick Jagger, Eric Idle, Steve Martin and Michael Caine. This time in David's life was family time; there were actually no drunken parties, drugs or sex (although that doesn't include the fact that he sunbaked naked on the top of the yacht). There was, however, a lot of rock and roll. At the time, Bowie was starting a new band called Tin Machine, which meant a great deal of time was spent practising. During the day-to-day routine of life on the yacht, I would honestly forget that he was the David Bowie, although one day he was warming up with Space Oddity and my mouth just dropped. I then said out loud, to no-one in particular, ‘That is David Bowie!' (For the record, Bowie was a beautiful person who kept his feet on the ground. And if you want to know why Bowie has two differently coloured eyes, it's because he and his best friend were in a fight at school and the damaged eye was the result.)

Working on David's boat sounds glamorous, and at times it was, but it was also really hard work. We would have back-to-back charters for four months, which meant that you worked those months without a break. I needed to be available 24 hours a day and the job involved everything from cleaning silverware and the toilet to organising the helicopter to take guests out to dinner. While it was very glamorous to fall asleep in France and wake up in Monaco, the sea sickness was not. At times you wished someone would throw you overboard. And I won't go into the gory details regarding a very large man who managed to destroy the toilet, leaving whatever had just left his body all over the walls and roof – aargh, not glamorous.

Some of the wealthiest people in the world hired the yacht, and I wasn't too sure what to expect from them when I first started. I knew from my upbringing that people with money were ‘not us'. My gran experienced the Great Depression and worked as a cleaner – in her mind, if we got a job at Myer, we were doing exceptionally well. She believed we should never get above ourselves. (As I mentioned earlier, years later, when Boost started to get off the ground, she couldn't get her head around her granddaughter running the business. Gran was convinced that the part-time bookkeeper was the person I worked for – because who would listen to Janine?)

Meeting the rich and famous was great fun and a significant learning experience, especially about people. Most people who came on the yacht were lovely, like David Bowie; others thought they were superior to the rest of the human race.

On board, we had guests whose attitude ranged from ‘show us where the fridge is and leave us alone', to those who would send a boiled egg back because it was too hot. We once had a group of Americans on board and their kids were obnoxious. They thought they were better than everyone and treated all the staff like dirt. On the flip side, we had one of the wealthiest men in Kuwait as a guest, and his son was a lovely young man. The father asked me to type up a list of expenses for his son who was off to college in the United States. I was expecting to read that his son was allowed a fortune. To my surprise, his expenses were moderate. In fact, for the son to survive, he would have to get a part-time job.

Finding the resilient problem-solver within

When Janine's husband Jeff reflects on what characteristics Janine showed early on, the biggest one is being a great problem-solver. According to Jeff, ‘She travelled around the world with tuppence in the bank, she was a mum at 25 and she didn't whinge – she just got on with it. She is a real can-doer.

‘There is no doubt we were attracted to each other through our drive to succeed at whatever we were passionate about. Early in my life, I was passionate about assets, so I bought my first house at 19. Janine was passionate about travel, so she circumnavigated the world on a rock star's boat (slight exaggeration but within the realm of reality!)'.

After two years and a great deal of fun and hard work, I left the Deneb Star. I was seeing the engineer on the yacht at the time and we both left to work on another yacht with him as captain (this yacht was anchored in Monaco). We purchased a property in Valbonne, a lovely village just outside of Antibes, paying way too much for the house because we had no idea what we were doing – and it didn't help that my French was far from perfect. A few months later, I found out that I was pregnant. Sadly, I realised that I wasn't in love with this engineer; I knew that he was not my future. Although the pregnancy was not planned, I gave it a couple of years to see if I could learn to love him. But he just was not ‘the one', so we discussed it and I told him that it was time for my son and me to leave. It was as amicable a separation as you could possibly want. We had a beautiful friendship and he is a lovely man; he was just not my man.

In 1993, I turned to the first love of my life, my two-year-old son, Samuel, took his hand in mine and headed back to Australia. It took me 35 hours of travel and I had nothing but the clothes in our suitcases. Financially, the house we had purchased was not worth what we paid for it, leaving me without a cent to my name. My dear friends in France lent me the money to return to Australia. I felt like a failure – I was 27 years old and going home to live with my parents until I got myself back on my feet.