Читать книгу 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 Benaddi - Страница 10
Оглавление‘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, her heart beating harder in her chest. A brand-new start? Or the bitter end? The bitter end. ‘Will this be my entire adult working life?’ she thought to herself. Wearing the same old groove? Going on the same journey 25 miles in and 25 miles out of Leeds? Every. Single. Day?
‘That’s it,’ she said to herself, pushing herself back in her seat. ‘I am asking them again. They can only say no.’ She put the car into gear. Her mother had died at the age of 58 from breast cancer. Frances was 28 years old at the time and her mother’s passing left a huge hole in her life. Her mother had lost her battle with cancer when she was little older than Frances is now. She had not lived long enough to meet Mark or her grandchildren – a loss that Frances had always felt very keenly.
‘We are only here once,’ she reasoned. ‘We should make the most of our short time here. I’m fed up with going to things and hearing how “busy” everyone is. I don’t care who is “busy” or who is not “busy”. What is admirable about being busy? I don’t care about any of that. I want to get out and do something else.’
One of the things about the death of her mother that had always inspired Frances was how she never gave up – she always carried on fighting. For years she battled cancer with a serenity that was humbling. Her courage against all the odds was overwhelming.
So, after refuelling with a weak, tepid coffee from the office kitchen, she sat down at her desk and wrote this email:
From: Frances Davies
Sent: 03 May 2013 08:19
To: Janette Benaddi; Niki Doeg; Helen Butters; Caroline Lennox
Subject: Atlantic Campaigns | Atlantic Rowing | TALISKER Whisky Atlantic Challenge | Atlantic Rowing Race – Helen – don’t delete!
http://www.atlanticcampaigns.com/
Morning,
Do you remember my suggestion at the boat club dinner? I thought I would forward this to all of you. I do see that it sounds very silly, but I think we could do this race. Other people have done it and we must be just as good as they are.
I think it’s possible to enter as 1, 2, 4, 5 or 6, so any combination of us could enter. It’s quite pricey and, of course, would mean taking a couple of months out of our regular lives! We would need sponsorship. Mark obviously thinks I’m ridiculous, but I have sold it to the boys on the basis that they get to go to Antigua to meet us at the finish!
It would be amazing and probably life-changing, and we definitely won’t want to go back to work afterwards – we could maybe sign up for it if we get very drunk in France in September.
Anyway, have a think about it.
For those racing this weekend – good luck.
Have a great weekend
F xx
She pressed send, sighed and waited. Shuffling through the papers she needed for her first meeting that morning, she kept her eye on the screen.
It took Janette precisely 13 minutes to reply:
From: Janette Benaddi
Sent: 03 May 2013 08:32
To: Frances Davies; Niki Doeg; Helen Butters; Caroline Lennox
Subject: RE: Atlantic Campaigns | Atlantic Rowing | TALISKER Whisky Atlantic Challenge | Atlantic Rowing Race – Helen – don’t delete!
Life’s for living, so let’s really live. I am definitely up for it.
J
Janette Benaddi
That was so very typical of Janette. An impetuous force of nature, she is a self-made businesswoman who has been running her own clinical trials company for the past 20 years. Married to Ben, a French-Moroccan, whom she met dancing in her sister’s sitting room, she has never knowingly taken a duvet day in her life. Even after the birth of her first child, James, she didn’t take any time off. Not even a day! It wasn’t meant to happen that way, but she’d been booked to give a talk in London. She had originally thought she’d be fine. She’d have her baby; he would be two weeks old and she’d leave him with Ben for the day while she popped down to London to talk at the conference and popped back up to York again. But James was a first baby and first babies are often late. He was two weeks late. Janette had no choice, not unless she didn’t want to be paid, and anyway, she didn’t want to let them down. So she gave birth at 8 a.m. on the Tuesday after a long 36-hour labour with gas, air and ventouse. Come 8 a.m. on the Wednesday, she was on the train to London, leaving Ben in charge of their newborn son. During a break at the conference, there were a few doctors milling around, drinking tea and eating biscuits, and one of them approached Janette.
‘Do you have any children?’ she asked, smiling politely and nibbling the corner of a custard cream.
‘Oh yes!’ replied Janette, beaming with new-mother pride. ‘A son.’
‘How lovely,’ replied the doctor. ‘How old is he?’
‘Oh,’ replied Janette, her brain whirring, not wanting to lie that much. ‘Um… two weeks?’ she ventured.
‘Two weeks!’ The doctor was horrified; the crumbs went flying. ‘What are you doing here? Are you mad! You should be at home!’
Little did she know that, back in Selby, Ben was busy explaining Janette’s absence to an equally appalled midwife, who turned up to weigh the baby and was completely astonished to find no sign of the mother.
But Janette has never been one to conform. She left school at 16 with two O levels and eventually became a trained nurse, after putting herself through night school while working in a doctor’s surgery. As a nurse she became frustrated, as there was never enough time to do the job properly, never enough time to speak to the patients or give them the care they needed. Gradually, she found herself moving into the world of medical technology, travelling the length and breadth of the country, selling dressings and syringes to doctors, hospitals and surgeries.
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 our lack of talent, technique and knowledge of anything whatsoever to do with rowing.
‘Feather!’
‘Square!’
‘Feather!’
‘Square!’
‘More on stroke!’
‘More on bow!’
‘Half!’
‘Quarter!’
‘What the hell’s a square?’ whispered Janette as she wobbled about in the back.
‘No idea!’ hissed Helen as she wobbled about in the seat in front. ‘What’s a sodding feather?’
‘Christ!’ shrieked Janette as she splashed herself in the face with what felt like a bucket of freezing, fetid river water. ‘What are we doing?’
None of the coach’s words meant anything to us. Clearly his favourite method of teaching was total immersion, or indeed a baptism. He bawled and begged us, telling us we were letting the whole boat down by our awful ineptitude. We should whip back and forth on our seat using our strong legs, our blades should glide through water. We should have strength and style. And all the while, all we wanted to focus on was trying to remain out of the water as the boat listed precariously from side to side in the freezing River Ouse.
At the end of the lesson, we crawled – exhausted and decidedly damp – up the muddy riverbank. We all had pink cheeks, runny noses, painful hands and wet backsides, but it was immediately obvious who was going to be coming back the following week. Half the women looked miserable, like it had been the worst two hours of their lives, and there were a few, like us, who were clearly invigorated and excited, adrenalised and very much alive.
‘Who fancies a cup of coffee at The Grange?’ suggested Niki, looking across the expansive playing fields towards the small Georgian hotel next door to the school.
‘Great,’ said Frances.
‘Absolutely,’ agreed Helen.
‘Janette?’ asked Niki, looking over at her.
‘Me?’
And that was it. We would meet every Saturday after that, come rain or shine (mainly rain), and we’d row up and down the Ouse, falling in, getting back into the boat, only to be shouted at by the coach over and over. And then we would retire to The Grange and drink coffee and eat as many biscuits as was politely possible in a smart four-star hotel, while we talked about our husbands, our children and our lives.
People mostly thought we were mad. Our husbands thought we were a little eccentric. Why would four middle-aged women want to spend their Saturday mornings freezing their breasts off rowing, rather poorly, up and down a river? There was the exercise element. And, of course, we were all learning a new skill, but truthfully, after a while it became about the friendship.
We are four completely different characters. Janette is the go-getter with a very dry sense of humour. Helen is always the cheerful one – gossipy, full of stories and tall tales of angels, feathers and the universe. Frances is very laid-back, sanguine and calm; it takes a lot to rile her. And then there’s Niki, the serious, dependable one, who is never knowingly out of wet wipes, with a handbag to rival Mary Poppins, right down to the hat stand.
Our backgrounds could also not be more diverse. Niki was born in Nassau in the Bahamas. Her parents were schoolteachers who travelled all over the world, and Niki lived in Mexico, Dubai, Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia before she was sent to boarding school near York at the age of 10. Rebellious at school, with dyed hair and an attitude to match, she managed to pass her A levels before getting a job at the nascent First Direct bank during her gap year. Having toyed with the idea of joining the Army, she never took up her place at university, preferring to work her way up through the bank and meeting her future husband, Gareth, at the Mansion Pub in Roundhay Park, Leeds, on New Year’s Eve when she was 20. ‘He was quite drunk, I was quite drunk, and he was asking girls for New Year’s Eve kisses. I refused, saying I would only kiss him at midnight.’ And they have been together ever since. Literally. They bought a house together quite soon afterwards and have barely – almost never – spent a day apart. They finally got married in 1999. The theme was fancy dress: Cavaliers Only! Gareth was dressed in high boots and a tabard and Niki came down the aisle in a fabulous corseted gold frock with a feathered mask.
Helen is married to Richard, a former barrister who is currently the Director of Public Prosecutions on the Isle of Man. A Catholic grammar school girl, she attended Notre Dame School in Leeds before turning down a place at the London School of Fashion to work at LTHT (Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust). She worked her way up to management level, only to give up her job to get married and have children.
‘I met Richard in an All Bar One and it was time,’ she said. ‘I had got to a point when all I was doing was finishing work on a Friday and going out for a few glasses of wine. I remember I was waiting for the bus and this man selling The Big Issue was standing next to me. He asked me to look after his dog and we ended up chatting. He was selling the magazine, while I was holding the dog, and I just thought, “Maybe, Helen, the universe is trying to tell you something.” This was not the best use of my Friday night, after all. So subconsciously, I believe, I must have put it out there that I really wanted to find someone. I wanted to settle down. It was only a few weeks later when Richard walked into All Bar One and started to talk to me. He was very funny and bright and clearly one of those people who knows what he wants and gets it and, boof, that was it. Before I knew it, we were married. It was all a bit of whirlwind.’
Frances, on the other hand, grew up in Denby Dale, a quiet village in West Yorkshire in the rolling hills outside Huddersfield. Her mother (a school teacher) and her father (a chemical engineer) got together in their twenties and settled down to family life in Yorkshire, raising Frances and her older brother, Robert. Her parents were not ones to stray too far from the county borders: her father made a single cross-Channel trip for business and her mother visited France once on a school trip. Family holidays were spent in the Lake District and Wales. Exotic travel was not high on the family’s agenda, nor adrenaline-fuelled experiences…
Running was Frances’s escape as a teenager. She ran for Longwood Harriers on the track and in cross-country events, and loved nothing better in the evenings and at weekends than a run across the local hills and along the back lanes around neighbouring villages. Running gave Frances a sense of freedom and independence, and the space to let her mind wander. ‘I just love that feeling of almost leaving the real world when a racing gun has started. You are in this no man’s land. Such a feeling of flow. Then there’s the finish line and the elation when you cross it.’
Perhaps her parents shouldn’t have been so shocked, then, when Frances chose to go away from Yorkshire, all the way to Southampton University, for her degree course. After completing her chemistry degree, Frances studied law in Manchester and qualified as a solicitor, moving to Leeds to join a commercial law firm. Here she met and married her husband Mark, a lawyer at the same firm. ‘Mark has always said that I have a restless soul. One of our first dates was abseiling (my idea), and shortly after that I persuaded him to join me in having a go at paragliding. I think I took him out of his comfort zone, but he must have liked it given that we were married within 18 months of getting together!’
They managed to fit in a trek in Nepal and a London Marathon, and then plans for more ambitious adventures had to be put on hold in 2001 with the birth of their son, Jay, who was closely followed by his brother, Jack, the following year.
‘When the boys were little we used to go to libraries a lot and one day at Acomb Library in the York suburbs, while they took out picture books, I borrowed Debra Veal’s Rowing it Alone, the story of a woman who rowed the Atlantic solo after setting off with her husband. He had to abandon the trip when he couldn’t cope with being out at sea. I also read books by Anne Mustoe and Dervla Murphy – they were my armchair adventures. I would read all these books and dream and think, “I’d love to do that one day.”’
Instead, she channelled her energies into her legal career and raising her family. With the routines of daily life eating away at any spare time, Frances’s thirst for adventure had to be satisfied by taking part in occasional running, cycling or open-water swimming races. But while she was taking part in these races she still dreamed of bigger adventures.
And 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)
