BOOK OF THE WEEK

WAVEWALKER: BREAKING FREE 

by Suzanne Heywood (William Collins £20, 416pp)

When seven-year-old Suzanne Heywood (nee Cook) was informed by her father one morning over breakfast in 1976 that she, her five-year-old brother Jon and their parents Gordon and Mary were going to sail round the world, retracing their namesake Captain Cook’s voyage, ‘the spoonful of cornflakes paused on the way to my mouth’, she recalls.

Her father’s bombshell announcement was exciting, but it meant she was going to have to say goodbye to her best friend Sarah, and her beloved golden-haired spaniel Rusty.

If she’d had an inkling of what was really in store for her, that whole bowl of cornflakes would surely have smashed to the floor.

She would never see Rusty again, or indeed ever return to school in England. Her father’s original plan was that they’d be sailing for three years. In fact, they would be away for a decade.

A few months into the voyage, cooped up with her family and small crew in their schooner Wavewalker, Suzanne’s skull would be smashed when the boat was tipped over by a 40ft wave in the Indian Ocean, requiring seven operations without anaesthetic performed by a doctor on a tiny remote island.

That was just one of the many ordeals she endured. Stuck on a coral reef; stuck in ‘the Doldrums’, mid-Atlantic; stuck mid-ocean with a flat battery and broken engine; stuck in a cyclone; stuck on various tropical or volcanic islands for months while her cash-strapped parents desperately tried to make money.

Running out of drinking water; living on tinned corned beef; curled up in pain on her bunk bed when her first period started . . . Suzanne’s memoir exposes, scene by scene, the bare reality behind the romantic notion of sailing round the world.

Her worst, though, was ‘being trapped inside someone else’s dream’ — her father’s — from the age of seven to almost 17. He had an iron will — his wife remarked, ‘once you’ve made up your mind to do something, nothing will stop you’.

Whenever Suzanne dared to hope they might at last be turning towards home, her father would suddenly spring a new travel plan on them, informing them that they would be away for at least another year and a half.

Addicted to sailing, he also had no intention of returning to Britain with what he called its ‘ridiculous tax rates’. And so it continued: the fourth Christmas, the seventh Christmas, the ninth Christmas, and you think, ‘Will this ever end?’

‘Monstrous’ is the adjective Suzanne uses to describe that 40ft killer wave, which would give her nightmares for years.

As I read her beautifully written travelogue, I transferred that adjective ‘monstrous’ to her parents.

It’s often said that 1970s and 1980s parents were more selfish than today’s parents – ‘children just tagged along doing whatever the parents wanted to do’. What Gordon and Mary inflicted on their children is the most extreme example of that selfishness.

All Suzanne longed for was a bit of geographical stability, friends and an education. None of these were encouraged by her parents, who had a cruel habit of accusing her of selfishness when she dared to suggest anything that might help her to pursue her own life goals, such as being allowed to go to boarding school.

Desperate for a bit of agency in her early teens, she did some babysitting while in Australia and saved up $100. Her skint father asked her to lend him all the money, which she did. He never paid her back. When she dared to mention it for the third time, he refused, saying: ‘And let me be clear. If you ever ask me about this again, I never will.’

Eight years into the voyage, Suzanne embarked on an educational correspondence course. She was conscientious, intent on passing exams, but her mother demanded that she did all the cooking and cleaning while she cowered in her cabin for days, suffering from seasickness.

One day, when Suzanne was trying to study at the boat’s only table, her mother told her to get out of the way because the crew needed to sit there. She refused to move (I punched the air at this point), so her mother put on loud music to distract her.

There were moments of magic, such as when a whale followed the boat for days, and when they disembarked in Rio or Tonga to be feted by the locals or the king. Suzanne tried to make the most of it, arriving at each place with a burst of hope.

But you can’t read her story without a growing sense of fury at her plight — a minor, thousands of miles from home, trapped with her parents and totally misunderstood by them. Especially by her mother, who seemed to nurse a special, bitter resentment for her daughter — perhaps brought on by her own subconscious guilt at depriving her of a normal childhood.

‘I knew Mum didn’t like me,’ Suzanne writes, ‘a dull ache I’d long accepted, though the pain of it sometimes became acute.’

I knew I should be fascinated by Tonga, Honolulu, New Zealand, coral reefs, and so on, but what I found most fascinating was the slow-burning psychological torture that Suzanne endured.

Her parents’ selfishness ratcheted up to new levels.

Suzanne was 16 when they sailed off on their own, leaving their two children alone in a house in New Zealand for seven months, with not enough money to live on, telling Suzanne to make all the new bookings for the paying crew, plus doing the driving, cooking, cleaning, shopping and chopping logs with an axe to heat the cold house.

When her father eventually rang, his first question was not: ‘How are you?’ but ‘How many crew have you booked?’

With great courage, and with no help from anyone, Suzanne posted letters to universities around the world, asking whether she might be allowed to apply to them. To Oxford’s great credit, it was the sole university that gave a positive reply. Oxford was intrigued by this girl who’d managed to educate herself on a boat. She was invited to an interview at Somerville College.

When, aged 17, she flew home from New Zealand for the interview, and responded well to the don’s tricky questions, thanks to the wide reading she’d done over a decade of exchanging books at charity shops in Pacific islands, I cried with relief. Her whole future, her escape, depended on Oxford saying ‘Yes’.

And it did. This girl who’d never seen a play, heard an orchestra or visited an art gallery was accepted by Oxford, and she thrived there.

She’s now a successful business leader and mother of three. Her husband, former Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, died tragically young in 2018.

When she was planning to write this memoir, her spooked mother threatened to damage Suzanne’s husband’s career if she did so. But nothing could stop Suzanne from going ahead. ‘I had no control over my life when I was a child,’ she writes, ‘but as an adult I have the right to tell my story as honestly as I can.’