My 10-year family trip from hell

BOOK OF THE WEEK

WAVEWALKER: BREAK FREE

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

When seven-year-old Suzanne Heywood (née Cook) was informed by her father over breakfast one morning in 1976 that she, her five-year-old brother Jon, and their parents Gordon and Mary had traveled around the world, tracing the voyage of their namesake Captain Cook, ” the spoonful of cereal stopped on its way to my mouth,” she recalls.

Her dad’s great announcement was thrilling; but it meant saying goodbye to her best friend, Sarah, and her beloved golden-haired spaniel, Rusty.

If she had any inkling of what was really in store for her, that whole bowl of cereal would surely have fallen on the floor.

She would never see Rusty again, never even go back to school in England. Her father’s original plan was for them to sail for three years. In fact, they would be gone for ten years.

A few months into the voyage, trapped with her family and a small crew in their schooner Wavewalker, Suzanne’s skull would be shattered when a 40-foot wave overturned the boat in the Indian Ocean, requiring seven surgeries without anesthesia by an doctor on the boat. a small remote island.

That was just one of many trials she had to endure. Stuck on a coral reef; stuck in ‘the Doldrums’, mid-Atlantic; stuck in the middle of the ocean with a dead battery and broken motor; stuck in a cyclone; spent months on various tropical or volcanic islands while her penniless parents desperately tried to make money.

No more drinking water; living on canned corned beef; curled up in pain on her bunk when her first period started. . . Suzanne’s memoirs expose, scene by scene, the naked reality behind the romantic idea of ​​sailing around the world.

Her worst, however, was “being trapped in someone else’s dream” – her father’s – from the age of seven to almost 17. He had an iron will – his wife observed, “once you’ve decided to do something , nothing can stop you’.

Every time Suzanne dared to hope that they would finally go home, her father would suddenly approach them with a new itinerary, informing them that they would be gone 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 went: 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 40-foot wave that would give her nightmares for years to come.

As I read her beautifully written travelogue, I conveyed that adjective “monstrous” to her parents.

It is often said that parents in the 1970s and 1980s were more selfish than parents today; ‘children just went along and did what the parents wanted’. What Gordon and Mary did to their children is the most extreme example of that selfishness.

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

Desperate for some freedom of choice in her early teens, she did some babysitting while in Australia and saved $100. Her scrawny father asked her to loan him all the money, which she did. He never paid her back. When she dared to say it a third time, he refused, saying, “And let me be clear. If you ever ask me about this again, I’ll never do it again.’

Eight years after the trip, Suzanne began an educational correspondence course. She was conscientious, determined to pass exams, but her mother demanded that she do all the cooking and cleaning as she huddled 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 move aside because the crew had to sit there. She refused to move (I hit the air at this point), so her mom 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 celebrated by the locals or the king. Suzanne tried to make the best of it and arrived at each place with a burst of hope.

But you can’t read her story without a growing sense of anger at her plight – a minor, thousands of miles from home, cooped up with her parents and totally misunderstood by them. Particularly from her mother, who seemed to harbor a special, bitter grudge against her daughter—caused, perhaps, by her own subconscious guilt for taking away a normal childhood from her.

“I knew Mom didn’t like me,” Suzanne writes, “a dull ache I’d long since accepted, though sometimes the pain 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 Suzanne endured.

Her parents’ selfishness reached a new level.

Suzanne was 16 when they left on their own, leaving their two children alone in a house in New Zealand for seven months, with not enough money to live on. driving, cooking, cleaning, shopping and chopping wood with an ax to heat the cold house.

When her father finally called, his first question wasn’t, “How are you?” but ‘How many crew members have you booked?’

With great courage and without any help from anyone, Suzanne mailed letters to universities around the world asking if she could apply to them. To Oxford’s credit, it was the only university to give a positive answer. Oxford was intrigued by this girl who had managed to educate herself on a boat. She was invited for an interview at Somerville College.

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

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

She is now a successful business executive and mother of three children. Her husband, former cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood, died tragically young in 2018.

When she set out to write this memoir, her startled mother threatened to damage Suzanne’s husband’s career if she did so. But nothing could stop Suzanne from continuing. “As a child I had no control over my life,” she writes, “but as an adult I have a right to tell my story as honestly as possible.”