November 21, 2024 • 38 mins
Imagine being Suzanne Heywood, a seven-year-old girl who must abandon all she knows: friends, school, home and surroundings because her parent's dream is to spend three years sailing across the globe, retracing the route of Captain James Cook. Three years turned into a decade and a living nightmare aboard the Wavewalker-A 70-foot sailboat boat, often shared with strangers to help fund the trip.
The family encounters violent storms and life-threatening injuries, and for Suzanne emotional abandonment, and isolation even within her family. Yet, amidst the chaos, she found solace and determination in education, meticulously crafting her lifeline to escape-a true and powerful story of trauma to triumph, resilience and reclamation.
To purchase Suzanne'e book, https://www.amazon.com/Wavewalker-Memoir-Breaking-Suzanne-Heywood-ebook/dp/B0BZK87N22
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Episode Transcript
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(00:04):
You might not love what you do or where you are in your journey through
life. That is reality. But for
most people listening to this podcast, you can accept and even
surrender to what is happening, or you could choose to make it
happen. Now, there's no secret or 5 steps to this or that.
There's no freedom via lottery ticket. And for those who are listening
(00:26):
who are consumed by just surviving, I know it's tough to dream
inside a nightmare. But what
I've learned from 200 interviews and chatter that matters is there's a
commonality with those who make happen, happen.
They don't accept status quo. They dream of a better outcome.
Could be finding more safety and security, love and belonging, a better
(00:48):
career or higher purpose, could be even just chasing their meaning in
life, and they manifest their future by animating their dream. They
see themselves living it and loving it, and they make their dreams so
magnetic that attracts others.
In this episode, I share the story of someone who had an epic dream. His
(01:09):
name was George Cook. He wanted to retrace the 3rd and final voyage
of the 18th century explorer, Captain Cook, to whom they were not
related, but they did share the same surname. He and his wife Mary, who
actually didn't like sailing, went all in to make this dream happen. They sold
their family home and family owned hotel and set sail with their 2 young
children. They end up spending a decade on the open seas.
(01:32):
And what might have been their dream turned into a living nightmare for their daughter,
Suzanne. There I am, a little kid, my brother, sitting in this main
cabin for days hanging on. She left with them at
age 7 thinking this was an adventure, but over time began to realize
that their love for the open waters closed the door in her going to school,
meeting friends, or having any sense of security. I would get
(01:54):
harassed a lot by by the kind of local men at the different
ports. Add to this nightmare, many life threatening storms of
brain injury, 7 life saving operations, starvation, and
you'll better understand the title of her book, Wavewalker, my memoir of
breaking free. I knew it was a lifeline. I didn't know whether it would take
me far enough. As you listen to Suzanne's story,
(02:16):
put yourself into her deck shoes and ask yourself,
was this a dream, a nightmare, or something in between?
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented
by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings
(02:42):
Susanne Heywood, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Hi. Great to be with
you. So your story begins almost like a fairy tale. What do
you remember about life before you're that 7 year old that
that climbed onboard the ship? I remember quite a lot actually, and maybe that's
because there was such a clear divide between my life before
7 and my life after 7. So I I kind of know that all my
(03:04):
memories of England as a child come from before I was
7. So I remember the houses that we lived in, we lived in, 3
houses that I can remember. I remember my dog, Rusty. I remember my
doll's house, which I later on I drew the kind of the
floor plan of this doll's house, which I later drew up plunge to electrify.
You know, I remember my friends, my best friend, Sarah, I remember going to
(03:27):
school. So, yes, I I have quite vivid memories of what
was a very conventional life. And your parents
had a family home. I understand a family hotel and there were teachers for a
living. So my father trained as a teacher, but by the point,
that I was 6 years old, he'd become a bit of a serial
entrepreneur. He'd set up this hotel, as you mentioned. He was
(03:50):
also working at Warwick Castle and my father's job was to try and make it
make money. My mother was, was basically a
housewife. She was a trained primary school teacher, but at that point in my life,
she was a housewife. So she was picking up my brother and me from school
and dropping us off and taking me to violin lessons and horse riding
and Your mom really didn't like sailing either? No. So my dad
(04:11):
was a passionate sailor and would occasionally disappear off to go
sailing with his friends. And he'd go away for a kind of long
weekend or even a week going down sailing to the canaries and back.
My mother was a bit of a party person. You know, she was never happier
than when we had lots of people over to the house. She was dressed up,
she was entertaining, serving food. So really not
(04:33):
a sailor at all. So when did your dad I mean, the irony is
his last name is Cook, and he's fascinated with captain Cook. And when
did he come up with this dream? Because I've heard big dreams before,
but, you know, following the path of captain Cook's voyage. I mean, this wasn't
across going across the English Channel. This was a trip around the world. I
suspect the surname played into it, so the fact that we shared the name. My
(04:56):
father came comes from a similar part of the UK to captain Cook,
not exactly the same, but he also comes from Yorkshire, and he likes
sailing. So I think he'd always seen Cook as a bit of a
hero. When it came time for the 200th anniversary of Cook's voyages
around the world, he somehow got the idea that he was
gonna play some part in commemorating Captain Cook.
(05:18):
But, you know, nothing happened on the anniversary of the first voyage or the second
voyage, so he became determined he was going to recreate the third voyage.
And I don't know to what extent he really factored into that dream,
the fact that he had a wife he didn't like sailing and 2 small
children. And of course, by making it all about captain Cook's
voyage, he was able to get a lot of sponsorship for our boat
(05:41):
because we weren't that wealthy. We certainly couldn't have afforded to put it
all together, but it became something more than just somebody's mad
dream. It became the Captain James Cook bicentenary
voyage. How did your mom go along? Somebody who loved parties and
dinner and socializing and watching her young daughter learn how to
play the violin, agreeing to sell everything and going all in on this
(06:03):
dream. Well, my dad, I think, wanted to be a hero, wanted everybody to
think he'd done something incredible, and this was his moment to be,
you know, we talk now about kind of influencers, people who are famous, this was
his moment to be famous, I think. My
mother basically was, devoted to my
dad. And I think once my father had decided he was going to do it,
(06:24):
it didn't even occur to my mother that she wouldn't just go with
him, around the world. I still don't know why they didn't
discuss all the different variants that might have been possible. You
know, like my father doing the long legs and my mother going out
and meeting him or us going with them for a few months and then coming
back. None of that in my memory, was ever discussed. It
(06:47):
was always assumed it was a 3 year voyage, and my mother, my
brother, and me would go with him. You know, a lot of people dream
doing is a very different thing. And when he came across
the boat, the wave walker, and and he felt he got the deal of a
lifetime much bigger boat for his budget, is that when you
started to realize that this was more than just something he was
(07:08):
manifesting, but this was something that was actually gonna happen? Even as a kid, I
knew at this point it had become real because he took
me and my younger brother and my mother down to see Wavewalker,
and she was a beautiful boat. And buying her, by the way, meant selling virtually
everything else that we had. So we had to sell our our house. He put
the hotel on the market. He sold everything. Suzanne, was there
(07:30):
any pushback from family or friends or teachers that
started to question the judgment of, as you
said, someone that really is not thinking through that there is possibly other ways
to do this? My mother went in to see my head teacher and
he told her that he thought the whole idea was a ridiculous idea.
In fact, he thought it was such a ridiculous idea that he refused to even
(07:52):
give her the curriculum that we'd been learning so that we could continue it on
the boat. This dream is first introduced to you at age 6, and you get
on this boat at age 7. And from what I understand, like, was
it wasn't that far into the first leg of the journey that
you really hit your first tragedy. Yes. So we set
sail from Plymouth and pretty much immediately went into a
(08:14):
storm. And I realized 2 things. First of all, as soon as you
go into a storm at sea and you're a little kid, you're basically trapped
down below. That might not seem so bad, but you've got to remember that
if you're in a storm at sea, it goes on for days. And my mother
gets very badly seasick. She disappeared into her cabin for
several days. So there I am a little kid with my brother sitting
(08:37):
in this main cabin for days hanging on, with no real food,
for example, because, you know, we're we're too little to make
food. So we end up kind of making do by eating the cake that we
were given, when we left Plymouth. Not long after that,
you know, not long after my mother finally kind of reappears,
all of a sudden late one evening, after I've gone to sleep in
(09:00):
my bunk, there's lots of screaming and shouting, people running around on
deck, and I come up on deck in my kind of pyjamas and
there's a massive tanker bearing down on us. And my
father starts setting off flares, flare after flare after flare and they're
coming towards us. And the problem is, we're on a sailing boat, so
we're going at a much slower speed than they are, so you can't get out
(09:22):
of the way, there's nothing you can do. I mean, if he's got, if they're
gonna hit you, they're gonna hit you. And eventually my father shot a flare, which
hit the kind of the the the the kind of glass cabin
on top of this boat, and it turned. And the other tragedy at
sea, and I know this happened afterwards, but it's such a horrific
storm. Your dad is thrown overboard.
(09:42):
Worse, the girl trapped below, you, suffer severe
brain injury. Now most people who sail around the world go from, east to
west. And the reason why that's a better thing to do is because the
winds near the equator go by and large from west to east,
sorry from east to west. Captain Cook decided to go the other way.
And because he decided to go the other way, going from west to east,
(10:05):
he had to go really, really far south to get around the world. So
we had to follow him. And that meant that we crossed 2 of the most
dangerous oceans of the world, the Southern Atlantic Ocean, and then the
Southern Indian Ocean. And halfway across the Southern Indian
Ocean, we hit a terrible storm that went on for days. The waves
became bigger and bigger, And eventually an enormous
(10:26):
wave hit the boat, went straight through the deck out to the side of the
boat. I was flung up against the the roof of the
cabin, the wall of the cabin. I fractured my skull, broke
my nose, and we almost died. I mean, we we
were incredibly lucky that 3, days
later, we came across a tiny atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean. But
(10:47):
even then, the the the kind of trauma wasn't over because I ended up
having to have 6 or 7 operations on my head to relieve
the blood pressure. And, of course, in an ator in the middle of the Indian
Ocean, there was no anesthetic. So who actually did the operation? So
there's a little tiny French military base on this island. I think they're still
there now. And it's a team of about 15 men, one of which
(11:09):
is a doctor. My mother refused to come in for any of the operations
because she was afraid of blood. The consequence of that was as a
7 year old kid, I had to go through all these operations on my
own with a doctor who didn't speak any English. I
basically spent most of the operations swearing at him. I'm just
I have nothing but shame for your mom. I really don't care if she was
(11:32):
scared of blood. I mean, this is her little girl. You're going through 7
operations to relieve like, if you hadn't found that little
space in the ocean, you probably wouldn't be here right now. No. Well, what the
doctor told me, and I managed to contact him when I was writing the book,
the pressure on my brain was so, so enormous that I would've ended up
with brain damage. Actually, what made it worse, my parents
(11:54):
never liked to discuss things that went wrong. This was a kind of family
rule, so I could never discuss the wave. Why did the wave
happen? Why was I so badly injured? You know, why was I
operated on? Why did my mother not come in? None of that was discussable.
And that meant that it took me a very long time to kind of
process it. How soon did you realize that instead of being on an
(12:16):
adventure, you were in fact a prisoner? It took me quite a
long time, you know, really when I was 11 or
12, by which point I'd been on the boat 5, you
know, 4 or 5 years. As a child, it's very, very hard to
challenge your parents, or even to accept that they're not
treating you in the way that they should, because to do so pulls
(12:38):
down your entire universe. And, of course, for me, it was an even more
extreme situation because, you know, that universe was the only
thing I had. If I blew up that universe by accepting
that something was wrong, I would have nothing left. So let's talk about that
age because that's an age when puberty is gonna hit hormonal changes,
periods, body changes, one toilet. I mean, was
(13:01):
there any place that you had privacy? Was there any place
or anyone that helped you come to terms with these changes? No. Not at
all. Although Wavewalker was quite a big boat in some ways, she was 69
feet long. Down below, there wasn't that much space. All I
had was I had one bunk, and I had one drawer. As you
say, just one toilet, one small table that would only sit
(13:24):
kind of 5 or 6 people. As time went on and we ran more
and more and more out of money, we started taking paying crew on the boat.
So my father effectively turned wave walk into a bit of a floating hotel. So
people would come on board for, you know, 5, 6, 7 weeks and then
disappear again. And that meant that the boat was packed. And a lot of our
crew members were men. You know, I very quickly realized I had to be very
(13:46):
kind of careful. Would you ever feel threatened or were you ever approached
in an inappropriate way? Because, I mean, you're living on the open water.
The biggest danger that I generally felt was, when we went
to shore. And so because I would get harassed a lot by the
kind of local men at the different ports. So quite often, I would
stay on board. And then on board, I would keep myself to myself as much
(14:09):
as I could. I have 2 daughters, and I remember them going through puberty, you
know, and the the discussions with their mom and, you know, the products that
they needed, a bra. How did you deal with that? Where is your lifeline
there, or did you just have to figure this out like some sea
urchin? It's one of the things that I now realize, one of the issues with
taking a child out of normal society. You're taking away
(14:31):
every lifeline they have. So if there is any issue in the family,
they have no one to turn to. My relationship with my mother
deteriorated very, very badly when I was 11, 12 when I went into
puberty. I don't know why, I think she was jealous of
me, resented me something. Now she would call me
names, she would refer to me in the 3rd person. So she would say to
(14:53):
somebody, can you tell that girl to do something? Or she just not speak to
me for days on end. So the only thing that
you could do is kind of build a shell around yourself. And so I wasn't
gonna get any support from my mother. In fact, my mother, when I went to
her and said, I wanted a bra, she laughed at me.
Luckily enough, at that point in time, we were in Hawaii and I had a
(15:14):
friend And I wasn't intending to, to kind of talk to the
friend's mother, but we were talking about it in the back seat. And the
mother heard me. She turned the car around, drove me to the nearest shopping
center, because we were in Hawaii, so they have shopping centers, like bought me for
bras. As you're between ages 7 17, there's also the
things like the first kiss and holding hands or
(15:35):
flirting. Did any of was any of that part of your life or it was
just a vacuum that everybody else was living and you had
no opportunity to fill it? No. I mean, that was the great frustration of this
life is that you would so for example, in Hawaii,
I met 2 friends, Heidi and Shannon. I'm still in
touch with Heidi actually, and it was Heidi's mom who bought me the,
(15:57):
the bras. In Hawaii, there was also a boy in another boat called Eric,
and I remember Eric gave me a kiss. But then about a week
later, we left. You know? So that and that would just
happen repeatedly. I kind of started to build up a set of kind of
pen pals, so I would write to people. But, of course, I didn't have a
permanent address, so I'd always be guessing where I might kinda go
(16:18):
to. This, I think, was a big missing thing for me as a
child and thing that something that I increasingly became
desperate to find somehow was friends,
somebody you can sit and talk to. And I've had sailors
say to me, well, I don't know what, what the problem is. You know, when
I've been sailing, I've seen kids on boats and, you know, kids on boats
(16:40):
meet kids on boats and they have fun. And I say to them, you don't
understand, you're a teenage girl. I'm not looking for a play date. You know,
I'm not looking for somebody that I can meet for an hour to go for
a swim. I'm looking for somebody I can, you know, get to know as a
friend and try to make sense of the world. You could have been nicknamed Cinderella.
I mean, when you talk about your brother was on top of the deck doing
(17:03):
chores and you were down below, trapped down below, sort of doing
kitchen things. There were 2 things going on. You know, one was
my mother's increasing well, what I felt was kind of
just dislike of me. She once told me later in life that she was intimidated
by me. She thinks my brother on the other hand is wonderful.
One of the triggers for me writing the book and we'll come on to this
(17:25):
probably later, was much later on
when I had children of my own. My mother replicated this
and she chose one of my children who could do no wrong
and one of my children who could do no right. And I had to stop
her spending time alone with them. The other thing going on was there was a
huge kind of gender thing going on, which was much more from my
(17:46):
father. Well, you know, my father's view was a boy gets to help up out
on deck, and a girl kinda helps below,
And boys need kinda time to just muck around and do what boys
do, whereas girls are serious and they should be kinda downstairs
helping and doing stuff. You know? How did your brother react to this? I mean,
he's in a situation where, I mean, kids are can be kids, but if
(18:08):
this is going on day after day, month after month, it has to
change his psyche as well. He kind of enjoyed it. I mean, and I
don't really blame him for that. I mean, I'm saddened by
that, but he was a kid. You decide I'm going to
get an education through written correspondence. That must have
been quite challenging. I managed to convince my parents to let
(18:30):
me enroll in a correspondence school in Australia. So I had a
stack of books and then there were kind of work lessons
you could work through and post off. That sounds relatively
straightforward, but then there were all sorts of problems. So one problem of course is
we didn't have an address. So I could only post them off when we got
to a port that had a post office. I then have to ask my dad
(18:52):
where we were going to sail to next. I would ask them to send the
lessons back to wherever that was, but often then my dad would change his mind.
I mean, it just wasn't a priority for him to get my schoolwork back. So
I only ever got back, you know, at best half the lesson. So that was
a kind of first problem. 2nd problem was there was no space on board to
work. All we have is this one little table. And actually for me, there's a
(19:12):
really pivotal moment in the book, in the story where I actually
assert my right to a space at this table because
my mother is trying to stop me from sitting at the table. And so given
the crew were around, I basically just, you know, challenged her
to to try and force me to move. Then you had the issue that, you
know, my mother, my father wanted me to work for several hours each day. But
(19:34):
despite all that, I became obsessed with educating myself.
And I've asked myself why this is. And I think there was two
reasons. One is it was something I could control. I was
living in a world where my father in particular, my father and my mother to
some extent, had incredible freedom. But the person who
was paying for that was me and my brother, because we
(19:56):
had literally no freedom at all. I mean, we couldn't even get off the
boat most of the time. We had no choice. We were never consulted on where
we went. We had no choice about what we ate. Within this
world where I had literally no choice, I was like a prisoner on
this boat. The one thing that I could control was my
schoolwork. And then the second reason is I knew it was
(20:18):
a lifeline. I didn't know. It's like somebody kind of sitting
in a cell and braiding a piece of rope. You don't
know if that rope is gonna be long enough to get you out the window
and down to the ground, but you do know it's gonna go out the window.
And I knew that education would take me somewhere. I didn't know whether it would
take me far enough. When
(20:40):
we return, Suzanne, now 16 years old,
feeling isolated and abandoned is faced with an impossible
choice, and her decision will shape her entire
future.
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I think it's very important, actually, that we try to kinda give children
(22:05):
access to structures and people outside of the family
because if the family dynamics are very difficult as mine were,
you're very trapped if you can't get away from them.
Today, I'm speaking to Suzanne Heywood. Imagine being 7 years old and
you find yourself on a boat, a 70 foot boat called the Wave
Walker. Your parents' dream is to follow the famed voyage of
(22:27):
Captain James Cook. It's supposed to take 3 years, but for the next 10
years, you really become a miniature deckhand, 10
years before you finally have a chance to escape.
Fast forward the story to New Zealand, where your
parents decide maybe your brother needs an education. It
must have driven you crazy that someone had been so committed to education,
(22:51):
he gets to go to school, and you're supposed to again be this,
the caretaker. By this point, I'd done the junior
certificate, the first high school exam. I'd done the 1st
year of the second level, all through Australia. And so when
my father said that he wanted to stop because he was going to put my
brother into school, I begged him to take us to Australia because I
(23:13):
only had one more year in the Australian curriculum and then I
was going to graduate. But my father refused. So he went to New Zealand
instead. I was then faced with a horrible choice. You know, I either
threw away an entire year, if not more of,
of this, this work that I'd done, you know, sweat blood and
tears on this boat, you know, wrapping myself in a sail, hiding.
(23:36):
I just sat the exams for that, that kind of 3rd year and I
got a very good mark in maths. I would have had to chop the whole
thing away because the curriculum was completely different. I felt I'd been left
with no choice, but to continue doing this correspondence. And then I was
left and I was expected to kind of cook and clean for my brother.
And then in addition, my father also wanted me to run his
(23:58):
business, paying crew to go on the boat. So that's kind of running advertisements,
taking all the money, you know, sorting all that out as well. He
left us almost no money to survive on. And that kind of ended up being
9 months that they left us on our own. Those were some of the toughest
months of all, kind of mentally, psychologically, because I was completely
isolated. You decide that now that you've got these certificates,
(24:21):
that you're gonna start applying to universities. Oxford comes
along. It was amazing. And Oxford said, if you can
write us 2 essays, we'll think about it. And so I wrote them 2
essays. 1 was about what it's like to study science at sea, because
I figured nobody else could write that essay. And then they wrote back to me
and said, if you can get yourself here, we'll interview
(24:42):
you. So I went and picked kiwifruit. My father gave
me a small amount as well, and I bought a one way ticket
back to the UK and basically bet everything on that
interview. And I write about it in the book being in an airport,
I think it was in Japan on the way back, and just being in
this moment of thinking, I can't ever go back to the boat.
(25:04):
I can't go back to my mother. I can't go back to being treated like
that. I'm never gonna go back. But in front of me, I don't know what
I have because all I have is this kind of one way bet.
I have a whole set of relatives I haven't seen since I was 7 years
old, almost no money. If I can get this interview to
work, then I can work everything else out from there. How did you
(25:25):
even get to England? Like, you got money, you got on the ticket, but did
you have at least the paperwork to get you into the country? Did so that
they know you're a British citizen? So when we left England when I was
7, I was on my parents' passport. But when I finally got
to being 16 years old, you could no longer be on your parents'
passport. So my parents were forced to get me a passport. So I
(25:46):
had a passport. My brother, because he was a year younger,
had entered New Zealand still on my parents' passport and
bizarrely, the New Zealand immigration people have missed him
altogether. And then what had happened to me when my parents basically
abandoned us and left is I only had a very short visa
on my passport. And so I almost got deported from New Zealand twice during
(26:08):
that period where I was left there. Whereas they never came for my brother because
they didn't even realize he was in the country. All these ports of call along
the way, was there ever a time an authority kind of questioned this
whole family situation, or was it just, as you said, they're just used to sea
gypsies and whoever finds themselves on board? When you reach a
port, basically, 2 people come on board. 1 is the customs people
(26:29):
and then immigration. And all immigration was worried about was,
you know, stamping your passport and deciding whether or not they were going to let
you stay and they never asked anything. This is the thing, you know, they always
had a plausible story if anybody ever asked them. So in kind of
passing conversation, it would be, oh, the kids are all doing fine, you know,
kind of, you know, Mary, my mom's name is
(26:51):
teaching them was the early story, although it wasn't really true after the 1st kind
of year and a half and later it was, oh, they're teaching themselves.
One of the things that's happened since I wrote the book is one of my
relatives wrote to me and said that they now
regretted never coming to find us. But you must have thought of escape a
lot. At one point I ran away from the boat. So when I was about
(27:13):
15, I eventually, you know, my mother had been particularly unpleasant
and my father was being quite pleasant at the time as well. My father
drinks very heavily and that used to frighten me and he'd been
drinking a lot. So I went to shore and ran away
kind of as far as I could to the end of the peninsula and then
sat there and thought, what am I gonna do? I'm quite vulnerable, quite
(27:35):
kind of petite and quite pretty. And so I will be kind of regularly harassed
if you're on your own. I have no money. I don't have a passport.
I don't have the number of a relative that I can go to. So what
am I gonna do? And I thought the only thing I can do is go
back, keep myself as kind of small as I possibly
can, and keep studying. So let's go back to Oxford. It's almost like
(27:57):
the movie where the person comes out of the jungle that hasn't been in society
in 10 years. I mean, you couldn't have had the the cultural nuances. You
couldn't have understood what happened in music and fashion. You must have been a bit
of an odd berg. I thought, this is wonderful. Finally, I've
escaped. Finally, I'm going to have friends. Finally, I'm going to be able to live
a normal life. And then what what I was really worried about was the
(28:18):
academic side. I thought they're going to see me, they're going to see through me,
they're going to see that I really don't know very much. I'm
missing subjects. I've got huge gaps in my education. I never learned my
times table. And what happened that was really interesting
was academically, it was okay. I mean, I worked really hard.
The one thing I learned how to do on that boat was to work really
(28:39):
hard and that served me well. I worked hard.
Socially, it was a complete disaster because I had literally
nothing in common with anybody. I remember one of the girls who I met
early on turning to me at one point and said, you're the worst person at
small talk that I've ever met. And at the at the time,
I remember feeling, well, I don't not sure I really care because small talk is
(29:01):
a slightly kind of ridiculous thing. And I now realize that that kind
of summed up the whole thing. I hadn't learned how to do
it. It probably took a good year or 2 until I really
started to fit in a bit more. You don't just crush Oxford. You
get your PhD at Cambridge. You've had this
incredible career. I mean, you've got everything going for you. You meet the
(29:23):
love of your life, Jeremy. How hard was it to
let the drop bridge down? Because I have to believe you'd built up
a pretty thick wall. I've been off the boat for about 6 years.
I think I was still very careful what I said to people.
And when I met Jeremy, what was wonderful about him
was, first of all, he was incredibly calm. He was very funny as
(29:46):
well. Very, very funny man. Sadly, he passed. I should say the reason why I'm
talking past tense is he sadly passed away 5 years ago. But he
was very calm, very clever, and utterly dependable.
You say he was just the complete opposite of what I'd experienced
with my parents. I knew very early on with Jeremy,
despite the fact, by the way, that he'd been a kind of serial bachelor. I
(30:08):
mean, he'd had kind of, you know, trails of girlfriends for years, but somehow
when he met me and I met him, he stopped that. And he
suddenly saw something in me that, you know, and he was never like that
again. I saw something in him, which was just utter dependability.
For the first time in my life, I'd met somebody where I knew I could
do almost anything and Jeremy was just always going to be there.
(30:30):
I think Jeremy was one of the first people that I actually
told the proper wave walker story, as
opposed to the very superficial version that I would tell people, which, you
know, always went along the lines of, you know, where did you grow up? I
grew up on a boat. Oh, that sounds wonderful. Well, actually it was a bit
mixed. Oh, I can see that. And that will be the end of the conversation.
(30:51):
With Jeremy, we actually properly kind of talked about it. It must have
been tragic to lose him. He died of lung
cancer, so we had about kind of 18 months of of kind of warning.
And the things that really mattered to me were, 1, how I
was gonna handle it with our 3 kids so that they came out out of
it with kind of minimal trauma. Secondly, I was desperate to kind
(31:13):
of spend time with him. So I ended up writing a book all about him
because he worked for 5 different British prime ministers, an amazing man.
And then how I coped with it. What happened in
my childhood was my parents repeatedly abandoned
me. You know, my mother effectively emotionally abandoned me when I became a
teenager. My father at one point kind of chucked me off the boat. And then
(31:35):
when I went to Oxford, actually, they disowned me on a kind of trumped
up excuse. I think they just didn't want to pay the money to kind of
look after me. My father, you know, I lost him in 2019. He
walked out on me then and hasn't responded to any communication since.
When Jeremy died, I felt the same way. You know, I
felt like, you know, I put my trust in somebody and they
(31:57):
disappeared, which is a ridiculous way to feel when, you know,
because he did not choose to go. But it was one of the
reasons why I thought I'll go and do this therapy because I'm, you know, I
need to kind of come to terms with this. And your mother dies.
But before she does, she's so angry and vicious that you're
going to write this book that she's threatens to do everything she
(32:19):
can to discredit both you and your husband, Jeremy.
How did you feel when she died? She had a very sudden heart attack and
died. And at which point, we did not have a very good relationship.
She, by then, knew I was writing the book. She'd never
asked to see it. But she knew it was going to be a
difficult book for her. About a year before she died, she asked to come up
(32:40):
and have tea with me or have lunch with me. And so she came up
to London, which she'd never done before. She never asked to spend any time with
me whatsoever. She suddenly came up. And at the end of this lunch,
she said, okay, so what was it you didn't like about your childhood?
Quite hard to know where to start, but, you know, you're not talking to me
for weeks on end and calling me names and you abandoned me in New Zealand
(33:01):
and you disowned me in Oxford. Anyway, she said, oh, well, you've
given me lots to think about. And she kind of got up and walked out
about a year then elapsed and I would ring them every month or 2.
And I remember in one phone call, I said to my mom, can I talk
to you about the things that I raised with you? I don't want to talk
to you about it. I don't want to talk to you about it. And then
(33:22):
she passed the phone to my father and I could hear her in the background
saying, this is going to be bad for us. They knew that if I
wrote an honest story about my childhood, even if I didn't write
it in a mean way, and I've never wanted to write it in a mean
way, they weren't going to come out of it kind of pristine. And
then then she suddenly died. And I was very upset. And then I went down
(33:43):
to help my dad prepare for, the funeral. And that's when I,
that's when I found the letter and she'd written this horrible letter, which she
was in the process of writing to me. It said, you know,
if you write your book, I will do everything possible to destroy
Jeremy's, my husband's career, It was kind of everything she could possibly
throw at me. The letter was completely liberating. All
(34:05):
these years, I thought maybe it was me being difficult on the boat. You know,
being on a boat with a teenage girl is probably not a very easy thing.
I suddenly thought, no, you're just not a
nice person. And as you said, you have no relationship with your dad now.
I last saw him in 2019, when he basically walked out on
me, he demanded that I shouldn't write my book,
(34:27):
and kind of swore at me a bit. I mean, he was quite drunk.
And I said, you know, I have a right to write my book. You know,
I'm not going to write my book in a nasty way, but it's my story
and my experience. I wrote him a letter saying, look, you don't have to
explain what happened. You don't have to apologize. I mean, I'm
an adult now. But you do have to accept that
(34:48):
this is how I experienced it. And I accept that you experienced
it differently because I'm sure you experienced it differently. Needless to say, he
hasn't responded. But I feel very calm now because I
feel that, you know, this is his choice, not mine. In a way he's lost
a lot more than I've lost because he's lost not only me, but my kind
of 3 children. My brother and me, I mean, what
(35:10):
happened because we were treated so differently on the boat is we became
very separate. We never really fell out, but we just kind of kept separate
from each other. And always looming over us was this thing that, you know, I
was the black sheep of the family that, you know, could really
even as an adult, not really do too much that was right.
Although it was less a bird than a being on the boat. And he was
(35:33):
the kind of golden child who lived, you know, really close to them. But
it doesn't particularly kind of bother me because I'm very lucky to have
inherited my late husband's family. I've got my wider
family, I've got my kids, and I've got a wide range of kind of friends
and colleagues. So I've got many people in my life who I
care about and they care about me. And one of my learnings, and this
(35:56):
is it is almost a kind of social obligation that you feel
that you should have a relationship with your closest blood relatives.
That's fine. But there are people, and I'm unfortunately one of
them, where those people for whatever reason are not good to you.
And then you don't have to have that. And that for me is quite a
kind of liberating thing to realize at kind
(36:19):
of my age age, so I no longer have to do that. So I always
end my podcast with my 3 takeaways. And it's first of all, you've
just been an absolutely wonderful person to talk to, and I
just live through a real life fairy tale. It's
remarkable. You grew up in a home where people were blinded by
ambition. You were bullied mentally, and you're so up to the
(36:41):
task of extending these olive branches that maybe she was jealous or
how hard it must have been to live with a teenage daughter, but you had
a bad seed in a month. And the more that you flourished and
grew, the more she withered on that vine. And it's just horrible that you had
to pay that price. But what I really liked is that how
the switch changed when you decided to take control. And I think it's an
(37:02):
incredible lesson for people that there's lots of things you can't control.
There's a lot of circumstances that can overpower us, but you chose to take control
and started with getting an education and then claiming a seat at the table,
writing universities, and then going off and navigating, which
must have been is to me, the first couple of years at Oxford must have
been as hard as the last 2 years on the boat because, again, you just
(37:24):
didn't find a way to fit in. But I think at the end and the
thing I've the title of your book is so beautiful because you finally broke
free, and it's so wonderful to see how how you're gonna spend the rest of
your life helping others. There's a lot of people that are in a prison just
from their circumstance. And as you said, there's a lot of people sort of trying
to put a rope together. And just by telling people, just even by having that
(37:45):
rope go out the window, that's your first step forward
towards just escaping this reality. So for all of that more,
it's just been an absolute delight to have you on Chatter That Matters.
Thank you so much. It's been absolutely wonderful being here.
Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter That Matters.
It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
You might not love what you do or where you are in your journey through
life. That is reality. But for
most people listening to this podcast, you can accept and even
surrender to what is happening, or you could choose to make it
happen. Now, there's no secret or 5 steps to this or that.
There's no freedom via lottery ticket. And for those who are listening
(00:26):
who are consumed by just surviving, I know it's tough to dream
inside a nightmare. But what
I've learned from 200 interviews and chatter that matters is there's a
commonality with those who make happen, happen.
They don't accept status quo. They dream of a better outcome.
Could be finding more safety and security, love and belonging, a better
(00:48):
career or higher purpose, could be even just chasing their meaning in
life, and they manifest their future by animating their dream. They
see themselves living it and loving it, and they make their dreams so
magnetic that attracts others.
In this episode, I share the story of someone who had an epic dream. His
(01:09):
name was George Cook. He wanted to retrace the 3rd and final voyage
of the 18th century explorer, Captain Cook, to whom they were not
related, but they did share the same surname. He and his wife Mary, who
actually didn't like sailing, went all in to make this dream happen. They sold
their family home and family owned hotel and set sail with their 2 young
children. They end up spending a decade on the open seas.
(01:32):
And what might have been their dream turned into a living nightmare for their daughter,
Suzanne. There I am, a little kid, my brother, sitting in this main
cabin for days hanging on. She left with them at
age 7 thinking this was an adventure, but over time began to realize
that their love for the open waters closed the door in her going to school,
meeting friends, or having any sense of security. I would get
(01:54):
harassed a lot by by the kind of local men at the different
ports. Add to this nightmare, many life threatening storms of
brain injury, 7 life saving operations, starvation, and
you'll better understand the title of her book, Wavewalker, my memoir of
breaking free. I knew it was a lifeline. I didn't know whether it would take
me far enough. As you listen to Suzanne's story,
(02:16):
put yourself into her deck shoes and ask yourself,
was this a dream, a nightmare, or something in between?
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented
by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings
(02:42):
Susanne Heywood, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Hi. Great to be with
you. So your story begins almost like a fairy tale. What do
you remember about life before you're that 7 year old that
that climbed onboard the ship? I remember quite a lot actually, and maybe that's
because there was such a clear divide between my life before
7 and my life after 7. So I I kind of know that all my
(03:04):
memories of England as a child come from before I was
7. So I remember the houses that we lived in, we lived in, 3
houses that I can remember. I remember my dog, Rusty. I remember my
doll's house, which I later on I drew the kind of the
floor plan of this doll's house, which I later drew up plunge to electrify.
You know, I remember my friends, my best friend, Sarah, I remember going to
(03:27):
school. So, yes, I I have quite vivid memories of what
was a very conventional life. And your parents
had a family home. I understand a family hotel and there were teachers for a
living. So my father trained as a teacher, but by the point,
that I was 6 years old, he'd become a bit of a serial
entrepreneur. He'd set up this hotel, as you mentioned. He was
(03:50):
also working at Warwick Castle and my father's job was to try and make it
make money. My mother was, was basically a
housewife. She was a trained primary school teacher, but at that point in my life,
she was a housewife. So she was picking up my brother and me from school
and dropping us off and taking me to violin lessons and horse riding
and Your mom really didn't like sailing either? No. So my dad
(04:11):
was a passionate sailor and would occasionally disappear off to go
sailing with his friends. And he'd go away for a kind of long
weekend or even a week going down sailing to the canaries and back.
My mother was a bit of a party person. You know, she was never happier
than when we had lots of people over to the house. She was dressed up,
she was entertaining, serving food. So really not
(04:33):
a sailor at all. So when did your dad I mean, the irony is
his last name is Cook, and he's fascinated with captain Cook. And when
did he come up with this dream? Because I've heard big dreams before,
but, you know, following the path of captain Cook's voyage. I mean, this wasn't
across going across the English Channel. This was a trip around the world. I
suspect the surname played into it, so the fact that we shared the name. My
(04:56):
father came comes from a similar part of the UK to captain Cook,
not exactly the same, but he also comes from Yorkshire, and he likes
sailing. So I think he'd always seen Cook as a bit of a
hero. When it came time for the 200th anniversary of Cook's voyages
around the world, he somehow got the idea that he was
gonna play some part in commemorating Captain Cook.
(05:18):
But, you know, nothing happened on the anniversary of the first voyage or the second
voyage, so he became determined he was going to recreate the third voyage.
And I don't know to what extent he really factored into that dream,
the fact that he had a wife he didn't like sailing and 2 small
children. And of course, by making it all about captain Cook's
voyage, he was able to get a lot of sponsorship for our boat
(05:41):
because we weren't that wealthy. We certainly couldn't have afforded to put it
all together, but it became something more than just somebody's mad
dream. It became the Captain James Cook bicentenary
voyage. How did your mom go along? Somebody who loved parties and
dinner and socializing and watching her young daughter learn how to
play the violin, agreeing to sell everything and going all in on this
(06:03):
dream. Well, my dad, I think, wanted to be a hero, wanted everybody to
think he'd done something incredible, and this was his moment to be,
you know, we talk now about kind of influencers, people who are famous, this was
his moment to be famous, I think. My
mother basically was, devoted to my
dad. And I think once my father had decided he was going to do it,
(06:24):
it didn't even occur to my mother that she wouldn't just go with
him, around the world. I still don't know why they didn't
discuss all the different variants that might have been possible. You
know, like my father doing the long legs and my mother going out
and meeting him or us going with them for a few months and then coming
back. None of that in my memory, was ever discussed. It
(06:47):
was always assumed it was a 3 year voyage, and my mother, my
brother, and me would go with him. You know, a lot of people dream
doing is a very different thing. And when he came across
the boat, the wave walker, and and he felt he got the deal of a
lifetime much bigger boat for his budget, is that when you
started to realize that this was more than just something he was
(07:08):
manifesting, but this was something that was actually gonna happen? Even as a kid, I
knew at this point it had become real because he took
me and my younger brother and my mother down to see Wavewalker,
and she was a beautiful boat. And buying her, by the way, meant selling virtually
everything else that we had. So we had to sell our our house. He put
the hotel on the market. He sold everything. Suzanne, was there
(07:30):
any pushback from family or friends or teachers that
started to question the judgment of, as you
said, someone that really is not thinking through that there is possibly other ways
to do this? My mother went in to see my head teacher and
he told her that he thought the whole idea was a ridiculous idea.
In fact, he thought it was such a ridiculous idea that he refused to even
(07:52):
give her the curriculum that we'd been learning so that we could continue it on
the boat. This dream is first introduced to you at age 6, and you get
on this boat at age 7. And from what I understand, like, was
it wasn't that far into the first leg of the journey that
you really hit your first tragedy. Yes. So we set
sail from Plymouth and pretty much immediately went into a
(08:14):
storm. And I realized 2 things. First of all, as soon as you
go into a storm at sea and you're a little kid, you're basically trapped
down below. That might not seem so bad, but you've got to remember that
if you're in a storm at sea, it goes on for days. And my mother
gets very badly seasick. She disappeared into her cabin for
several days. So there I am a little kid with my brother sitting
(08:37):
in this main cabin for days hanging on, with no real food,
for example, because, you know, we're we're too little to make
food. So we end up kind of making do by eating the cake that we
were given, when we left Plymouth. Not long after that,
you know, not long after my mother finally kind of reappears,
all of a sudden late one evening, after I've gone to sleep in
(09:00):
my bunk, there's lots of screaming and shouting, people running around on
deck, and I come up on deck in my kind of pyjamas and
there's a massive tanker bearing down on us. And my
father starts setting off flares, flare after flare after flare and they're
coming towards us. And the problem is, we're on a sailing boat, so
we're going at a much slower speed than they are, so you can't get out
(09:22):
of the way, there's nothing you can do. I mean, if he's got, if they're
gonna hit you, they're gonna hit you. And eventually my father shot a flare, which
hit the kind of the the the the kind of glass cabin
on top of this boat, and it turned. And the other tragedy at
sea, and I know this happened afterwards, but it's such a horrific
storm. Your dad is thrown overboard.
(09:42):
Worse, the girl trapped below, you, suffer severe
brain injury. Now most people who sail around the world go from, east to
west. And the reason why that's a better thing to do is because the
winds near the equator go by and large from west to east,
sorry from east to west. Captain Cook decided to go the other way.
And because he decided to go the other way, going from west to east,
(10:05):
he had to go really, really far south to get around the world. So
we had to follow him. And that meant that we crossed 2 of the most
dangerous oceans of the world, the Southern Atlantic Ocean, and then the
Southern Indian Ocean. And halfway across the Southern Indian
Ocean, we hit a terrible storm that went on for days. The waves
became bigger and bigger, And eventually an enormous
(10:26):
wave hit the boat, went straight through the deck out to the side of the
boat. I was flung up against the the roof of the
cabin, the wall of the cabin. I fractured my skull, broke
my nose, and we almost died. I mean, we we
were incredibly lucky that 3, days
later, we came across a tiny atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean. But
(10:47):
even then, the the the kind of trauma wasn't over because I ended up
having to have 6 or 7 operations on my head to relieve
the blood pressure. And, of course, in an ator in the middle of the Indian
Ocean, there was no anesthetic. So who actually did the operation? So
there's a little tiny French military base on this island. I think they're still
there now. And it's a team of about 15 men, one of which
(11:09):
is a doctor. My mother refused to come in for any of the operations
because she was afraid of blood. The consequence of that was as a
7 year old kid, I had to go through all these operations on my
own with a doctor who didn't speak any English. I
basically spent most of the operations swearing at him. I'm just
I have nothing but shame for your mom. I really don't care if she was
(11:32):
scared of blood. I mean, this is her little girl. You're going through 7
operations to relieve like, if you hadn't found that little
space in the ocean, you probably wouldn't be here right now. No. Well, what the
doctor told me, and I managed to contact him when I was writing the book,
the pressure on my brain was so, so enormous that I would've ended up
with brain damage. Actually, what made it worse, my parents
(11:54):
never liked to discuss things that went wrong. This was a kind of family
rule, so I could never discuss the wave. Why did the wave
happen? Why was I so badly injured? You know, why was I
operated on? Why did my mother not come in? None of that was discussable.
And that meant that it took me a very long time to kind of
process it. How soon did you realize that instead of being on an
(12:16):
adventure, you were in fact a prisoner? It took me quite a
long time, you know, really when I was 11 or
12, by which point I'd been on the boat 5, you
know, 4 or 5 years. As a child, it's very, very hard to
challenge your parents, or even to accept that they're not
treating you in the way that they should, because to do so pulls
(12:38):
down your entire universe. And, of course, for me, it was an even more
extreme situation because, you know, that universe was the only
thing I had. If I blew up that universe by accepting
that something was wrong, I would have nothing left. So let's talk about that
age because that's an age when puberty is gonna hit hormonal changes,
periods, body changes, one toilet. I mean, was
(13:01):
there any place that you had privacy? Was there any place
or anyone that helped you come to terms with these changes? No. Not at
all. Although Wavewalker was quite a big boat in some ways, she was 69
feet long. Down below, there wasn't that much space. All I
had was I had one bunk, and I had one drawer. As you
say, just one toilet, one small table that would only sit
(13:24):
kind of 5 or 6 people. As time went on and we ran more
and more and more out of money, we started taking paying crew on the boat.
So my father effectively turned wave walk into a bit of a floating hotel. So
people would come on board for, you know, 5, 6, 7 weeks and then
disappear again. And that meant that the boat was packed. And a lot of our
crew members were men. You know, I very quickly realized I had to be very
(13:46):
kind of careful. Would you ever feel threatened or were you ever approached
in an inappropriate way? Because, I mean, you're living on the open water.
The biggest danger that I generally felt was, when we went
to shore. And so because I would get harassed a lot by the
kind of local men at the different ports. So quite often, I would
stay on board. And then on board, I would keep myself to myself as much
(14:09):
as I could. I have 2 daughters, and I remember them going through puberty, you
know, and the the discussions with their mom and, you know, the products that
they needed, a bra. How did you deal with that? Where is your lifeline
there, or did you just have to figure this out like some sea
urchin? It's one of the things that I now realize, one of the issues with
taking a child out of normal society. You're taking away
(14:31):
every lifeline they have. So if there is any issue in the family,
they have no one to turn to. My relationship with my mother
deteriorated very, very badly when I was 11, 12 when I went into
puberty. I don't know why, I think she was jealous of
me, resented me something. Now she would call me
names, she would refer to me in the 3rd person. So she would say to
(14:53):
somebody, can you tell that girl to do something? Or she just not speak to
me for days on end. So the only thing that
you could do is kind of build a shell around yourself. And so I wasn't
gonna get any support from my mother. In fact, my mother, when I went to
her and said, I wanted a bra, she laughed at me.
Luckily enough, at that point in time, we were in Hawaii and I had a
(15:14):
friend And I wasn't intending to, to kind of talk to the
friend's mother, but we were talking about it in the back seat. And the
mother heard me. She turned the car around, drove me to the nearest shopping
center, because we were in Hawaii, so they have shopping centers, like bought me for
bras. As you're between ages 7 17, there's also the
things like the first kiss and holding hands or
(15:35):
flirting. Did any of was any of that part of your life or it was
just a vacuum that everybody else was living and you had
no opportunity to fill it? No. I mean, that was the great frustration of this
life is that you would so for example, in Hawaii,
I met 2 friends, Heidi and Shannon. I'm still in
touch with Heidi actually, and it was Heidi's mom who bought me the,
(15:57):
the bras. In Hawaii, there was also a boy in another boat called Eric,
and I remember Eric gave me a kiss. But then about a week
later, we left. You know? So that and that would just
happen repeatedly. I kind of started to build up a set of kind of
pen pals, so I would write to people. But, of course, I didn't have a
permanent address, so I'd always be guessing where I might kinda go
(16:18):
to. This, I think, was a big missing thing for me as a
child and thing that something that I increasingly became
desperate to find somehow was friends,
somebody you can sit and talk to. And I've had sailors
say to me, well, I don't know what, what the problem is. You know, when
I've been sailing, I've seen kids on boats and, you know, kids on boats
(16:40):
meet kids on boats and they have fun. And I say to them, you don't
understand, you're a teenage girl. I'm not looking for a play date. You know,
I'm not looking for somebody that I can meet for an hour to go for
a swim. I'm looking for somebody I can, you know, get to know as a
friend and try to make sense of the world. You could have been nicknamed Cinderella.
I mean, when you talk about your brother was on top of the deck doing
(17:03):
chores and you were down below, trapped down below, sort of doing
kitchen things. There were 2 things going on. You know, one was
my mother's increasing well, what I felt was kind of
just dislike of me. She once told me later in life that she was intimidated
by me. She thinks my brother on the other hand is wonderful.
One of the triggers for me writing the book and we'll come on to this
(17:25):
probably later, was much later on
when I had children of my own. My mother replicated this
and she chose one of my children who could do no wrong
and one of my children who could do no right. And I had to stop
her spending time alone with them. The other thing going on was there was a
huge kind of gender thing going on, which was much more from my
(17:46):
father. Well, you know, my father's view was a boy gets to help up out
on deck, and a girl kinda helps below,
And boys need kinda time to just muck around and do what boys
do, whereas girls are serious and they should be kinda downstairs
helping and doing stuff. You know? How did your brother react to this? I mean,
he's in a situation where, I mean, kids are can be kids, but if
(18:08):
this is going on day after day, month after month, it has to
change his psyche as well. He kind of enjoyed it. I mean, and I
don't really blame him for that. I mean, I'm saddened by
that, but he was a kid. You decide I'm going to
get an education through written correspondence. That must have
been quite challenging. I managed to convince my parents to let
(18:30):
me enroll in a correspondence school in Australia. So I had a
stack of books and then there were kind of work lessons
you could work through and post off. That sounds relatively
straightforward, but then there were all sorts of problems. So one problem of course is
we didn't have an address. So I could only post them off when we got
to a port that had a post office. I then have to ask my dad
(18:52):
where we were going to sail to next. I would ask them to send the
lessons back to wherever that was, but often then my dad would change his mind.
I mean, it just wasn't a priority for him to get my schoolwork back. So
I only ever got back, you know, at best half the lesson. So that was
a kind of first problem. 2nd problem was there was no space on board to
work. All we have is this one little table. And actually for me, there's a
(19:12):
really pivotal moment in the book, in the story where I actually
assert my right to a space at this table because
my mother is trying to stop me from sitting at the table. And so given
the crew were around, I basically just, you know, challenged her
to to try and force me to move. Then you had the issue that, you
know, my mother, my father wanted me to work for several hours each day. But
(19:34):
despite all that, I became obsessed with educating myself.
And I've asked myself why this is. And I think there was two
reasons. One is it was something I could control. I was
living in a world where my father in particular, my father and my mother to
some extent, had incredible freedom. But the person who
was paying for that was me and my brother, because we
(19:56):
had literally no freedom at all. I mean, we couldn't even get off the
boat most of the time. We had no choice. We were never consulted on where
we went. We had no choice about what we ate. Within this
world where I had literally no choice, I was like a prisoner on
this boat. The one thing that I could control was my
schoolwork. And then the second reason is I knew it was
(20:18):
a lifeline. I didn't know. It's like somebody kind of sitting
in a cell and braiding a piece of rope. You don't
know if that rope is gonna be long enough to get you out the window
and down to the ground, but you do know it's gonna go out the window.
And I knew that education would take me somewhere. I didn't know whether it would
take me far enough. When
(20:40):
we return, Suzanne, now 16 years old,
feeling isolated and abandoned is faced with an impossible
choice, and her decision will shape her entire
future.
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I think it's very important, actually, that we try to kinda give children
(22:05):
access to structures and people outside of the family
because if the family dynamics are very difficult as mine were,
you're very trapped if you can't get away from them.
Today, I'm speaking to Suzanne Heywood. Imagine being 7 years old and
you find yourself on a boat, a 70 foot boat called the Wave
Walker. Your parents' dream is to follow the famed voyage of
(22:27):
Captain James Cook. It's supposed to take 3 years, but for the next 10
years, you really become a miniature deckhand, 10
years before you finally have a chance to escape.
Fast forward the story to New Zealand, where your
parents decide maybe your brother needs an education. It
must have driven you crazy that someone had been so committed to education,
(22:51):
he gets to go to school, and you're supposed to again be this,
the caretaker. By this point, I'd done the junior
certificate, the first high school exam. I'd done the 1st
year of the second level, all through Australia. And so when
my father said that he wanted to stop because he was going to put my
brother into school, I begged him to take us to Australia because I
(23:13):
only had one more year in the Australian curriculum and then I
was going to graduate. But my father refused. So he went to New Zealand
instead. I was then faced with a horrible choice. You know, I either
threw away an entire year, if not more of,
of this, this work that I'd done, you know, sweat blood and
tears on this boat, you know, wrapping myself in a sail, hiding.
(23:36):
I just sat the exams for that, that kind of 3rd year and I
got a very good mark in maths. I would have had to chop the whole
thing away because the curriculum was completely different. I felt I'd been left
with no choice, but to continue doing this correspondence. And then I was
left and I was expected to kind of cook and clean for my brother.
And then in addition, my father also wanted me to run his
(23:58):
business, paying crew to go on the boat. So that's kind of running advertisements,
taking all the money, you know, sorting all that out as well. He
left us almost no money to survive on. And that kind of ended up being
9 months that they left us on our own. Those were some of the toughest
months of all, kind of mentally, psychologically, because I was completely
isolated. You decide that now that you've got these certificates,
(24:21):
that you're gonna start applying to universities. Oxford comes
along. It was amazing. And Oxford said, if you can
write us 2 essays, we'll think about it. And so I wrote them 2
essays. 1 was about what it's like to study science at sea, because
I figured nobody else could write that essay. And then they wrote back to me
and said, if you can get yourself here, we'll interview
(24:42):
you. So I went and picked kiwifruit. My father gave
me a small amount as well, and I bought a one way ticket
back to the UK and basically bet everything on that
interview. And I write about it in the book being in an airport,
I think it was in Japan on the way back, and just being in
this moment of thinking, I can't ever go back to the boat.
(25:04):
I can't go back to my mother. I can't go back to being treated like
that. I'm never gonna go back. But in front of me, I don't know what
I have because all I have is this kind of one way bet.
I have a whole set of relatives I haven't seen since I was 7 years
old, almost no money. If I can get this interview to
work, then I can work everything else out from there. How did you
(25:25):
even get to England? Like, you got money, you got on the ticket, but did
you have at least the paperwork to get you into the country? Did so that
they know you're a British citizen? So when we left England when I was
7, I was on my parents' passport. But when I finally got
to being 16 years old, you could no longer be on your parents'
passport. So my parents were forced to get me a passport. So I
(25:46):
had a passport. My brother, because he was a year younger,
had entered New Zealand still on my parents' passport and
bizarrely, the New Zealand immigration people have missed him
altogether. And then what had happened to me when my parents basically
abandoned us and left is I only had a very short visa
on my passport. And so I almost got deported from New Zealand twice during
(26:08):
that period where I was left there. Whereas they never came for my brother because
they didn't even realize he was in the country. All these ports of call along
the way, was there ever a time an authority kind of questioned this
whole family situation, or was it just, as you said, they're just used to sea
gypsies and whoever finds themselves on board? When you reach a
port, basically, 2 people come on board. 1 is the customs people
(26:29):
and then immigration. And all immigration was worried about was,
you know, stamping your passport and deciding whether or not they were going to let
you stay and they never asked anything. This is the thing, you know, they always
had a plausible story if anybody ever asked them. So in kind of
passing conversation, it would be, oh, the kids are all doing fine, you know,
kind of, you know, Mary, my mom's name is
(26:51):
teaching them was the early story, although it wasn't really true after the 1st kind
of year and a half and later it was, oh, they're teaching themselves.
One of the things that's happened since I wrote the book is one of my
relatives wrote to me and said that they now
regretted never coming to find us. But you must have thought of escape a
lot. At one point I ran away from the boat. So when I was about
(27:13):
15, I eventually, you know, my mother had been particularly unpleasant
and my father was being quite pleasant at the time as well. My father
drinks very heavily and that used to frighten me and he'd been
drinking a lot. So I went to shore and ran away
kind of as far as I could to the end of the peninsula and then
sat there and thought, what am I gonna do? I'm quite vulnerable, quite
(27:35):
kind of petite and quite pretty. And so I will be kind of regularly harassed
if you're on your own. I have no money. I don't have a passport.
I don't have the number of a relative that I can go to. So what
am I gonna do? And I thought the only thing I can do is go
back, keep myself as kind of small as I possibly
can, and keep studying. So let's go back to Oxford. It's almost like
(27:57):
the movie where the person comes out of the jungle that hasn't been in society
in 10 years. I mean, you couldn't have had the the cultural nuances. You
couldn't have understood what happened in music and fashion. You must have been a bit
of an odd berg. I thought, this is wonderful. Finally, I've
escaped. Finally, I'm going to have friends. Finally, I'm going to be able to live
a normal life. And then what what I was really worried about was the
(28:18):
academic side. I thought they're going to see me, they're going to see through me,
they're going to see that I really don't know very much. I'm
missing subjects. I've got huge gaps in my education. I never learned my
times table. And what happened that was really interesting
was academically, it was okay. I mean, I worked really hard.
The one thing I learned how to do on that boat was to work really
(28:39):
hard and that served me well. I worked hard.
Socially, it was a complete disaster because I had literally
nothing in common with anybody. I remember one of the girls who I met
early on turning to me at one point and said, you're the worst person at
small talk that I've ever met. And at the at the time,
I remember feeling, well, I don't not sure I really care because small talk is
(29:01):
a slightly kind of ridiculous thing. And I now realize that that kind
of summed up the whole thing. I hadn't learned how to do
it. It probably took a good year or 2 until I really
started to fit in a bit more. You don't just crush Oxford. You
get your PhD at Cambridge. You've had this
incredible career. I mean, you've got everything going for you. You meet the
(29:23):
love of your life, Jeremy. How hard was it to
let the drop bridge down? Because I have to believe you'd built up
a pretty thick wall. I've been off the boat for about 6 years.
I think I was still very careful what I said to people.
And when I met Jeremy, what was wonderful about him
was, first of all, he was incredibly calm. He was very funny as
(29:46):
well. Very, very funny man. Sadly, he passed. I should say the reason why I'm
talking past tense is he sadly passed away 5 years ago. But he
was very calm, very clever, and utterly dependable.
You say he was just the complete opposite of what I'd experienced
with my parents. I knew very early on with Jeremy,
despite the fact, by the way, that he'd been a kind of serial bachelor. I
(30:08):
mean, he'd had kind of, you know, trails of girlfriends for years, but somehow
when he met me and I met him, he stopped that. And he
suddenly saw something in me that, you know, and he was never like that
again. I saw something in him, which was just utter dependability.
For the first time in my life, I'd met somebody where I knew I could
do almost anything and Jeremy was just always going to be there.
(30:30):
I think Jeremy was one of the first people that I actually
told the proper wave walker story, as
opposed to the very superficial version that I would tell people, which, you
know, always went along the lines of, you know, where did you grow up? I
grew up on a boat. Oh, that sounds wonderful. Well, actually it was a bit
mixed. Oh, I can see that. And that will be the end of the conversation.
(30:51):
With Jeremy, we actually properly kind of talked about it. It must have
been tragic to lose him. He died of lung
cancer, so we had about kind of 18 months of of kind of warning.
And the things that really mattered to me were, 1, how I
was gonna handle it with our 3 kids so that they came out out of
it with kind of minimal trauma. Secondly, I was desperate to kind
(31:13):
of spend time with him. So I ended up writing a book all about him
because he worked for 5 different British prime ministers, an amazing man.
And then how I coped with it. What happened in
my childhood was my parents repeatedly abandoned
me. You know, my mother effectively emotionally abandoned me when I became a
teenager. My father at one point kind of chucked me off the boat. And then
(31:35):
when I went to Oxford, actually, they disowned me on a kind of trumped
up excuse. I think they just didn't want to pay the money to kind of
look after me. My father, you know, I lost him in 2019. He
walked out on me then and hasn't responded to any communication since.
When Jeremy died, I felt the same way. You know, I
felt like, you know, I put my trust in somebody and they
(31:57):
disappeared, which is a ridiculous way to feel when, you know,
because he did not choose to go. But it was one of the
reasons why I thought I'll go and do this therapy because I'm, you know, I
need to kind of come to terms with this. And your mother dies.
But before she does, she's so angry and vicious that you're
going to write this book that she's threatens to do everything she
(32:19):
can to discredit both you and your husband, Jeremy.
How did you feel when she died? She had a very sudden heart attack and
died. And at which point, we did not have a very good relationship.
She, by then, knew I was writing the book. She'd never
asked to see it. But she knew it was going to be a
difficult book for her. About a year before she died, she asked to come up
(32:40):
and have tea with me or have lunch with me. And so she came up
to London, which she'd never done before. She never asked to spend any time with
me whatsoever. She suddenly came up. And at the end of this lunch,
she said, okay, so what was it you didn't like about your childhood?
Quite hard to know where to start, but, you know, you're not talking to me
for weeks on end and calling me names and you abandoned me in New Zealand
(33:01):
and you disowned me in Oxford. Anyway, she said, oh, well, you've
given me lots to think about. And she kind of got up and walked out
about a year then elapsed and I would ring them every month or 2.
And I remember in one phone call, I said to my mom, can I talk
to you about the things that I raised with you? I don't want to talk
to you about it. I don't want to talk to you about it. And then
(33:22):
she passed the phone to my father and I could hear her in the background
saying, this is going to be bad for us. They knew that if I
wrote an honest story about my childhood, even if I didn't write
it in a mean way, and I've never wanted to write it in a mean
way, they weren't going to come out of it kind of pristine. And
then then she suddenly died. And I was very upset. And then I went down
(33:43):
to help my dad prepare for, the funeral. And that's when I,
that's when I found the letter and she'd written this horrible letter, which she
was in the process of writing to me. It said, you know,
if you write your book, I will do everything possible to destroy
Jeremy's, my husband's career, It was kind of everything she could possibly
throw at me. The letter was completely liberating. All
(34:05):
these years, I thought maybe it was me being difficult on the boat. You know,
being on a boat with a teenage girl is probably not a very easy thing.
I suddenly thought, no, you're just not a
nice person. And as you said, you have no relationship with your dad now.
I last saw him in 2019, when he basically walked out on
me, he demanded that I shouldn't write my book,
(34:27):
and kind of swore at me a bit. I mean, he was quite drunk.
And I said, you know, I have a right to write my book. You know,
I'm not going to write my book in a nasty way, but it's my story
and my experience. I wrote him a letter saying, look, you don't have to
explain what happened. You don't have to apologize. I mean, I'm
an adult now. But you do have to accept that
(34:48):
this is how I experienced it. And I accept that you experienced
it differently because I'm sure you experienced it differently. Needless to say, he
hasn't responded. But I feel very calm now because I
feel that, you know, this is his choice, not mine. In a way he's lost
a lot more than I've lost because he's lost not only me, but my kind
of 3 children. My brother and me, I mean, what
(35:10):
happened because we were treated so differently on the boat is we became
very separate. We never really fell out, but we just kind of kept separate
from each other. And always looming over us was this thing that, you know, I
was the black sheep of the family that, you know, could really
even as an adult, not really do too much that was right.
Although it was less a bird than a being on the boat. And he was
(35:33):
the kind of golden child who lived, you know, really close to them. But
it doesn't particularly kind of bother me because I'm very lucky to have
inherited my late husband's family. I've got my wider
family, I've got my kids, and I've got a wide range of kind of friends
and colleagues. So I've got many people in my life who I
care about and they care about me. And one of my learnings, and this
(35:56):
is it is almost a kind of social obligation that you feel
that you should have a relationship with your closest blood relatives.
That's fine. But there are people, and I'm unfortunately one of
them, where those people for whatever reason are not good to you.
And then you don't have to have that. And that for me is quite a
kind of liberating thing to realize at kind
(36:19):
of my age age, so I no longer have to do that. So I always
end my podcast with my 3 takeaways. And it's first of all, you've
just been an absolutely wonderful person to talk to, and I
just live through a real life fairy tale. It's
remarkable. You grew up in a home where people were blinded by
ambition. You were bullied mentally, and you're so up to the
(36:41):
task of extending these olive branches that maybe she was jealous or
how hard it must have been to live with a teenage daughter, but you had
a bad seed in a month. And the more that you flourished and
grew, the more she withered on that vine. And it's just horrible that you had
to pay that price. But what I really liked is that how
the switch changed when you decided to take control. And I think it's an
(37:02):
incredible lesson for people that there's lots of things you can't control.
There's a lot of circumstances that can overpower us, but you chose to take control
and started with getting an education and then claiming a seat at the table,
writing universities, and then going off and navigating, which
must have been is to me, the first couple of years at Oxford must have
been as hard as the last 2 years on the boat because, again, you just
(37:24):
didn't find a way to fit in. But I think at the end and the
thing I've the title of your book is so beautiful because you finally broke
free, and it's so wonderful to see how how you're gonna spend the rest of
your life helping others. There's a lot of people that are in a prison just
from their circumstance. And as you said, there's a lot of people sort of trying
to put a rope together. And just by telling people, just even by having that
(37:45):
rope go out the window, that's your first step forward
towards just escaping this reality. So for all of that more,
it's just been an absolute delight to have you on Chatter That Matters.
Thank you so much. It's been absolutely wonderful being here.
Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter That Matters.
It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
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