Wavewalker: Suzanne Heywood’s honest story of a makeshift childhood at sea

Wavewalker: Breaking Free

Author: Suzanne Heywood

ISBN-13: 978-0008498498

Publisher: William Collins

Guideline Price: £20

I’m not sure at what point I realised that Suzanne Heywood’s singular, troubling and remarkable memoir was not, in fact, really only about her childhood spent at sea aboard a boat called Wavewalker. Even though that story in itself is extraordinary. How many people have you ever known whose parents sat them down, aged six (Suzanne), and five (Jonathan) and told them they were leaving their lives in England to spend three years sailing around the world, retracing voyages made by Captain James Cook?

The family set off from Plymouth in 1976, but did not return, as promised by her father Gordon Cook (no relation to Captain Cook), in three years. They spent more than a decade roaming the world, most of it in the South Pacific, covering 47,000 nautical miles, always moving on, always flat broke; a deeply dysfunctional unit of four.

The gripping story Heywood recounting her childhood and young adulthood aboard Wavewalker is bizarre by any standards. Many children entertain fantasies about running away to the circus, or to sea, or to some world that is the complete opposite of their known and normal existence. The two siblings actually lived such a fictional-seeming life, spending their entire formative years without ever going to school, labouring as unpaid crew on the boat, and dealing with situations no child should ever have to experience.

Such as the horrendous storms they frequently endured, one of which resulted in seven-year-old Suzanne’s hospitalisation – days after the event – for a fractured skull, a broken nose and swelling on the brain, when a giant wave in the Indian Ocean almost sank their boat. She required seven operations, and there was no anaesthetic in the hospital of the tiny island that was their first land after the storm. For years after she had nightmares about what she calls The Wave.

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Wavewalker, Breaking Free, is in fact at core a story about years of what seems very like wilful parental neglect, and the devastating impact this makeshift life at sea had on the author. The three years at sea turned into 10. This was despite repeated pleading by the author to return to England: to be allowed to go to school, to have friends she did not have to keep saying goodbye to, and to cease the endless work she was required to do on the boat. What she describes is nothing less than a childhood spent in marine imprisonment. I read most of this book with my jaw on the floor.

Education came via correspondence courses despite the fact that both parents were trained teachers. They told their children they did not have time to teach them; and also told them keeping the boat sailing, supplied and maintained was more important. The needs of various ragbag paying crew they took on along the way were similarly prioritised over those of the two young children.

Like Tara Westover’s seminal memoir Education, Heywood makes fierce and heroic efforts over the years to educate herself, seeing it as a way of escape from family entrapment. (Unlike Westover, however, the writing itself is not as memorably compelling, although the narrative is, if overlong.) At one point, aged 16, Heywood is left alone for months with her brother in New Zealand, while their parents try to make some money by voyaging with more paying crew. Against truly remarkable odds she is granted an interview to Oxford, and then a university place.

Heywood’s parents are still alive, and she addresses the fact that they most understandably did not want her to write this book. In the very moving epilogue she writes that their response was “worse than I’d anticipated”. Her parents’ public version of their years at sea – they were interviewed by the media several times en route and after they eventually returned to England – had always been: what a “privileged” upbringing their children received.

“But this oft-repeated mantra conceals a far darker story… many parts of my childhood were worse than I’d been willing to admit,” Heywood states.

It requires true courage to take ownership of one’s own story when others involved in the story have such a different version, especially when those others are one’s ageing parents. There are no higher stakes, and she knows it. Heywood concludes by saying, “I had no control over my life when I was a child, but as an adult I have the right to tell my story as honestly as I can.”

Bravo to that.