This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear Weekday
Afternoon's on the Drive. When Susanne Heywood was seven, she set sail out
of Plymouth, England in the schooner Wavewalker with her parents and brother. The
trip was to recreate Captain Cook's third voyage around the world, and it was
supposed to last three years. It lasted considerably longer, and she's written all
about it in her new book it's called wave Walker, and she's joining us
now. Please, Suzanne, please tell me your dad at least had novice
sailing skills. He did have novice sailing skills. He had sailed quite a
lot around the UK, but he'd never crossed the ocean before, so he
didn't really know how to kind of navigate across the no ocean. But the
bigger issue actually was that my mother who went with us. So it was
my father, my mother, my younger brother and me. My mother hated
sailing and became very, very badly seasick and that kind of created quite a
difficult dynamic on the boat, as you can imagine, I imagine. So,
and this was also at a time, wasn't it before GPS and satellite
phones. That's right. I mean, conditions on board were very basic.
We sit there when I was seven years old, I mean on the boat.
Basically the only technology that we had was we had a sextant, which
my father had never kind of used crossing an ocean before. We had a
compass, and we had an ice box, which literally was a kind of
box with kind of a you know, kind of pads pads around it so
that the ice would melt rather slowly. But we didn't have a refrigerator.
We had no satellite navigation. We had a shortwave radio, but that only
kind of worked when you were very close to the coast. So once we
left a port pretty quickly, we were completely out of contact with anybody.
Was your father just that type of person that he just would spur the moment
to, very impulsive kind of guy. Well, he was somebody who wanted
to be a hero. I think now my maiden name is Cook. And
so what he wanted to do is he wanted to recreate Captain Cook's third voyage
around the world. And that was the whole pretext of this voyage, and
incidentally how he raised the money for the Boycher because we weren't kind of wealthy
people, so he raised money that way. I think he wanted to be
a hero, be celebrated for doing this. And what he promised me,
as you said in your introduction, was that I, you know, it
was only going to take three years. I'd be back by the time I
was ten years old. I was going to leave obviously my entire life behind,
my beloved dog, Rusty, my friends, my doll's house, which
was going to go into my grandfather's attic. But not to worry. We
were going to be back by the time I was ten, and everything would
go back to normal. And it was considerably long. It was indeed,
it was indeed, I mean, and that really is the kind of tale
of the book, because this gradually unravels over time. You know, first
of all, we're very badly shipwrecked early on in the voyage, about six
months in. I'm very badly injured in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Because we're also sailing a very dangerous route around the world, because we're following
Captain Cook on his third voyage. We're actually sailing the wrong way around the
world, across some of the most dangerous oceans with two little kids on board.
I'm seven and my brother six. I'm very badly injured, so as
you can imagine, that leads me to quite a fear of the sea.
But my father is determined to keep sailing. We keep on sailing all the
way up to Hawaii, which is where we stay for a little while.
Well, my father decides what to do next, and then we have a
family vote, and I vote to come home, because of course, by
this time, I'm desperate to go to school. I'm desperate to have friends.
And my father overrules my brother and me and says, you know,
this is a dictatorship, not the democracy, and we're going to keep sailing.
And so we did. We just kept sailing. Suzanne Hayward the book
is wave Walker, Breaking Free. It's about her adventure around the world sailing
as a child with her family. I'm a sailing enthusiast and I haven't done
this, but I know people who have and something similar, and much of
the time they sail in a group as close as possible, relaying information to
one another, and only at certain times of the year when the possibility for
storms is low. Did any of that occur to her parents, No,
we didn't do any of that. No, we sailed completely on our own.
We were sailing the wrong way around the world. And although we would
stay for a few months occasionally in Australia or New Zealand during the cyclone season,
often my father would sail before the cyclone season was over, and we
did hit several cyclones while we were sailing. But I became determined I was
going to escape from this world. I mean, as the years roll by,
and I ended up being on the spot for almost a decade. Years
grow by, I was getting older, I'm a girl becoming a teenager on
this boat. My relationship with my mother is deteriorating. There's only one bathroom
on the boat. We have lots of crew on board. It's a very
difficult environment. They're expecting me to work on the boat because these crew are
basically paying for us to keep sailing, so they have to be kind of
cooked and cleaned for I decide I'm going to study and education is going to
be my way form of escape from this boat. I was about to ask
if you did have to be on watch at the tender age that you were.
Yes. No, I had to do watches from quite early on and
They're very difficult, really because you can't you can't read, you can't do
anything. You basically have to stand up on deck looking out. And you
know what I found. And particularly as the kind of years went by and
I started trying to study, I tried to teach myself by correspondence, by
post. I was trying to do that. I was trying to work for
five six hours a day kind of cooking and cleaning, which is what my
parents wanted. And I'm afraid they had a very gender view, so that
was expected of me and not of my brother. And then I was doing
my watches, so it was incredibly kind of tiring. I mean I had
no time to kind of do all the normal things that you would expect that
you do as a teenager. So Zan Hayward and Haywood and the name of
the book is it's all about her sailing experience as wavewalker, Breaking Free available
everywhere you get books. One would look at this and think this was a
form of child abuse. Well you could do. I mean, it's very
interesting. I kind of did a course on that at one point, and
many of the things have happened. I like that. But the interesting thing
is when it happens to you as a child, you're incredibly forgiving of your
parents. But that never occurred to me as a child. I just accepted
that this was the world that I was in. I assumed, and I
think you have to assume when you were a child that my parents were good
and they wanted the kind of best for me. And frankly, it was
only when I became a parent myself, and I'm now the parent of three
children, and who are kind of in their early twenties, so they've gone
right through this kind of age period. Then actually I looked back and I
realized that, you know, the way in which I'd been treated really wasn't
acceptable. You know, kind of looking at it through a mother's eyes,
I think is very different than looking at it as a child. Oh no,
I've done that many times, looking back at with my middle aged brain,
looking back at certain things my father and grandfather did, and I came
to these realizations that I didn't as a child. Of course, that's right.
I think as a child you have to forgive your parents. You have
to assume that it's all okay. But what I did know was I had
no intention of being trapped on that boat forever. You know, I write
in the book about feeling and I felt like this as a child, that
I was trapped in my father's dream. My father's dream was to sell around
the world. He loved the freedom of it. He loved the fact that
every time he fell out with somebody, he could pull up the anchor and
keep sailing. But his freedom was effectively my imprisonment because I could I mean
lots of time, I couldn't even get off this boat. I mean I
was truly trapped on the boat, couldn't even go ashore. I knew I
wanted to escape from that. I didn't want to live my life inside somebody
else's dream. And that's why I decided I had to educate myself. I
could see no other way to get off this boat than to do that.
So Zaan Haywood. And the name of the book is it the same name
as the schooner. She was a board wave walker breaking free. Did your
father ever master the trigonometry necessary to use the sextant? He did, Indeed,
he became very very good at using the sextent. So yes, and
over time we got a little bit more equipment on the boat, but the
boat became very tired over time and increasingly crowded, so conditions on board actually
deteriorated as we went on. But my father became a very good navigator.
And when you'd come into a port of call, would you have to to
I mean, how did you make your means? Did you have to at
times get a job on shore to make a little money? I mean the
money must have started to run out from time to time. Well, we
never had a lot of money, and after we were shipwrecked in the Indian
Ocean, basically any money that my parents had was spent repairing the boat.
So what they started to do was to take paying crew on board. So
they effectively turned this boat into a bit of a floating hotel. And that's
why I had to work, you know, four or five six hours a
day cooking and cleaning, because on this boat we would have you know,
five six, seven eight crew and that's how they earned money. So I
was effectively kind of working for them to keep this endless voyage going. It
does eventually end, and you can read all about it in wave Walker Breaking
Free, Suzanne Haywood. It's an incredible story and a great page turner,
and I thank you for bringing it to us. Thank you very much,
wonderful to talk to keep the day. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee
Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live
weekday afternoons from five to seven. iHeartMedia Presentation