Life Uncut - Suzanne Heywood Was 6 When Her Dad Decided They Would Sail Around The World. She Was Trapped On The Boat For Nearly A Decade

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

We all remember the Netflix hit Adolescence. Jack Thorn, the writer of Adolescence is adapting the incredible story of Suzanne Heywood into a new 4 part series. Suzanne is an author, a business leader, and child survivor of an extraordinary and scary life at sea. Suzanne spent nearly a decade (ages 7 to 17) living on board her parents’ boat Wavewalker, following her father’s dream of recreating Captain Cook’s third voyage. But, what was meant to be a three year family adventure actually became a childhood of captivity.  Suzanne was isolated, unable to receive a proper education and at one point she spent weeks with a fractured skull that required multiple operations without anaesthesia on a tiny remote island. Suzanne survived shipwrecks, emotional neglect from her parents, and eventually battled her way to Oxford and a career at Cambridge.  Today we talk about: Suzanne’s childhood in captivity on the boat How life at sea felt like a cult The neglect and ‘jealousy’ of her mother Having multiple surgeries for her fractured skull on a remote island without anaesthesia Suzanne’s determination to get an education Being abandoned at 16 in New Zealand without a visa and their attempts to deport her Her relationship with her parents now No authorities intervening and why we should question these situations when kids are involved   You can get a copy of Wavewalker from Suzanne’s website  You can find Suzanne on Instagram  You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! Xx  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode was recorded on Camaragal land. Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany. And I'm Laura. Today is a guest that I am extremely excited about. Now, we all remember the Netflix hit Adolescence. Remember, it was number one on Netflix in 70 countries for three or four weeks. it was that series, if you missed it, that was all shot in like one long scene. Do you remember? Oh yeah, everyone. It took over everything. It took over everything. Well, I, along with literally the rest of the world, became

obsessed with it. And whilst I was doing one of my deep dives on it one day, I saw that Jack Thorne, who was the writer of Adolescence, was adapting a biography of a new series. And so obviously I went down that rabbit hole and wanted to see what that was going to be, because I thought it would be just as brilliant. And that is how I stumbled across our next guest. So today we're joined by Suzanne Haywood. Now, Suzanne is an author, a business leader, and a child survivor of a pretty extraordinary and scary life at sea. Suzanne spent nearly a decade from age seven to 17 living on board her parents' boat, Wave Walker. This was following her father's dream of recreating Captain Cook's third voyage. But what was meant to be only a

three-year family adventure ended up becoming this wild story of childhood captivity for want of a better word. Suzanne was isolated, unable to receive a proper education and at one point she spent weeks with a fractured skull that required multiple operations on this tiny island in the middle of the sea and she didn't even have access to anesthesia to go through that. So I just cannot imagine. She has survived shipwrecks, emotional neglect from her parents, and eventually battled her way to Oxford and a career at Cambridge, which is one of, I mean, one of my favorite parts of the stories, which we're obviously going to get to because that is at the end. But Suzanne, I'm so excited to talk to you today. Welcome to Life Uncut.

Thank you. Delighted to be here. Suzanne, the story that you have to share is such a huge story. It also spans over so many years, but what was your life like prior to your dad having this idea of going out and you know going on this boat what was it like your childhood prior to that time see my recollection of my childhood prior to that time it was very normal so we were living in a house in England living in a town called Warwick which is right in the middle of the UK we were living quite a kind of nice life my mother was a teacher my father was running a hotel that he'd set up and doing various other kind of bits and pieces. I was going to a little local school. I remember I was learning

how to ride a horse. I was learning how to play the violin. Not very well, as I recall, but there we go. I had various friends. I had a very beloved dog called Rusty, who was a water spaniel. So a very normal childhood, really. And then your dad comes out of nowhere in a way and says, we're going to go around the world to see on a boat for a couple of years? Or was he an avid sailor? How did this come about? So my dad was a keen sailor. He used to go out sailing with friends on the weekends. He didn't go very far. He occasionally went across the channel. And then he suddenly announced, I've got this great idea. We're going to sail around the world following Captain Cook. And I should explain that my maiden name is Cook. So he had always been a

got a fan of Captain Cook. It was his name. We're not actually related, by the way. I grew up thinking that we were, but I now know that we're not. You did an ancestry test. Exactly, exactly. Well, all Captain Cook's children died without air. But the idea was that we were going to follow Captain Cook around the world and recreate, more specifically, his third voyage. So we were going to set sail on the exact anniversary of Captain Cook's third voyage, and we were going to sail around the world but it was going to be a three-year adventure so we're going to sit sail when i was seven we're going to be back by the time i was 10 everything would go back to normal i go back to school rusty my dog would be waiting for me my doll's house which was my favorite toy

would be waiting in my grandfather's attic it would all be there when we came back it also sounds so incredibly exciting when you say it like that and and you think you know i mean this parents these days who take their kids out of school for x amount of time and they go sailing it sounds magical and in your situation and what unfolded was anything but that what was it like when your dad said okay this is what we're doing was the reaction from the whole family excitement was it enthusiastic were you nervous about it what was that time like i remember having quite mixed feelings i mean like many little girls i hero worship my dad i thought my dad could do anything and my dad is a bit of a polymath he can do anything uh so i

absolute was going to go on this thing and anyway I was seven years old you don't question your parents totally didn't have a choice anyway you don't really have a choice which is one of the things that we might come back to kids just don't have a choice on the other hand I also remember being really upset about leaving my best friend behind my dog and my doll's house in particular those were the three things that I really regretted and I remember crying a lot about that so it was a it was a kind of mixed experience but there was never any question that I would go and also that my younger brother who was six one year younger than me would go as well and so the family was you and your brother your dad and your mum how did your mum feel about this

was she also a sailor because I feel like it's a pretty big endeavor to say for like you know a weekend sailor a sometimes sailor that dabbles in it to say I'm going to take my family that involves small children around the world alone for a year like that is a pretty big undertaking so my mother never expressed any doubt at that point in front of us that I can recall there was a bit of a discussion about how we were going to get schooling which they were very laid back about I was worried about that a little bit because I love school actually I was quite an academic child and so there was a promise that my mother who was a school teacher was going to kind of bring worksheets and that would all be absolutely fine I don't remember at that point my mother

expressing concern although I already knew that my mother was not a keen sailor so my father was the sailor and my mother never never was the sailor. What was normal day-to-day life like when you had actually transported your life you're now on this boat what was it like at the start of this journey? Well it was a shock to be honest because we get on this boat and it's as you say it's my mother and my father and my brother and me we have three crew on board at the start of the boat because she's quite a big boat she's 69 feet long very narrow quite old-fashioned looking so we needed some crew to help sail it uh one of the crew actually had some sailing experience which was very helpful because my father would never I should hope so so Owen one of the crew actually

had crossed an ocean before so that was quite helpful as well but what was a shock is we got out to sea my mother went to bed because it turns out my mother gets very badly seasick so she went to bed and she disappeared for several days and my brother and I basically left on our own age seven and six in the main cabin they kind of tossed around because what happens at sea is the adults if they're not ill like my mother would be for kind of several days every time we went to sea they would either be up on deck on watch or they'd be asleep in their bunks so as kids you're kind of left on your own in the middle kind of in the main cabin and quickly you know working out that every time a wave hits the deck lots of salt water comes down below so there's places to sit places not to

sit trying to work out what you can do all day you know in a world where it's just you and your brother and you're just sitting in this cabin not allowed up on deck because it was very stormy at least for the first few days at sea. I mean, even when you describe the first week or so on this boat, it feels, I understand that with bad weather and everything else, your parents probably had to be doing what they needed in order to keep everyone safe. But it also feels like it started off quite negligible. In terms of your, and we might be jumping ahead here a little bit, but in terms of your perspective and as a child, you don't really understand what's going on. You don't really comprehend that maybe the behavior of my parents isn't appropriate. We seem to do the

therapy work afterwards and put those pieces together but how old were you when you started to realize this is not okay like this is not how a child should be be treated or behave or like how when was it that you started putting the pieces together that this wasn't an acceptable life it was a lot later actually I think it was in my early teens that I really started to rebel and really it was after Hawaii after we had the vote which we will come to that was a kind of pivot moment for me on the voyage, because that was the point at which I knew beyond all doubt that I was there against my will. So early on, you just kind of accept what that world is like. But this wasn't a pleasure cruise. The first voyage that we had was from the UK all the way

down to South America. And that is a six, seven week trip at sea. We stopped kind of briefly uh up in dira and the canary islands but then six seven weeks at sea so you're not seeing anyone for six or seven weeks we're before the internet so you've got no contact with anybody by the time we got to south america we were quite severely short of food it's not a kind of fun experience to put a kid through really um now kids are incredibly resilient so my my brother and i eventually kind of figured out various games we could play we made a kind of kingdom with our stuffed animals and you know i remember particularly in kind of later years creating an entire imaginary world out of a chess set you know so each of the kind of pieces on the chess set had

a character and it was an entire kind of kingdom but you're you're doing this out of desperation because you just don't have very much you know to do on the boat well there's no stimulation what would a typical day look like for you i know there's probably not a typical i guess in a way if there's storms and you're facing all these different kinds of adversity but did you you said you your mum was a school teacher did she come prepared with things to teach you was she too sick to teach you like what were you doing all day for seven weeks at a time so on that first voyage we were just trying to entertain ourselves and kind of subsist really my mother I mean the teaching was very occasional I have to say every so often my mother would produce a worksheet and

kind of hand it to us and even early on I remember quite a lot of tension between myself and my mother because you know my style of learning is that I question a lot so so I would kind of get a worksheet on the kind of rare occasions when she would give us one and I'd want to ask questions about it kind of why you know why is this like this and you know why is this type of kind of maths like this and this one and she got very frustrated at that she didn't want to do that she wanted to kind of just give us something and then she would get on with what she was doing and you know not really engage with us about it so that was always a great source of tension and didn't really work very well between me and my mother just the kind of way in which I learned

but otherwise we would get up in the morning we would forage around a bit because there wouldn't be any adults around because they're up on deck or they're in their bunk so we would forage around a bit to see what we could find for kind of breakfast at some point if it wasn't too stormy an adult would appear around lunchtime and there might be some food that was prepared and the same around kind of dinner time otherwise you were on your own you know trying to figure out what you could do you know with your kind of stuffed animals and kind of other bit if the weather became much better which it did after we passed the equator after three or four weeks then we could occasionally go up on deck so most of the time you see you're trapped down below i mean

you're not even up you know you don't even see the light because you're down below and then we were allowed on deck for kind of brief periods of time uh we could sit on deck which was you know huge release as you can imagine and i should explain for those listeners who are not sailors we were sailing the wrong way around the world so most people who sail around the world sail from east to west and if you sail from east to west you can sail around near the equator and generally the winds are pretty good and it's not a bad sail most of the time, as long as you time it well. We were sailing the other way. We were sailing from west to east because that was where Captain Cook went and we were following Captain Cook. And what I hadn't understood when my father

announced we were going to follow Captain Cook on his third voyage is we were following an incredibly dangerous route. Because to sail from west to east, you've got to go very, very far south. So we went all the way down to South America, to Rio, and then crossed the very southern Atlantic Ocean, which was a very stormy crossing. And then we had to cross the southern Indian Ocean, which is probably one of the most dangerous bits of ocean in the world. How do you, and we are jumping around here, but how do you reconcile as an adult that, you know, when you understand more the danger that your father chose to put you in? Because it's one thing to be circumnavigating the world I mean in the safest way possible but it's another

to actively choose to go the direction that nobody goes knowing it's going to put yourself and your family in direct danger like how do you grapple with that as an adult I find it very difficult I just don't understand and I'm now a parent myself I have three children I don't understand the thought process that makes you think so I understand the thought process of this is a great adventure and I'm excited about the adventure. There are people in the world who just love doing that. You know, they see a mountain and they want to climb it. They see an ocean, they want to cross it. And that's great. You know, you can take a decision as an adult to put your own life at risk. But to take a decision as an adult to put the lives of small children

in known risk. I mean, we were sailing on our own. We weren't sailing in a flotilla with other boats we had very limited safety equipment on board that decision I just find incomprehensible and I find it incomprehensible today and actually it was the point at which my children became a similar age to the age I'd been when I'd been on wave walker that I started to write because that was the point where something inside my head kind of clicked and I went this just doesn't make any sense I just don't understand the decisions here that were made what ended up happening at the three-year mark. I mean, that's what was promised to you originally. You think you're going back to your life, to your dollhouse, your dog, and then three years comes and goes and it's far from the

case. Was there a discussion with you about it or was it just an expectation that we're going to keep on going? Well, you see, what had happened by the time we got to three years is we were shipwrecked on that second very difficult voyage. So after we went from South America to South Africa, on that voyage from South Africa to Australia, we were very, very badly shipwrecked. were hit by an enormous wave which my father who who'd been up on the wheel he looked behind himself and saw something that he described as being three times as big as our main mast a huge wave which crashed over the boat went through the center of the deck outside the you know and then through the hull and i as a little girl still seven years old had been standing below and i

was thrown against the ceiling of the cabin and then against the wall of the cabin and i fractured my skull and broke my nose and the boat was filling up with water so we almost died yeah we almost died we were incredibly lucky to find a tiny little atoll in the middle of the indian ocean called al amsterdam and we found it three days later and i say incredibly lucky because we were in a storm and you can't take i mean the only navigation we had on board was a sextant which is a you know a very old-fashioned piece of equipment where you basically measure the angle between the sun or a star and the horizon which obviously you can't do in a storm so we didn't know where we were so my father guessed where we were we found this atoll three days later we

wouldn't have stayed afloat long enough to get to australia so it was a very very kind of close thing and then when we found this atoll because i was so badly injured with this kind of skull fracture with a big blood clot on the brain I had all of these head operations on this island which didn't have suitable anesthetic for a kind of seven-year-old so they were all done without anesthetic and all done on my own as well because my mother didn't come in because she doesn't like the sight of blood so I did all of those on my own. Oh Suzanne we need to wind it back here because that is one of the most wild stories I've ever heard. Okay you've got a fractured skull and a broken nose. Was your family aware of how injured you were? Yeah, I had an absolutely massive kind

of lump on my head. And, you know, one of the shocking things actually about writing the book was a lot of what happened on the boat, I'd kind of packed away in the back of my head and then I got on with my life because I just wanted to move forward. And it was only when I stopped and wrote the book that I then tried to gather every piece of kind of documentation that I could find about what had happened and one of the things that I managed to get hold of and take a copy was of was my mother's diary and my mother's diary when I read it was really quite kind of sobering because my parents always tried to kind of play down my injury I mean I remember it being horrific I mean I had really kind of horrific kind of jagged memories of what happened in that time in that

accident. But reading my mother's diary, which she wrote kind of at the time, in fact, she kind of wrote it on the island, all the bits up to it. It is equally horrific, you know, because she talks about my head being deformed and my, you know, my huge swelling and me screaming in pain and all of this. So I now know that what I remember, those kind of jagged bits of memory in my head are actually correct. But I packed a lot of that away for a long time. And as I say, my parents then kind of played it down for years in my childhood and I now know that a lot of what happened and this is one of the kind of difficult things about this is when you grew up on a boat particularly for such a long period of time it's a little bit like growing up in a cult you know there was a

particular philosophy about why we were there what we were doing we were following Captain Cook it was a kind of grand and noble purpose my father was a fantastic sailor you know what happened in the Indian Ocean that was a one-off and anyway it wasn't that bad yeah my father later wrote that I got away lightly from the accident you know there was just this ongoing attempt to kind of play everything down okay so you're in this tiny island in the Indian Ocean that you've stumbled across how did it come about that there was a doctor there that was able to operate on you was this just by chance what kind of a doctor was he if you remember and what kind of operations was he performing on you without anesthesia so on our Amsterdam there's this tiny scientific base

and people can look it up actually it's quite interesting they they have about every I think it's about every 12 months they drop off another team of scientists and they take the last team of scientists off and there's a group of about it's about 20 it was all men when we were there I don't know whether it's now kind of more mixed and they are doing uh you know weather testing and various other things on this tiny atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean I think it's a very interesting place to be and they do have a doctor on the team but the medical facilities as you can imagine are very limited because you're really just trying to deal with what might happen for 20 men on an island doing science experiments so not they're not geared up to do major operations since the

book came out I've actually been able to well actually when I was writing the book I was able to correspond with the doctor who operated on me he didn't speak very good english so this was i'm afraid google translate kind of emails back and forth since the book came out and the book has recently come out in french i've been approached by somebody called pierre and it's been a little bit in the in the newspapers and pierre was actually present during the operations uh and is a little bit younger and he has explained to me it's funny how these little facts of your background start to kind of come together because one of my big questions was why didn't you give me anesthetic because what they had to do is they had to cut open my head not through the bone but

on top to release this pressure the kind of massive blood that I had on the brain and it was such a huge swelling they had to do six seven operations to relieve the swelling and you can imagine somebody cutting into a massive swelling on your head six seven times I'm screaming with prayed and repeatedly screaming I have to say the only French swear word I knew because the doctor spoke French and not English and I couldn't speak French so we were and I was on my own because as I said my mother didn't want to come in and she said she didn't like the sight of blood which by the way the indication which became kind of clearer as I grew up you know my mother was never a very maternal person because frankly you know one of my kids have been in that situation I would have

been there even if I blindfolded myself you know I would have been there yeah so Pierre said the reason why they didn't give me any anesthetic is they did have some general anesthetic but they had no way of working out the dose for a seven-year-old and they thought if they tried to give me it they could you know they could easily kind of kill me and then they had some local anesthetic but when they tried that they discovered it wasn't working so the net result was I had no bio-aesthetic. How did your parents like at this time obviously they've gone through all of this how long did you end up spending on the island in total before you were able to set sail again how long was that? So my father was on the island I think for about three or four weeks and then he

set sail again with the crew he'd done some very basic patching up of the boat the very limited facilities on this island it's basically a volcanic atom in the middle of nowhere so he'd nailed some bits of steel over the hole in the side of the boat and on the deck but you know the boat was still very badly damaged so my brother my mother and I were banned from going back on board by the French and the British government because they said this is just too dangerous for you to go back on board so it was several weeks later when a passing cargo ship came by and my brother and my mother and I were basically kind of rescued from this island it was a very dramatic rescue actually because we were taken out in the little supply ship that the

island had because it happened to be at the moment when they were bringing in more supplies and then we transferred at sea across this cargo ship and I remember clinging onto the ladder was like at one of these electric ladders going up the side of this container ship which is I mean they're huge they're like 20 stories high but anyway we got to Fremantle and met up with my dad And then we were in Fremantle for about a year, during which I got to go to school briefly, which was fantastic. I mean, I love that. I mean, going to school in Fremantle. I remember making friends. I remember being able to learn an instrument. I've always loved music. So I remember doing that, which, of course, is not something I can do very easily on the boat.

Although later on, I taught myself the guitar. So that was great. But then, of course, my father wanted to keep sailing. So we kept sailing. We went round the kind of bite of Australia up to Melbourne and then up to Sydney. We sailed in the Sydney Hobart and not officially down to Tasmania. Not officially, just tacked on. Well, yes. I mean, my father decided he either didn't want to pay for it,

he couldn't enter the race officially, but he decided it would be fun to sail with it. So the only issue was he couldn't get a chart. So he sailed based on the map that he managed to get on the back of a bar mat. so that was the sales of sydney hobart your daddy's a cowboy a wild cowboy yeah complete cowboy complete cowboy what was happening with your parents relationship at the time was there a point where your mom's perspective changed on wanting to be on the boat or whether she verbalized

that she didn't want to be there or was she quite willing for this whole experience so my mother was always very clear that she hated sailing and she said that a lot and every time we left port she would go to bed for three days and nobody was allowed to bother her she would just kind of go to her bed and and that was it you know she also used to suffer from migraines and kind of go to bed as well you know so my mother would disappear a lot at sea you know I just got used to as a kid my mum would not be around for quite a lot of time when we were at sea she always hated that on the other hand my parents relationship is very close and somebody once gave me a kind of quote I I didn't know where it came from, but it kind of summed up my childhood.

And the quote is, the child of lovers is an orphan. And it felt like that. You know, on the boat, the kind of key relationship was between my parents. And my brother and I were really quite tangential to that. You know, we were along for the trip, but it wasn't about us at all. As you grew up and you became a little bit more self-aware and you got smaller levels of education here and there, which we'll chat about what were the roles that were laid upon you and your brother and how did they start to differ with age? Yeah they really did and really it started to kind of change after

Hawaii so we went all the way up the Pacific from there to Hawaii and that was the moment where everything changed because we got to four years the voyage was supposed to have been three years but it was four years to get there because of the shipwreck and the year spent repairing the boat in Fremantle and my father had always promised and this was always a premise of the voyage that the voyage was something that we were all doing together that we all wanted to do now of course I now know that this is completely false you know a child of seven can't decide to do this you have no choice you have to do it and there'd also been a decision to keep going in Fremantle but again I was eight years old so you don't really have a choice by the time we got to Hawaii

so we're four years in and then we stayed in Hawaii for about a year and a half I was 11 12 and I desperately wanted to go back to the UK or frankly anywhere where I could settle and go to school and have friends I was desperate to get an education I was desperate to have friendships do all the normal things that a kind of teenage girl would do and you know living in that sort environment is a bit like being in a cult you know what my father said was what we were all supposed to believe and my father was the captain which is a bit like being the kind of king and so we had to vote and I voted to come home and my brother voted to come home and my parents both voted to keep sailing and then at the end of all this my dad took another swig of rum my parents

were very heavy drinkers as kind of goes with a lot of sailors and he said well you know what I didn't tell you is that this isn't a democracy this is a kind of benevolent dictatorship and the captain always gets the final vote and I'm voting that we keep sailing and I remember being completely shocked because when you grow up in that kind of cult-like situation you accept the kind of doctrines of it and then all of a sudden it's turned on its head and you realize that was never true that was never true it was never true it was only true while I agreed at the point at which I disagreed it became untrue and then from that moment onwards of course I knew that I was there against my will you know we turned the boat around we sailed back down to Australia but I was

never there by my own choice either the boat in a way which was a conceit that my father has I now realized as an adult to kind of legitimize everything you know well you can't complain about it because you decided to be here yeah suddenly kind of blew up because when it didn't work the opposite happened in my head anyway which was I never chose to be here I was very clear I didn't want to be here and my kind of choice was overridden and my relationship with my mother was deteriorating really quite badly my mother was my mother and I had a very difficult relationship which got really bad after I got to kind of early, early teens. And I, to this day, don't know why she was so kind of unpleasant to me,

is the only way of describing it. I mean, she would not speak to me for kind of days, sometimes weeks on end on the boat. She would call me names. She refused. I mean, little things that, you know, now seem quite small, but at the time were very big. Like she refused ever to buy me a bra.

Because, and, you know, she would kind of mock me. And, you know, but those are very big things when you're living in a tiny space and you don't have anybody else to go to. But it's not even, I mean, even a part of me now and forgive me, but it even sounds like there's a part of you still downplaying it a little bit. Like they are pretty huge things for the person that's supposed to be raising you and looking after you and caring for you. And not only that, but they are the only point of contact that you have.

Like you are, you are below deck with no sunlight. That is your only person. not only is it supposed to be your carer but it's the only person that is belittling you and mocking you it almost sounds like maybe she was resentful of you both you know having children and maybe it's impacted her life I don't know is that how you feel so the relationship she had with my brother was very different to the relationship with me and this kind of plays into the question you were asking about the kind of different genders on board so the way in which it kind played out is my brother was allowed to be on deck and was allowed to sail he enjoyed doing that and

he was celebrated as doing that you know and he became a very kind of golden child my brother could do no wrong he was the kind of one who was kind of strong and on deck and my role as a girl was I was expected to be down below helping my mother cook and clean and by this point we'd run completely out of money we never had a huge amount of money but we'd run completely out of money and My father started taking crew on board who were paying us to come on board. So it became a bit like a floating hotel. So therefore, they had to be cooked for and cleaned for. And usually they were men.

So I'm a kind of teenage girl. We've got kind of multiple male crew on board. I'm sharing a cabin with them. I don't have my own cabin. There's only one working head or toilet, as they call that. So you're in very kind of, and I'm expected to go and work down below, six, seven hours a day, kind of cooking and cleaning. and my relationship with my mother is completely different to her relationship with my brother and

I think a lot of it frankly if I look back as an adult now and having done a little bit of kind of therapy around this to try and understand her and me I think a lot of it was jealousy you know we were I was a very academic child my mother was not very academic I was becoming a very pretty teenager you know my mother was at a point in her life I don't know whether she was feeling insecure about that I had a very good relationship superficially with my dad I say superficially because we got on very well but I mean that was on his terms so long as I didn't challenge the kind of pieces of the voyage or anything like that and that was her only relationship so maybe she was jealous of that as well I to be honest I don't know I'm hypothesizing but you know all of

these things led to a very difficult relationship you know she was very emotionally abusive to me i would never use that language as the chart but i i would now say that i saw another parent doing it to another little girl that's what i would call it suzanne at what point was it that you really realized how dysfunctional it was that you were like the the life you were living and the relationship that you had with your parents and i guess like the unpacking of this sense of being held captive against your will in a situation that you had no ability to consent to It was only afterwards, to be completely honest, because when you're in that situation, and it went on for years, when you're in that situation, first of all, you've got nothing to compare it to. And you don't have anyone to talk to because I'm kind of trapped on this boat.

So who are you going to talk to? And it's also very difficult, as it's been kind of explained to me since, it's very difficult for a child to challenge their parents. because even even inside your own head because if you challenge your parents and you decide that your parents are not good parents where does that leave you and particularly where does that leave you if you're kind of stuck on a boat with them you know you've got nowhere else to go so actually it was only as an adult once I'd kind of formed my own world you know I've got my own family I've got my own kids I was able to look back and now I you know now I'm very kind of critical of what they did and how they treated me. At the time, I didn't get into any of that. At the time, my only

focus was on how am I going to get out of here? I don't like where I am. I kind of accept it's just as it is. And maybe my parents are just like everybody else's parents, just a little bit more extreme. I kind of knew they were more extreme. My main focus is getting out of here because I don't like this world. And saying that as well, you know, when you talk about like how other kids might think that their parents are extreme, when you have literally no reference point because you don't have the stability of friendships you don't have the stability of aunts and uncles or other friends parents well there's no internet to do the comparison yeah and the smaller your world is the more that world is normal to you because as a child because

there's no reference point for anything else there's so much more to your story in terms of like when you left how did you escape that situation how did your parents respond to it but what age were you when you decided I'm not going to stay here anymore and how did your mom and dad react to that so I never told them that in that way what I decided inside my own head was I was going to try and educate myself off this boat because I couldn't think of any other way to get out of it I mean I hadn't spoken to or had any contact of any sort with any of my relatives since we left England for a long time I didn't even have my own passport I was just on my parents passport I had no money the little bit of money I earned at various points babysitting

my father would take from me, because he would say, okay, well, we need that money to run the boat. So you need to kind of give us that money. And he wouldn't kind of give it back. So I had almost no autonomy. But the one thing I decided I could do was to educate myself, because I managed to convince my parents to let me register with a correspondence school, actually, the kind of Queensland Secondary Correspondence School, as it was then called. And I started working on this in the bits and pieces of time that I had. Now, I didn't have a lot of time, because I was expected to work cooking and cleaning on this boat and my mother hated me studying to the point where she would actively try to you know disrupt me so I would be sitting there was one little table on

the boat that only sat kind of four or five people so you'd have to fight for a place with the crew and my mother would come in and turn the radio up to full volume if she saw me studying and then I would say you know mum I can't study even so I'd turn it down and then she would come and turn it back up again and she would play this game and again kind of looking back I can't quite understand why apart from a if I was doing that I wasn't working you know working doing stuff she wanted I think she did find it threatening somehow that I had this thing that I was doing that wasn't kind of hers and she just didn't really like me I mean it was just as basic as that and that But I did understood.

Even as a child, I knew that she didn't like me. That's so sad. But I still kept on studying. How did it end up being your escape route? You said you wanted to educate your way off the boat. How did that come into fruition? So the final stage is that we got to New Zealand, by which point my parents were worried about my brother's education.

My brother, as I say, was always the kind of golden child in our family. And he wasn't studying. He gave up studying. And I don't blame him at all for that. It was almost impossible to study off the boat. But they were very worried about that, unlike kind of me, because as my father would say to me, your brother, when he grows up, he needs to support a family and you won't. So, you know, we need to worry about education. So they left my brother in New Zealand and he was 15 and they left me looking after him, age 16, and they kept sailing.

They left us behind. So we were basically abandoned in New Zealand. I was left as kind of caregiver to my brother and he was going to school I wasn't going to school I was still trying to teach myself and then look after him and in the book that is the most difficult chapter although I have to say it's the dawn before you know it's the darkest part of the night before the dawn because after that it gets a lot better but um that is very difficult I've become very depressed you know I just can't cope I remember ringing up child line and, you know, I just couldn't kind of deal with being left all on my own

with no adults at all in New Zealand trying to kind of cope as an adult when I was only 16. I can't even fathom it. I just cannot fathom at a time where there's, you know, there's no internet, you're 16, you're in a foreign country with nobody, you haven't had the proper education. Where were you living? Like how were you physically surviving?

So my father had hired a little holiday hut or a batch as they're called in New Zealand. and we were living in that but it was incredibly basic I mean particularly I mean it gets pretty cold we were in Rotorua in the center of North Ireland and it gets really cold and I remember getting this guy to come and bring me some logs of wood which I was chopping up to try and kind of get this little burner to work so that was very basic we didn't have a kind of washing machine or anything like that so I was I had a very clapped out car that my father had also left behind that I was driving into Rotorua which is about 40 minutes away to try and do the washing and get

kind of food. He'd left a very small amount of money. My father was always very difficult about money. He'd left a very small amount of money in a bank account, separate to his bank account, which I could access. But because I was so young in New Zealand at the time, you couldn't have an account before you were 18. So I could only access it by forging his signature. One way or another, I was making do, but I mean, it was very difficult. But as I say, that was the kind of darkest point before the light because I then wrote from that hut in New Zealand to every university I'd ever heard of in the world I made up the addresses because I had no way of finding the addresses so I wrote to you know Oxford University Oxford England and Cambridge University and Sydney and

Auckland and London and Harvard and yeah I mean a lot of the elite universities not because I thought I was elite but they were just the only universities I'd ever heard of and in all of them I kind of wrote and wrote the same thing I said I'd kind of grown up on a boat I hadn't really been to school I taught myself and I really wanted to come and study zoology and would they at least consider me and most of them wrote back and said well they either didn't write back because the address was wrong turns out Harvard University is not in Harvard but also what else are you supposed to do like you'd think that somebody would see Harvard and deliver it to Harvard Well, yeah, maybe they got it and they didn't reply. But anyway, they didn't reply. I do now know it was the wrong address. Quite a lot of other places wrote back and said no. So Sydney wrote back and said no, because you're not Australian. You know, you've only got a British passport. In fact, I was illegally in New Zealand and they tried to deport me twice during this year because my parents didn't leave me on a proper visa. So they kept on trying to deport me.

So Auckland wrote back and said, I couldn't go there either. Most of the British universities wrote back and then incredibly, and said no. And then incredibly, Oxford wrote back and said, well, write us a couple of essays. And then I wrote them a couple of essays. And then they said, well, if you can get here, we'll interview you. So I went and picked kiwifruit, which was the only way in which I could earn any money because I was illegal. So you can't cut it.

And got myself enough money for a plane ticket and came back to the UK. did that interview and incredibly they offered me a place and it completely turned my life around did your parents ever face any sort of repercussions for firstly leaving you or for how they raised you like was there ever any intervention or anything for this no and one of the reasons why I wrote the book is it shocks me looking back but there never was any intervention I mean, even when they tried to deport me in New Zealand because I turned up and I tried to get my visa renewed and they said not that that's apparent. And then I managed to get my father to come down from on the boat. He came down for like two days, turned up.

Then they saw him. They stamped the passport. I mean, nobody ever asked any questions. Nobody ever asked any questions when we arrived in a port. You know, what are these kind of kids doing on board? I don't remember anybody ever intervening. evening and when my parents came back to the UK of course they celebrated you know this was a kind of great you know great achievement they'd kind of done this big voyage you know my father wrote

a book about the first year and a half where he's the kind of hero of the whole story so no no no repercussions whatsoever and nor have they ever wanted to talk about it. I feel like your entry into university is quite remarkable and we probably brushed over it a little bit too quickly but do you remember the essay that you wrote to Oxford to get into Oxford was it about your story or what was it yeah I've still got the essays I've still got the essays I wrote two essays I thought about it quite a lot and the one person by the way who was helping me is a wonderful teacher that I had at the correspondence school guy called Roger Wooler he was my biology teacher at the correspondence school and it's an amazing story for me anyway because I'd never met him

because my father always refused to go to the school to kind of let me meet my teachers because that would have been, you know, would have taken time out and he would have had to have inconvenienced himself. But I did go and find Roger. When I was writing the book, I went back as an adult and found Roger. And I discovered, which I'd never known, that kind of Roger suffered from polio as a child and was in a wheelchair. And that was why he was teaching at the school. But he was a wonderful teacher. And he, for example, sent me books when i was in new zealand that weren't actually part of the course but he just found them and sent them to me and he also was the one person i could talk to about things like you know what were these

essays going to be i decided i had to write two essays that were different to what anybody else would write so if i try i was trying to apply to read phylogy so i decided if i wrote something like the discovery of dna how was i going to compete for somebody who was at a school and they could go to a library and they could read books about it and they could get their teacher to help them with it it'd be impossible so my essays had to be different so one was it was called science at sea and it was basically describing how i tried to teach myself science whilst living at sea so you know for example i had to do one dissection for my senior biology course which involved me actually trying to catch a frog on an island in order to die

so that was i figured nobody else was going to write that one and then the other one was just very obscure it was basically an essay about whether or not uh humans are a domesticated species so a bit like kind of dogs you know their ancestry is wolves and then they became domesticated have we domesticated ourselves as a species and i just thought that was and i think it was originally suggested by roger i just thought that was an obscure enough and intriguing enough topic that nobody else was going to write about it and it worked there's so many lessons in this i mean one shoot your shot anything is possible I think feel like that's a really obvious lesson to come out of your side of the story but there's something that gives me goosebumps makes me

emotional to think about just how much Oxford going out on a limb and giving somebody a shot that you know for want of a better word might not have deserved a spot at Oxford because they weren't as well educated but the fact that they did and they took a risk on someone literally changed the course of the rest of your life. What is your relationship like now with your parents and your brother? My mum died in 2016 and by that point my parents knew that I was writing the book because I started writing the book back in 2015 and she was very angry that I was writing. I mean she always refused to talk about it with me. At one point she'd kind of come up to London to to have lunch with me which by the way was an unheard of event I mean my mother

never asked to talk to me on my own and she confronted me with you know what was it you didn't like about your childhood and I said well you know the fact that you didn't talk to me for weeks on end and I wasn't able to get an education and then you abandoned me in New Zealand and she kind of stomped off refusing to kind of talk about any of it and then she's very sadly kind of suddenly died in 2016 uh leaving me a very unpleasant letter which i found kind of afterwards which was very accusatory you know this was all my fault i was a miserable child and you know i should be grateful for my kind of privileged childhood and you know it it was actually you know an unbelievably unpleasant letter it was a lot more unpleasant than that kind of claiming

the one but there was a lovely woman in new zealand actually her name was pam crane and she looked after me right at the end just before I went to Oxford I had to go up to Auckland to sit my final exams with the correspondence school and she took me in for two weeks and looked after me and she told me afterwards as I just looked you know I looked close to collapse I hadn't really eaten a lot for a long time I was very tired because of course the thing is if you're working on your own you've got no one to compare yourself to so you don't know when to stop so I just kind of just kind of kept on going and I was in a you know I was in a terrible state and she just kind of took me in and she was wonderful so my mother in this letter said you know Pam Crane always

disliked you I mean it was a very unpleasant letter to the point where I actually remember ringing up sadly Pam died so she wasn't alive at the time but I rang up her son who said no no that's a complete lie you know Pam loved you so that was my mum and then my father we kind of patch things up a little bit he was also angry that I was writing also refused to ever talk to me about it also refused to read copies of the book but he turned up in 2019 and I should say I was widowed in 2018 so I'm a kind of widow by this point there's kind of three kids his three grandchildren and he's due to come and stay with us for Christmas and he got very angry about me writing the book and told me I wasn't allowed to and I had no right to and with a lot of swear

words kind of thrown in and I said no I'm going to I'm going to write this story yeah I have every right to write this story and he stormed out I haven't seen him since well or my brother because my brother has always as the golden child been very aligned with my parents but I don't really blame my brother I mean I would like to think that had it been the other way around I would have been more caring of the child who was kind of obviously the black sheep but it wasn't my brother who decided any of this this was kind of my parents who decided it not him and the reality is is your brother's experience at that time is very different to yours you know and he was a child himself but I think you can grow up in the same household and have a very different experience

to your sibling especially when there's these dynamics where there's a golden child and potential narcissism carrying on and everything else in terms of when you made the decision to write the book and knowing how much your family were against it how did you rationalize with that because it would have taken a great amount of strength to go okay I know everybody who was there and also experienced this doesn't want me to do this but I'm going to do it anyway so to start with I didn't know that they didn't want to do it in fact they were so when I first told them I was going to write it I think they assumed I was going to write their version and they actually let me kind of borrow all of their kind of papers which I copied and

gave back to them and I think they assumed I was going to write their version because they'd always refused to talk to me about anything so their version was the only version that was allowable which was my father was a hero it was all the kind of wonderful thing and anyway it all worked out fantastically because I went to Oxford so you know what was this to complain about I think it was only during the writing process that it became, and they never actually said until that last kind of encounter with my father, you know, don't write it. You know, they just clearly were getting more nervous about it, I think. But as they were getting more nervous, I was getting much clearer about the story because I was reading all this and kind of reliving it. So

I was becoming kind of clearer and clearer. I think the kind of question that was in my head, which I think goes to the head of a lot of people who are writing a book like this is how honest should I be you know so there's a spectrum as it were of writing a kind of candy floss version where you don't you know you don't really confront anything and it becomes a bit of a travel log in my case through to something which is really vitriolic and the first version that I wrote I remember I gave it to somebody and they said well it's really interesting Suzanne but what's really odd about this book is your mother is not in this book and I realized that what I'd done in an attempt to try and make it palatable to my parents was

I'd written my mother out of the story so she was on the boat but she never did anything because of course it was my mother who was most unpleasant to me and what that made me realize is I can't cheat the reader like that you know the reader notices I mean that that's kind of you've got to kind of you've got to be honest on the other hand the book and I think if people read the book the book's not at all vitriolic I mean the book just kind of in a very neutral way just explains what happened as we went on and anyway I didn't feel vitriolic when I was a child I was just dealing with the universe that I was being presented with so by the time it became clear that my parents were going to be very difficult about it I was absolutely clear I was going to

write it I had every right to kind of write it I wasn't writing it in a nasty way but they couldn't stop me. I mean, they, you know, they'd taken this decision to take me to sea and to basically take away my whole childhood. I have the right to tell that story in my own words. How do you feel now in terms of, I mean, it's a really big conversation that the fact that children don't have consent and that parents have to make the decisions that are the best decisions that they feel for their kids. And I mean, there's a lot of expectation that parents are going to make the right decisions. I think most parents want to do the right thing by their children but then in your experience there are parents who disregard what is best for their kids

and prioritize what's best themselves how do you i mean i mean what is your interpretation of this now in terms of children and consent and how it's informed how you raised your children like what impact that this had for you so there's a couple of things here first of all i think parents need to realize that most kids not every kid because every generalization is is kind of incorrect in in some instances but most kids want to be normal you know most kids want to grow up and have friends and kind of be normal as most people remember from their own childhoods it's actually horrible to be a child and not be normal you know because you're bullied and people mock you it was very difficult in those different bits when I went to school because I was always so weird you know

so kids want to be normal so the motivations behind a parent kind of doing something extraordinary are often very you know they come from a very good place but they need to understand that the motivations for the child are very different and the impact on the child is very different you as an adult deciding to step out of normal life and go and live in the outback or kind of going you know on a beach in the Seychelles or take a boat or whatever it is your motivation is because you want to take a break from normal life or you even want to leave normal life and that's a decision that you're taking kind of knowing what that is the child you're affecting their entire future and there's only a certain period of your life where you are a parent with

a dependent child I mean I know it feels like it goes on for a long time but it's really only 15 years out of an adult's life where you've got that kind of dependency so that that's the kind of first thing and then I think for everybody who's not the parent I just think we need to be more questioning. It reminds me a little bit of those kind of signs that you now see in airports where they say, you know, kind of ask if somebody's a kind of slave. There's something about just ask people the question. As you know, you know, Instagram is full of parents putting out pictures of kind of them and their kids walking on the sandy beach or kind of, you know, living in the middle of nowhere or going on a boat or whatever. I think we all need to question that. I don't think

we should just assume that that's always a good thing and that applies both to kind of you know friends and family but also to authorities it still shocks me that nobody ever asked whether we were okay in this entire time I mean it happens a lot I think that now there's a little bit more of a lens of curiosity I think not even just curiosity but there's a standard that is held you know and I think about this in terms of like domestic violence people do ask more questions but not as not enough not enough you know there's people don't want to overstep but I even think about you know when we were in school there wasn't the framework for teachers to ask the right questions if they thought something was not right in the household

whereas now teachers are they are taught what are the things to look out for there's taught how do you approach these conversations with kids and when you sort of say people that are living these kind of exciting lives so to say on social media I mean there was the family who had their entire family aboard a boat and the youngest child fell overboard and passed away and they've been banned from ever living on a boat again when you actually hear about the circumstances of which that family were living it seems outrageous that that ever was a possibility and then it took an immense tragedy for that to come to an end well one thing that has happened since wave walker came out is because the book has done so well i've been approached by many people

who've had some sort of extraordinary childhood or have been introduced to them or have kind of come across them. And there are many different versions of this story. I mean, there are kids out there, absolutely, who have a wonderful time. And normally that's because the time period is not so long. You come from a kind of very caring family.

They do make provision for you to have kind of friendships and schooling and so on. So that can all work out very well. But unfortunately, there are a lot of cases where it doesn't. and then it's kind of covered up and your example of the kind of family where someone drowned i mean in a lot of these other cases there were examples of kind of drowning or near drowning that takes place i mean frankly a lot of these worlds where you can live kind of off grid they are more dangerous so you have to be very careful but unfortunately some of the parents who have the

mindset of stepping outside of society don't have that sort of kind of caution and child protected divide Suzanne thank you so much for sharing your story it's truly fascinating and I've never ever come across anything quite like it I cannot wait to see this adaptation for the series your memoir Wave Walker a memoir of breaking free was released in 2023 anyone that wants to go and read it you we're going to put all the links for it but we cannot wait to see the series thank you It's going to be fantastic and wonderful to talk to you both today. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for coming and being part of the pod, Susan.

It's been amazing. Thank you.