Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Just another manic Monday

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Fi is still under the weather so joins via zoom, meanwhile, Jane’s away on holiday so Ed Vaizey is sitting in… what could go wrong?Plus Suzanne Heywood joins them to discuss her memoir ‘Wavewalker: Breaking Free’ which recounts an astonishing childhood involving her parents having the wild idea to retrace Captain Cook’s third voyage for the best part of a decade…If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producer: Eve SalusburyTimes Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

VoiceOver describes what's happening on your iPhone screen. VoiceOver on. Settings. So you can navigate it just by listening. Books. Contacts. Calendar. Double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day. Accessibility. There's more to iPhone. So it's just one of those really funny ones. When was the last time you had COVID?

Have you had COVID? I had it in March last year. And I didn't know I had it till I tested myself, as it were. Yeah. And I don't think I've had it since. Yeah. So I can't, see, I think probably if I was standing on the 149 bus with maybe 170 other people, probably half the bus in London at the moment

has COVID, but nobody knows because nobody tests anymore. Yeah. And I just, i decided to be a nice citizen and test before going to see my mum uh just to explain actually that jane's off on holiday this week and i am meant to be presenting with ed until wednesday isn't it ed that's right the coveted struck which meant that you had had to go into the show alone today. And I'm sorry about that. We are speaking to each other,

I think separated by a good kind of five miles. I'm at home at the moment. Anything that you'd like to share with us, our email remains the same though. It's janeandfeeattimes.radio. So there we go. But I should be back in tomorrow and I'm looking forward to that enormously.

Good, can't wait. Excellent. So we've got emails. Now, can I ask you a straight question? And it needs a straight answer. Is it a possibility that you've never listened to Off Air with Jane and Fi before? There is that possibility. OK. Do you have any idea what kind of content our podcast has in it of course but i'd much rather hear you describe that is such a politician's thing to say uh so i just i'm only asking you this because obviously our listeners know what our content is but it's wide and varied so i don't know whether as a kid you had one of those very, very long Caran d'Ache pencil sets.

I did. Yeah. So, okay, that's what our podcast is. It's like 70 different shades of life all the way through. So that's the joy of it. And you are, I think, you are definitely, it's the first time that a man has ever entered what is quite often largely a lady's own. So are you OK with that?

It's true now you mention it. Everyone is a woman apart from the man whose name I can't pronounce. Who's that? Einar. Einar. Einar Orne. Yes. Yeah, God, never forget Einar Orne. So, yes, there's quite a lot of lady stuff that goes down here. And I think over the next couple of days, we should use you as a kind of man totem pole.

Ask you all the questions that we can't usually get answered. So that's your challenge. Should you choose to accept it? Absolutely. Shall we do just a couple of a couple of emails before we head into the interview that you did today with Suzanne Haywood? Yes. Excellent. Some of the things we've been talking about then, I don't really know how we got on.

I think it was because of the death of the lyricist of Procol Harim's White a Shade of Pale. We started talking about odd kind of lyrics. And Jan, who's listening to us, and Jan, forgive my pronunciation, Kununurra in Western Australia, she says, I didn't know that the lyricist of Propel Harum's White Shade of Pale was responsible for the John Farnham anthem, You're the Voice, Try and Understand It. It had that funny emphasis on it, didn't it?

And I wish you hadn't mentioned it now because it's constantly in my head. Thanks. Still enjoying your ravings, though. Do you have an earworm most days, Ed? I normally have the Times radio jingle in my head. Good God. I find it rather jaunty and I start sort of dancing to it I even dance sometimes to the tunes

in the adverts It's a bit weird isn't it It's a bit weird but I've now obviously got a whiter shade of pale now playing in my head Which would you rather have? Would you rather have a whiter shade of pale or John Farnham's You're the Voice?

I've never heard John Farnham's you're the voice so i'll now have to listen to that and then that will be in my head but a wider shade of pale is definitely in my head at the moment i can't remember the last time i had a uh uh a tune kind of playing around uh in my head maybe i had the bodyguard because of all that row that people have been having about people singing i will always love you during the musical and then being thrown out so i've probably had i will always love you knocking around my head yes do you have any firm views on that news topic because it's got some other presenters into a huge amount of trouble yes i gather people have had to do these incredible mayor culpers

derma o'leary has done an incredible uh mayor culper audit, which he had to post on Twitter. Because apparently if you say that you're kind of on the side of the roaring fans, you're disrespecting the artist. And I was going to take the side of the roaring fans, a bit like the people who go to the Rocky Horror Show and dress up and sing along. And indeed, just to obviously get a bit pompous and pretend I'm more scholarly than I am,

what it was like in Shakespeare's day when the audience used to kind of roundly jeer and shout at the actors. But actually, I did for the first time this morning actually hear a recording of these people at the bodyguard, and they are just drunken lunatics. They're just completely off their heads. They're not attempting to kind of sing along in a spirit of joyful celebration. They're completely bladdered and they deserve to be thrown out. Yeah.

I did think the public apologies were quite something because Alison Hammond had to make one as well, didn't she? Alison Hammond did a lovely one. And I've really felt for her. I love her. I think she's absolutely amazing. Yes. There's a lot of love for Alison Hammond from people. Yeah, it's huge and i just

i thought the apology i just kind of thought well you know she got it a bit wrong but do you need to make a great big public apology for that no and i didn't even i didn't even know she'd got it wrong till i heard about the apology and i don't even know what she did it's supposed to be allegedly wrong but anyway well she was she was like you so it, because you're now going to get deluged by theater land, because she was originally saying it's no big deal. Now, what's going on with you and the Southern Hemisphere? I don't know. What is going on?

I've got an email from New Zealand. Oh, we have a huge number of listeners, Ed, in the Southern Hemisphere. And Jane and I, we don't really understand why uh because jane's never been and i have no you know huge affinity either i've only been once for work but yes we do seem to be we're quite big in brisbane and we're quite popular in adelaide and do you have another email there that would prove our popularity in a different part of australia or new zealand take your Well, it goes without saying, Fi, that you are huge in Cromwell, central Otago.

You are huge. Go for it. It wouldn't surprise me if Cromwell, central Otago, has a Fi and Jane Avenue any day now. It's quite a long email, though. It's from Christine, otherwise known as Chris to her friends. Warm greetings from New Zealand. Oh, tiara.

That must be the Maori New Zealand. I probably got myself into trouble with that. Missed you last week. Hope you're well rested. In reference to song lyrics, we had one comparatively young nun at our Catholic girls' school in Auckland in the mid-70s, our music teacher and choir mistress sister jacinta shares the name of the recently departed pm loved harmony played as queen's bohemian rhapsody on

repeat she also played windflowers by seals and crofts and then she produces all the lyrics of mystifying the song wasn't nearly as cool as bohemian rhapsody so i didn't really care it was only years later when reminiscing about the latest late sister jacinta's random music choices that my school friend advised you did know windflowers was all about cannabis didn't you being a rather naive 15 year old i didn't realize that while a quick google suggests song is perhaps about environmental activism reading the lyrics again i wonder if my friend might have been on the right track regardless her interpretation certainly caused a bit of a chuckle at the time. So there you go, Sister Jacinta, the late Sister Jacinta.

What were you up to? Loving the show. Thanks for your superb wit and wisdom. Well, that's very kind, isn't it? I've never heard of that song. Do you know that one? No, never heard of it. They all sang it.

Thanks for your wit and your wisdom and all that sort of stuff. Amazing. People are very nice, Josh said. It's incredible incredible we've been on a journey with our listeners so you're probably uh you're a little piece of britain for them aren't you i wonder if you analyzed your southern hemisphere listeners how many would be expats who think i want something that's quintessentially british and there's yeah i don, actually. It's a good question. I think we're a bit split down the middle there. We definitely do hear from expats,

but equally, we don't know and we don't like to delve too deeply, Ed. Can I just do a quick one? And it's actually on a very serious topic. And then maybe we can talk about the interview you did with Suzanne Hayward on the programme today. So this is an email about suicide so I'd just like to put that out there because I know it's a very difficult topic if you want to just fast forward for a minute

then honestly please do we won't mind it comes from someone who wishes to remain anonymous and it's about the interview that Jane did did last week with christine flack the mother of caroline flack and our emailer says i appreciated that you discussed caroline as she was vibrant intelligent and fun i find the person gets lost in the method of suicide and mental health narrative that follows this type of death my beautiful mum decided to leave us in 2015, shortly before my 30th birthday. I'm so sorry about that. I've come to a place where I accept this. What hurts to this day is that people view suicide as a weakness and an undignified end, when as Christine said, it isn't an easy death. And our correspondent goes on to say, many people still don't know

that my mum died by suicide, and we don't want her memory to be tainted in any way. Like Caroline, she had a wonderful energy. She was incredibly funny, a brilliant wife and mum to my brother and I. It breaks my heart that her death can change how people remember and view her. Suicide isn't something that only happens to people who suffer from long term depression. It can be a split second choice that changes the life of the deceased and those left behind forever. What a very, very heartfelt and probably quite difficult email to send to us. So our thoughts are totally and utterly with you. And I would just like to say, I thought Jane's interview with Christine Flack was just superb and allowed Christine to say all the things that really needed to be said and I listened to that over the weekend. Anything

that you'd like to share with us our email remains the same though it's janeandfeeattimes.radio. So Ed I did listen this afternoon to the program, marvellous, wonderful, lovely and you did this incredible interview with Suzanne Hayward. Do you want to just explain who she is for people who I think probably wouldn't recognise her name, actually? Well, I mean, I shouldn't define Suzanne Hayward by who she was married to, but she was married to the Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Hayward, who has famously sort of served various different prime ministers

like David Cameron and indeed I think Gordon Brown even Tony Blair and sort of you know how can I put this because I think it kind of emphasizes the point she's sort of you know she's a member of the establishment with a hugely successful career behind her but she's written this book called Wave Walker which is named after a boat and the point is that at the age of seven her dad and her mum took her and her brother, she was seven, her brother was six, on a voyage in a sailing boat, 90 foot long, to recreate the voyage that Captain Cook took to discover Australia. So 1976, bicentenary.

It was meant to last three and a half years, which is bad enough in and of itself. It ended up lasting 10 years. She almost died in a storm in the Indian Ocean. She was effectively abandoned to live on her own with her brother in New Zealand. And at the end of all of that, she managed to get into Oxford, come back to the UK and start her life. And she's written this extraordinary book detailing the details of this voyage,

but also obviously reflecting on what an extraordinary childhood and her kind of relationship with her parents given effectively what if i can put it this way what they did to her which is really what happened so i started uh by asking suzanne why her dad wanted to do the trip in the first place well my maiden name is cook and I think my father decided that nobody was doing anything to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Cook's voyages around the world. And nobody had really got ready in time to do the first or the second voyage. So he decided to fix up a boat himself and set sail on the anniversary of the third voyage. And he was a good sailor but he wasn't uh your mother didn't particularly like sailing

uh and didn't really want to do it i mean it's it's the most kind of extraordinary random thing but it started as a sort of how can i put this quite legitimate i think you got sponsorship from trust house forte that's right that's right my father had a lot of experience of sailing although only short distances he'd never really crossed an ocean before my mother didn't really like sailing and got quite badly seasick but my father managed to raise quite a lot of sponsorship including as you say from Trust Housers for Morty to do this reenactment if you like of Captain Cook's third voyage and they they set sail on the 200th anniversary with my younger brother and me on board. And so you were literally only seven years old.

And up to then, you'd had a perfectly, as it were, how can I put it, perfectly normal childhood, normal routines at your local primary school. And suddenly here you were sailing south along the west coast of Europe. Yes, up till then, I had a very normal childhood. I was seven years old, my brother was six years old. We were going to primary school and then all of a sudden one morning my father announced that we were about to sail around the world on this boat. And I suddenly found myself, you know, at sea on this boat sailing down towards South America. And tell us about Wave Walker itself.

What kind of a boat was it? Because your father spent quite a lot of time searching for the right boat. That's right. So Wave Walker was a beautiful boat, a 70-foot schooner. And a schooner is a boat with a smaller mast at the front and a larger mast at the back, a big gaff scale sail, a square-shaped sail in the middle. So a very beautiful boat, 70 foot long, which sounds very large, but actually downstairs, down below, she was quite small because she was very, very narrow. She was only about nine foot across, so relatively small down below, but a beautiful boat, very elegant looking boat. I mean, it's always been one of my dreams to sort of sail across the Atlantic,

but one imagines that when one undertakes these expeditions, that you go in boat. I mean, it's always been one of my dreams to sort of sail across the Atlantic. But one imagines that when one undertakes these expeditions, that you go in boats that are completely properly equipped. Obviously, in this day and age, you would have all sorts of satellite phones and navigation aids and so on and so forth. But I think you had one life jacket between you and your brother, effectively one compass, and a pretty inexperienced crew to undertake this journey. That's right. So we had one member of crew on board, Owen, who had some experience. He had sailed across oceans before.

But, you know, we're in 1976, so the equipment on board was pretty basic. No kind of fridge, you know, kind of limited equipment on board. We only had one child's working life jacket. We had more than that kind of safety life jacket. By that, I meant the sort of life jacket that you can wear to do anything on deck. We had very limited radio capabilities. And obviously, we're before the internet or anything like that. So as soon as you set sail, you're effectively out of touch with land and unfortunately we set sail and immediately hit some pretty bad storms heading down towards South America and I remember the first few days being frapped down below with my brother unable to come up on deck because it was so rough

wondering what on earth I'd kind of let myself in for yeah what were your feelings at the beginning because as will transpire this uh journey around the world which was in any event a huge undertaking became an even bigger uh undertaking as things went on but when you first left presumably uh you as a seven-year-old felt this was the kind of most exciting thing in the world you wanted your dad to teach you how to sail at what point did you start to feel hold on this is all beginning to get uh a bit strange and I'm getting a bit unhappy so I left with mixed feelings I left behind obviously all my friends in England uh and my home in England so I had kind of mixed feelings on that front uh but I love my parents very much and I trusted my father as a sailor.

So I was excited about going. And I think I had no real comprehension of how long the voyage was going to be. And initially it was going to be three years. And that initial sail down all the way to South America, we went all the way down to Rio. Although, as I say, it was rough at the start, had some very enjoyable moments. You know, we saw dolphins. We saw a whale who I named Henry. We had a couple of narrow misses. We almost got kind of ploughed down by a tanker. But we also had some very beautiful moments sailing along. You know, we were in the doldrums and then through the doldrums, which is an area where you where you get becalmed. So I would say that first bit was actually, on balance, I quite enjoyed.

But then it started to get much more difficult because we set sail from South America across to South Africa. And then that's when you were hit by the wave. I mean, you describe it in graphic detail in the book, these kind of winds coming straight off the South Pole, I think your father was saying, and winds coming from the east and the south at the same time, 50-foot waves, and this ends up with the boat almost sinking and you sustaining a very serious injury. That's right. So we sailed from South America to South Africa, which was a very stormy trip, and we lost our compass halfway across and almost didn't find our way to South Africa, but did.

We then set sail from South Africa, from Cape Town, across to Australia, and that bit of sea, the southern Indian Ocean, is one of the most dangerous bits of ocean in the world. in the world and we were sailing it the wrong way because we were following captain cook we were effectively sailing the wrong way around the world because we were sailing into the wind the whole way and i've since been sent told that very very few people sail uh that bit of ocean and certainly almost no children sail that bit of ocean i have no idea so it's meant to be one of the most dangerous parts of the world because of the because of the way the wind the direction of the wind and the that's right there's two things first of all the wind goes you know you're sailing into the wind by and large um so that makes it very dangerous you're also sailing down at very low latitudes uh where the waves build up because there's no real uh continents to kind of break up the wave so it tends to be incredibly stormy down there So it's not a place where you would normally sail

and certainly not a place that you would normally sail with young children. And my brother and I were still very young. And so what happened in this accident where you were so badly injured? Well, we were in a terrible storm and the waves built up and built up and built up and I was very, very frightened.

And eventually what happened, I believe, is that several waves combined together. They smashed over the stern of the boat and went straight through the deck of the boat and out through the side, creating a huge hole in the deck of the boat. I was standing in the main cabin down below at the time and I was flung up, hit the ceiling, hit the wall, fractured my skull and was knocked unconscious and I woke I don't know how much longer how much later in a bunk and I had a very very deep cut on my arm as well but I was quite badly injured my head injury was quite bad because I had a fractured skull and a blood clot that was uh that was on the brain

uh which kind of created a huge kind of swelling on my head. And what were your parents' reaction to this, in particular your father, who was the sort of benign dictator of the whole thing? Well, so my father's first concern was to try and stop us from sinking, which we were in imminent danger of doing by trying to patch over this massive hole in the deck. And his second concern was the boat was so weakened

there was no way that we were going to make it to Australia. We were about halfway across the southern Indian Ocean when this accident happened. The boat was too weak to kind of turn around. So we only really had one chance which was to find a tiny little atoll called Al Amsterdam. And on that atoll, according to his books, there was a very small kind of French military base, which if we got there, we had the hope of finding a doctor and the hope of at least doing some kind of some repairs to the boat. But the problem was we had very limited navigation aids on the boat. You know, this was before any satellite navigation, so all we had was a sextant. And a sextant is really no use in the middle of a storm because you need to be able to see the sun in order to take a sight.

So his other concern was would we ever find this atoll in order to get kind of medical care? And if we didn't, chances were that we would sink. This is like some terrible Hollywood movie. I mean, this is awful. It is This is like some terrible Hollywood movie. I mean, this is awful. It is a bit like a terrible Hollywood movie. I mean, we were extremely lucky because my father effectively had to guess

which direction to sail. And if he'd guessed the wrong way, you would have been sailing into the oceanic wilderness. Yes, if he'd guessed the wrong way, we'd missed this atoll we would have ended up sinking before we reached australia we had a lifeboat on board but i mean that wouldn't have helped us because all that would have meant would be that we'd be in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean it would have taken the sharks just slightly longer to eat you slightly longer yes

exactly anyway we did find this atoll which is a very very basic place no kind of harbor anything like that where I was operated on by the by a French doctor who did six head operations without any anesthetic which I remember as being obviously horrific and about two months later my mother and my brother and I were rescued off the island by a pouncing tanker ship, while my father continued to sail with our two crew members on to Australia. Well, so he's managed to patch up the boat well enough to get it to Australia? Well enough to keep it afloat, yes. He kind of nailed bits of steel across the holes to try and keep it afloat.

But he did have the presence of mind to say that you shouldn't come with him on that leg? to try and keep it afloat. But he did have the presence of mind to say that you shouldn't come with him on that leg. Well, he was banned from taking us on that leg. So the French and the English government effectively said, you know, we can't stop you from sailing, but we can ban your wife and kind of children from going back on board.

So this is the first time that at last the authorities kind of take note. I mean, how old were you when this accident happened? Because you were seven when you set off. And how old were you when you got clob i was still seven i mean this happened quite early on in our voyage and you have this amazing kind of surgeon on sitting on this atoll who bizarrely knows what to do in terms of uh relieving pressure on your brain albeit agonizing pain as you're operated on without an anesthetic i mean like a wounded soldier

exactly exactly i mean i think kind of head operations are tricky to do anyway but to kind of do them on an atoll uh with very limited anesthetic he did an amazing job i later on when i was writing my book tracked him down uh dr senelart and found him tending chickens in the french countryside and was able to, in rather kind of broken French, understand from him what happened. In fact, that was one of the great joys of writing the book, was tracking down a lot of the people who were involved and hearing their side of kind of stories which were part of my history. VoiceOver describes what's happening on your iPhone screen. VoiceOver on. Settings. So you can navigate it just by listening.

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To cut to the chase, Suzanne, this three-year trip, which was daunting enough, turned into a 10-year trip around the world. I mean, your entire childhood was growing up in and around this boat. That's right. So after repairing our boat after we got shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean, my father wanted to continue on so we continued sailing all the way up through Australia, New Zealand, all the way up the South Pacific to Hawaii and then we faced a very momentous for me kind of moment where we had a family vote to decide what to do and the the two options were to come back

to the UK via the Panama Canal or to continue sailing around the South Pacific. And I voted to come home. By that point, I was really desperate to come home. I wanted to go to school. I wanted to learn. I wanted to have friends. I was 12 years old. I was turning into a teenager. And I really wanted to come back to a normal life, having really grown up inside my parents' dream. My brother also voted to come back to the UK and my parents both voted to keep sailing. And at the end of this vote, having kind of opened up the kind of four votes, my father said, you know, what you guys don't realise is this isn't a democracy. This is a benevolent dictatorship and we're going to keep sailing.

But at this point, I mean, you are seriously trying to get away. I mean, you go to New Zealand and you call child line. Well, that's right. Well, you know, several more years pass. I'm still desperately trying to get an education. The relationships on the boat start to deteriorate, particularly the relationship between my mother and me becomes very, very difficult once I hit puberty. So it becomes very, very, very difficult on the boat. And eventually, when I'm age 16, my parents effectively offload my brother and me in New Zealand, and they sail off and leave us

behind, leaving me looking after my younger brother, who starts going to school there. I'm still trying to teach myself by post which I'd started doing a few years before and that in a way was the most difficult year of all because I'm left there in New Zealand not knowing any adults at all in New Zealand and as you say in the middle of that year I really... Where on earth were you staying then if you knew your adults? Well we were living in a small hut about an hour outside of Rotorua. You cannot make this up. I know, I know. We were living in a small hut about an hour outside of Rotorua.

The only adults I knew in New Zealand lived in Auckland. So for those who know New Zealand geography, that's about kind of two or three hours' drive away. So what do the adults, how did New Zealand adults passing by this hut deal with you? I mean, you're're an unbelievably vulnerable position. Yeah, well, really no adults passed by that hut. I mean, it was a very, very remote place. So about twice a week, I would drive myself into Rotorua, which is about an hour either way,

to do the washing because we had no washing facilities and to buy some food. But apart from that, I was living pretty much by myself every day in this hut. My brother was going to school and I was trying to teach myself. And about halfway through that year, I really started to struggle to cope. My father had also left me running the business that by then he was running, which was taking paid crew members onto the boat. So every so often he was kind of ringing up and demanding to know what was happening with that. And I effectively, you know, couldn't cope and ended up kind of ringing Charlie and saying,

what can I do? So we're running out of time, but I just want to cover two topics very quickly now because it's been so fascinating. I've spent too much time to do the build-up. But first of all, how did you get up? Because you get into Oxford University, which is no mean feat if you're living in the UK

and studying at a normal school. But given what you'd been through, it's pretty remarkable. I mean, it's astonishing, in fact. I mean, how on earth did you do that? I just decided that education was my only way out of the situation. If I didn't educate myself, I couldn't see any way in which I was going to get away from living on a boat or living in a boatyard for the rest of the situation. If I didn't educate myself, I couldn't see any way in which I was going to get away from living on a boat or living in a boat yard for the rest of my life. It was my only escape

route. So that's what I dedicated myself to doing, kind of learning everything I possibly could and teaching myself as much as I could. And then I wrote to every university I'd ever heard of, you know, Oxford University, Oxford, England, Auckland, New Zealand, Auckland University, Auckland, New Zealand. And I just tried to get myself into university. And amazingly, Oxford offered me an interview. How did you get there? Well, I then went kiwi fruit picking to earn enough money to pay for a ticket, a one way ticket back to the UK.

And about a week after my parents finally turned up back in New Zealand, I got on a plane and flew back to do my interview at Oxford. Tell me... A photo album full of whale photos. So tell me, your mother died in 2016, but she knew you were writing the book and she was extremely angry about it. I don't think you've spoken to your father since 2019. I mean, I don't want to intrude on private grief, but everyone listening to this will be thinking, how on earth, you know, given what you've been

through and what your parents effectively put you through, if I can put it that way. Tell me about that. I mean, is your father's not speaking to you are you not speaking to your father and what's happened to your brother so my parents were very uh very very aggressive when i when i said that i wanted to write uh my version of uh well you know kind of how i'd uh experienced my childhood they always had a version of it which was it was all kind of fantastic and it all ended up kind of fine in the end the moment that I said I wanted to kind of write my version they became very very unpleasant my mother at one point kind of wrote to me and threatened to try and destroy my husband's career if I wrote the book which I think is very sad really and it's

not a subject we've ever been able to talk about. On many, many occasions, I've tried to talk to them to try and understand why they did what they did, but it's not something they've ever been willing to talk about. My brother had a very different experience to me. My brother was my mother's favourite and was much more protected during this experience. And I don't think he felt the same overwhelming desire to get an education.

And, of course, I looked after him during that period in New Zealand. So he remained closer to my parents than I did. And I maintained a kind of reasonable relationship with my parents up until the point where I just decided I needed to tell my story and I needed to be honest about it. And I could no longer maintain this kind of false relationship with my parents why I pretended that what had happened in the past hadn't happened. Well, that was Suzanne Hayward, author of Wave Walker, Breaking Free, talking to me about this extraordinary childhood that she had. So I noted, Ed, that when you were talking to her, you confessed your own kind of daring to ambition.

Was that a real ambition to sail across a massive ocean and if it was why does that appeal do explain it to someone who just feels terrified by the prospect of being anywhere on a boat where you can't see land yes well I don't mind boats at all but I'm not I'm not a sailor of any kind of description and to be honest with, I don't mind boats at all, but I'm not a sailor of any kind of description. And to be honest with you, I don't particularly enjoy sailing. I have actually weirdly been sailed. I haven't sailed myself around the Isle of Wight as part of the Round the Island race, and it's not a particularly interesting experience. I think what one wants is this, you know, and it is a classic cliche and a kind of Saturday Times article is, you know, escape from the modern rat race,

you know, take time out, you know, you lead these modern rat race, you know, take time out, you know, you lead these very conventional lives. What can you do that's different? And there is something about being in the elements, you know, the closest equivalent, and I'm not trying to be facetious, it would be kind of going to space. I mean, if you're in the middle of the Atlantic, admittedly, and I say this in my interviews, Suzanne, modern boats obviously have incredible navigation aids and communications and so on but you're still effectively as on your own as you possibly can be and I think that's just

appealing to experience once it's not my natural milieu by any stretch of the imagination but if I had a chance to do a bucket list that would be on it would you take your kids? No, no. I would go. Well, I might go with my wife. I doubt she'd come. But, I mean, it's for me kind of thing.

Yeah. And the thing that I found incredible about her book, and I know, you know, I could hear that you had found it incredible too, is just the sense that she and her brother were completely powerless as children to do anything other than what their parents told them to do. But actually, her parents just never at any point during those 10 years really listened to what the kids, I mean, her in particular, much more so than her brother, felt about the experience. I mean, I just had this huge sense all the way through the book of her just being completely trapped by her family. Yeah, and it was kind of life on the road, wasn't it? Except it was on the open ocean, therefore much more dangerous and a much more rickety way. But what I found kind of astonishing about it was not just the fact that they completely disregarded what

their children wanted, but also that Suzanne's entire childhood, I mean, you and I used to, you know, we can remember our childhoods. You grow up, you make friends, you socialise, you have a community. They didn't. And on the one hand, yes, she acknowledges kind of what her parents said was part of the point, which is she had these kind of extraordinary experiences which no other child in her, you know, would have, you know, dolphins along the boat and so on and so forth

and visiting these incredible places that you would never go to again uh but that's not the point the point is she wanted a normal childhood she wanted to grow up have a group of friends and do normal things i found it an amazing book i i mean it's such an overused cliche but i just couldn't put it down at all and and I was just so glad that uh you know that she did manage to fulfill her dream which is incredible isn't it she powered herself through correspondence learning uh to Oxford University and that's just just incredible actually so I couldn't recommend it highly enough actually I thought it was a great book absolutely it is and I don't want to labour the point here. And it's not just about,

it's not about getting into Oxford, it's about getting into any university. You know, again, you've got to pinch yourself and remember this is the age of correspondence, not the age of the internet and mobile phone calls and so on. So she wrote, as she says in the interview, she just wrote to the university she heard of. And weirdly, a letter addressed to Oxford University,

Oxford, received a reply on the offer of an interview. Yep, absolutely extraordinary. And there was one tiny detail as well that she puts in the beginning of the book, Oxford, received a reply on the offer of an interview. Yep, absolutely extraordinary. And there was one tiny detail as well that she puts in the beginning of the book, Ed, that her dad had never learned to swim. I didn't get around to asking her about that, but I still want to know the answer.

Yep, mind-boggling stuff. Anyway, so that is Suzanne Hayward's book. It's called Wave Walker and it's out in hardback now so ed hopefully uh we will be in the same studio tomorrow feel free to wear a mask if you want to i'm only joking uh it'll be nice to see you in person have a very good evening thank you to everybody for listening and uh yep do get in touch the email remains the same throughout this week anything i'm going to really throw you in at the deep end here.

Anything that we talk about in our Lady Fashion on the podcast that needs a male perspective, we can ask Ed this week. Is that all right? I'm absolutely the man for you. I was the minister for fashion. Oh, OK. Well, you're going to set up a whole cascade of emails there. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a nice evening, everybody. Take care. Well done for getting to the end of another episode of Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover.

Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Henry Tribe. And don't forget, there is even more of us every afternoon on Times Radio. It's Monday to Thursday, three till five. You can pop us on when you're pottering around the house or heading out in the car on the school run or running a bank. Thank you for joining us and we hope you can join us again on Off Air very soon. Don't be so silly.

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