The FAMILY TRIP FROM hell

Suzanne Heywood was seven when her monstrously selfish father took the family around the world in a boat. Ten years on, uneducated and abandoned by her parents, she won a place at Oxford against all odds

WAVEWALKER: BREAKING FREE by Suzanne Heywood (William Collins £20, 416pp)

WheN seven-yearold Suzanne heywood (nee Cook) was informed by her father one morning over breakfast in 1976 that she, her five- year- old brother, Jon, and their parents, Gordon and Mary, were going to sail round the world, retracing their namesake Captain Cook’s voyage, ‘ the spoonful of cornflakes paused on the way to my mouth,’ she recalls.

her father’s bombshell announcement was exciting; but it meant she was going to have to say goodbye to her best friend, Sarah, and her beloved golden-haired spaniel, Rusty.

If she’d had an inkling of what was really in store for her, that whole bowl of cornflakes would surely have smashed to the floor.

She would never see Rusty again, or indeed ever return to school in england. her father’s original plan was that they’d be sailing for three years. In fact, they would be away for a decade.

A few months into the voyage, cooped up with her family and small crew in their schooner Wavewalker, Suzanne’s skull would be smashed when the boat was tipped over by a 40ft wave in the Indian Ocean, requiring seven operations without anaesthetic performed by a doctor on a tiny remote island.

THAT was just one of the many ordeals she endured. Stuck on a coral reef; stuck in ‘the Doldrums’, mid-Atlantic; stuck in mid-ocean with a flat battery and broken engine; stuck in a cyclone; stuck on various tropical or volcanic islands for months while her cashstrapped parents desperately tried to make money.

Running out of drinking water; living on tinned corned beef; curled up in pain on her bunk bed when her first period started . . . Suzanne’s memoir exposes, scene by scene, the bare reality behind the romantic notion of sailing round the world.

her worst, though, was ‘being trapped inside someone else’s dream’ — her father’s — from the age of seven to almost 17. he had an iron will — his wife remarked, ‘once you’ve made up your mind to do something, nothing will stop you’.

Whenever Suzanne dared to hope they might at last be turning towards home, her father would suddenly spring a new travel plan on them, informing them that they would be away for at least another year and a half.

Addicted to sailing, he also had no intention of returning to Britain with what he called its ‘ridiculous tax rates’. And so it continued: the fourth Christmas, the seventh Christmas, the ninth Christmas, and you think, ‘Will this ever end?’

‘Monstrous’ is the adjective Suzanne uses to describe that 40ft killer wave, which would give her nightmares for years.

As I read her beautifully written travelogue, I transferred that adjective ‘monstrous’ to her parents.

It’s often said that 1970s and 1980s parents were more selfish than today’s parents; ‘children just tagged along doing whatever the parents wanted to do’. What Gordon and Mary inflicted on their children is the most extreme example of that selfishness.

All Suzanne longed for was a bit of geographical stability, friends and an education. None of these were encouraged by her parents, who had a cruel habit of accusing her of selfishness when she dared to suggest anything that might help her to pursue her own life goals, such as being allowed to go to boarding school.

Desperate for a bit of agency in her early teens, she did some